The resurgence of American interest in political ideas, together with the search for a native American conservatism, is evident in the revived study of the political philosophy of Orestes A. Brownson, one of the most original political thinkers of that transitional era between the administrations of Jackson and Lincoln when the future Republican party was in embryo. In the past Americans contributed enormously to political practice, but only slightly and incidentally to theory. The American historian, Henry Steele Commager, has recently (...) remarked that since Jefferson and Hamilton most American political thought has been merely repetitive. To this generalisation Brownson is the outstanding exception of the mid-nineteenth century. (shrink)

The prolonged neglect of Edmund Burke as a political thinker of the first rank appears to be at last coming to an end. In 1949 Ross Hoffman and Paul Levack broke new ground in their Introduction to the selection of writings and speeches which they published with the title Burke’s Politics. Their Introduction was the first serious attempt at a systematic exposition of the principles, moral and political, which inform the vast and miscellaneous variety of his writings, speeches and correspondence. (...) Now Mr. Charles Parkin explores in depth Burke’s political ideas as the expression of a moral philosophy of man and community. He calls his work an essay. It is a remarkable achievement that anything so brief should hold so much. (shrink)

We cannot think seriously on the importance of this subject without being horrified at some of its suggested implications. What makes it so baffling is the difficulty of discriminating between what is positive, negative and purely hypothetical in the current estimates. The idea of a nuclear war which, as we are told by men of the highest eminence in the natural sciences, would condemn the whole of mankind to extinction, dislocates our sense of reality. Man, it is true, is not (...) a necessary being; the mortality of his individual existence is an image of the human condition generally. The transmission of humanity as a historical fact is something we accept as not merely fortuitous but as imposed, at the biological level, in the evidence of cumulative experience. This by itself is not conclusive as regards the continuity of the human race. On the biological record the number of forms that have survived is infinitesimal as compared with those that have become extinct. (shrink)

This fourth volume of Professor G. D. H. Cole’s magnum opus, ‘A History of Socialist Thought’, covers the period from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the world–wide economic depression of the nineteen–thirties. The period is so crowded with great events that the present volume is issued in two separate parts under the title Communism and Social Democracy. These furnish in a single continuous narrative and commentary the history of socialist movements in all parts of the (...) world, and demonstrate, in clearer light than the previous volumes, the remarkable combination of analysis and synthesis which Professor Cole brings to his work. He has succeeded in reducing a subject–matter of almost unlimited extent, diffuseness and complication to clear patterns and a narrative as direct and easy to read as one of his detective stories. (shrink)

The volumes of the series Sovietica which have already gained for the Fribourg Institute, under the direction of Fr J M Bocheński, a leading position in western studies of Soviet Communist philosophy and ideology include some works mainly of interpretation and criticism, and others of source materials. The present volume is in some respects a most useful supplement, on the side of praxis, to the summary of the basic ‘dogmas’ of contemporary Soviet ideology made by J M Bocheński from the (...) Russian textbook Principles of Marxist Philosophy, and published in Sovietica in 1958 with the title Die Dogmatischen Grundlagen der Sowjetischen Philosophie. (shrink)