The most common assumption made about John Locke's historical sense is that he had none. In his lifetime, Locke was many things: a doctor, a philosopher, a political theorist, a policymaker and a biblical scholar. But few, if any, would say that Locke was a historian as well. Unlike Hobbes before him and Hume after him, Locke would write no history of England or of English politics. My intention in this paper then is not to make the claim that he was a “historian” in the strict sense of the word. I would therefore agree with John Pocock when he writes that Locke was the only major political writer of his age who did not try “to understand English politics through the history of English law (and English political institutions).”

Although volumes are now written about basic human needs, few of them issue from the subjects of those needs: the desperately poor. And a recent Third World document warns that:

While the satisfaction of basic human needs of the people, and the eradication of mass poverty must have a high priority in economic and social development, the idea is unacceptable and erroneous that these goals can be achieved without the all-round and comprehensive economic development of the developing countries and the establishment of the New International Economic Order.

It is paradoxical that an author whose thought is widely recognized to have had a profound influence on such revolutionary thinkers as Locke, Bayle, and Rousseau should be regarded as having himself been an extreme conservative in questions of political practice. Yet such is the almost unanimous judgment of contemporary scholars on Michel de Montaigne. While Montaigne endeavored in the Essays to question radically the grounds of all accepted beliefs and practices, and specifically denounced the unreasonableness and unjustness of many laws and customs practiced in his time, it is believed that he nonetheless opposed all attempts at political innovation or reform, fearing that any such change would only make matters worse.

Nationalism like all political doctrines is at root normative, that is, it makes a claim that matters ought to be arranged in a certain way. The root claim of nationalism is that a nation should be self-governing. This article is concerned with the normative basis of that claim: upon what understanding of value, principle, norm, etc., does it rest? The exercise is thus abstract; it is not a concrete investigation into the causes of nationalism, and it is also less about the substantive doctrine or theory of nationalism than about what might be called its metatheory; finally, the paper does not presume to pronounce on the validity of nationalism as normative doctrine.

It has been said of Alexis de Tocqueville that he is the most frequently quoted and least read author of all, rivaling and surpassing even William Shakespeare for this dubious honor. Virtually every American social scientist who as much as pays lip service to tradition manages to quote Tocqueville at least once. But this deference is to the author of Democracy in America, not of The Old Regime and the Revolution, for the latter book is, with the exception of one passage, neither read nor quoted. The Old Regime is neglected today because it is a political history, and today political history is not appreciated. What is “political history”?

Tocqueville's “political history” belongs to a genre of which he considered Montesquieu's “Sur la grandeur et la decadence des Romains” to be the finest example. Tocqueville thought that the nature and habits of his intellect suited him to evaluating modern societies and foreseeing their probable futures, but at the same time he believed he could do this most effectively in historical studies. While flatly denying that one can learn lessons from history in any simple sense, he did nonetheless hold that from an examination of historical particulars one can grasp the universal principles of social existence. His intention in writing The Old Regime was to enable his reader to achieve this same grasp. He, like Montesquieu, would not merely recount facts, but make known their causes and consequences and judge them. He would have to choose his facts well, so that they supported his theses. He would have to present them without making “the character of the work … visible” in the hope that “the reader would be conducted naturally from one reflection to another by the interest of the narrative.” Thus what I have called political history is understood by Tocqueville to be a selective, but not necessarily incorrect, use of the facts of history for the purposes of shedding light on the present and of teaching others to see and judge the present for themselves. Given Tocqueville's stated intention, we cannot read his work as either scientific history or political polemic.

The American republican form of government and the effects of the Enlightenment upon the European Catholic church provided fertile ground for theological reflection and ecclesiastical adaptation in early nineteenth-century American Catholicism. A number of immigrant Catholic laymen were influenced by their previous European Catholic experiences and by the American enthusiasm for republicanism to reform their understanding of the laity's role in the American Catholic church and to adapt ecclesiastical structures to American political institutions. In light of these experiences, some of these laymen began to reflect upon the Christian Scriptures and tradition, and to formulate a democratic conception of the layman's role within the church.