Constitutionalism,the Public Philosophy,and Political Science

Examining Willa Cather's corpus of literary works reveals several phases of her illustrious career. After defending commercial culture in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, her later novels, especially her One of Ours, diagnose an unmediated split in the Western world illustrated by the experience of the Great War: the bourgeois commercial culture undermines aspirations for human greatness. Her later novels deepen this diagnosis and offer a way out in a return to a rooted community of believers living in the shadows of the Church.     

The Semantics of Corruption: Political Science Perspectives on Imperial and Post-Imperial Methods of State-Building

Although imperial historians concentrate on regions and periods with abundant documentation, it is worth considering how another discipline copes with the political fate of post-colonial societies whose records are not so easily accessible. The nine works reviewed below cover problems of misgovernment in new states in several regions. This article concentrates on their methods and conclusions for states in sub-Saharan Africa and more especially West Africa. Authors and editors have made considerable use of patron-client (or clientelistic) explanations in their interpretations of the aims and performance of African leaders under post-independence constitutions. Techniques of patronage have a long history; colonial rulers applied them to find useful intermediaries between administrators and African ethnic groups; and there is ample evidence for their existence in the politics of new states under the label of ‘corruption’.

Despite accepted definitions of patronage, the terminology of clientelism contains ambiguities when employed to denote historical cases in a large number of cultural contexts with poor economic management and dictatorial governance. The collective conclusion of the books reviewed charges African civil and military leaders with corruption in appropriation of public resources for private gains. All the authors comment on that generic term; one of them supplies a detailed analysis of its ramifications. Most have drawn, too, on imperial works and records as background to their explanation for the policies of civil and military leaders in independent states in coping with debt management, risk of territorial fragmentation, use of parastatals and misuse of resources. It is concluded here, however, that input from the late colonial period has been misunderstood; second, that anthropologists’ knowledge of the institution of chieftainship, its survival or disappearance, throws light on the ‘indeterminacy’ of leadership succession in Africa, unless overcome by the mechanisms of constitutional elections; and, third, that political science has not investigated the reasons for the lack of competent judicial and civil service institutions to safeguard the working of Africa's constitutions.     

Derrida and Post-Modern Political Philosophy

Western political philosophy may be more diverse than its supporters or critics have allowed in recent scholarship. This paper argues that political philosophy is the centre of Derrida's philosophical thought as a whole, and suggests that similarities between Isocrates and Derrida help us to better understand both the political thought of these thinkers and the historical diversity of Western political philosophy.     

The State of American Political Science

Ada W. Finifter (ed.), Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Washington D.C.: American Political Science Assocaition, 1983.     

The Italian Enlightenment and the Rehabilitation of Moral and Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions, among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi—Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and, British Deism. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization.     

Political History and Political Philosophy: Making Sense of the West

Abstract

The old Western synthesis, the coming together of self-government, the Christian proposition, modern equality, and the commitment to relieving man's estate, appears to be unraveling. In the European context, it is being replaced by a “pure democracy” that cannot do justice to the continuity of Western civilization. Rejecting the twin temptations of Progress and Decline, Pierre Manent recovers the perspective of the human agent. While the polis or classical city is no longer available to us, the self-government of free human beings remains at the heart of the Western enterprise. Manent shows that the Christian notion of conscience preserved the classical analogy between the soul and the political association and is at the hear of Western liberty. The West as a whole rests on the synthetic and mediating notion of conscience.     

On the Completion of Political Life and the Incompleteness of Political Philosophy

Abstract

Political life means the normal life of a human being in its cycles from conception to death. A life is complete when it passes through these cycles. Political philosophy confronts the remaining issues of immortality and justice that arise in the lives of the citizens of actual cities.     

Political Philosophy,Education, and Statesmanship

How are we to understand the connection between political philosophy, education, and statesmanship? Using Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the Strauss Divided as a guide, the following essay explores this question by reflecting on a teacher-student lineage that stretches across the twentieth century. It explains and defends Jaffa's understanding of political philosophy but argues that one of Jaffa's students improved or perfected Jaffa's approach. In doing so, Jaffa's student did what Jaffa had done for his teacher, and Jaffa's teacher had done for his teacher. While at first glance the teacher-student lineage might appear to trace a descent, from another angle it appears to be an ascent, or at least the preparation for a possible ascent.     

Hubert Humphrey and Political Science

Abstract

This study argues that Aquinas’ account of tyranny grants citizens a surprisingly wide ambit for resistance to tyrants but that such actions demand a tall order for even the most virtuous citizens: knowledge of the hierarchy of ends in politics and the prudence to apply it under the pressure of a tyrannical government. We consider sections of the Summa Theologiae and De Regno, Aquinas’ most sustained discussion of tyranny, to demonstrate the theoretical illumination that the former provides of the latter. De Regno, we argue, presents a negative teaching of the best regime and citizen, one in which citizens are shown the need for their own virtue in discerning the roots of tyranny and their remedy. With the Summa, we show how such prudential decisions fit within the orders of charity and piety: the citizen must come to see love of country as intrinsically ordered to love of family and God. Ultimately, Aquinas’ resistance theory rests on a hierarchy of ends for civil government that orders both ruler and citizen to God.