The Review of Politics, which with this issue closes its fortieth year of publication, bears an interesting and faintly exotic relationship to the modern history of Notre Dame and of the Church. At first glance nothing could seem further from what many regarded as the somnolent provincialismof a Midwest Catholic college than the background and career of the founding editor of The Review, Waldemar Gurian. Had Notre Dame been the offspring of a small and youthful religious sect, there could have been no Gurian and no Review. What helped to make both possible was the universal Church, more especially the Church of the Western world. Many observers thought the universal Church itself steeped in somnolent, albeit worldwide provincialism. But the fact is that the Church was, in the 1930's, stirring with change, change which reflected and in turn influenced changes in the intellectual temper of the secular world.

The victims of the wars of religion and persecution had their revenge in the growth of a temper indifferent to the claims of particular churches. There were others too who, adopting ancient materialisms, rationalism or the outlook of physical science, rejected theology and abandoned religion altogether. For both, the Enlightenment meant a polemic against the Christian churches, as well as Judaism, and the articulation of new beliefs. Since religions touched in different degrees all spheres of life, the battleground included philosophy, morality and history. Superstition and persecution were the themes of Enlightened church history. God's hand, if there was a God, might direct history in some ultimate way, but not by direct intervention. As there was no “sacred history,” the meaning of history or, at any rate, a way of looking at history, had to be sought anew. After the first quarter of the eighteenth century, this task attracted a remarkable and numerous response, to which the Romantic period added the dense and challenging Idealist philosophies of history. The philosophes, the gurus of Enlightenment, presented history's meaning as not in the past but to come, as salvation from the irrational and the brutal, presented it with a clarity as misleading as it was persuasive.

At the close of hostilities geography proved decisive in the mis-fortune of Hungary, a country that had been in the inner circle of the German power sphere. From this came the basic problem of Hungarian diplomacy—attempting to preserve Hungarian independence in an almost impossible situation. None of the Axis satellites was in so precarious a position. The peripheral location of Italy, Finland, Rumania and Bulgaria made possible their early surrender, but events in Hungary inevitably turned out differently. Hungary could hardly succeed in changing sides during the war. She did not enjoy the trust of the Germans, her supposed partners. She did not enjoy much sympathy in the West. And she was positively disliked by the Russians. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he “thought Stalin would want to be pretty arbitrary about Hungary.”

Jacques Maritain began his theory of education by supposing that the child is made for freedom, that formal education on all levels, rightly conceived, is essentially aimed at truth and that the achievement of truth in areas such as philosophy, science and art progressively helps to make us free. The child is made to know. This means that he is made for a spiritual conquest of all nature. He is made also to love God and man, and this means that he is made for a conquest of himself. These simple statements were basic.

A few years ago the word totalitarian was unknown. The popular use of the term has its origin in Mussolini's famous article on the Fascistic doctrine. Mussolini probably took the expression totalitarian from Hegel's Philosophy of Law, where the word is used to characterize the organic unity of the people. “Liberalism,” wrote Mussolini, “negates the state in the interest of the single individual. Fascism affirms the state as the true reality of the individual. It is for the only freedom which can seriously be considered—the freedom of the state and of the individual within the state—because for the Fascist everything is in the state, and outside of the state nothing legal or spiritual can exist or still less be of value. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.”