The surge of national assertion in the USSR, generally unanticipated by American decision-makers, focusses attention on ethnic issues worldwide. But the moral dimension of ethnicity has rarely been examined in a comparative context, especially from the religious point of view. Issues now critical in the Soviet Union, such as justification for educational and occupational quotas for disadvantaged minorities, and the right of vulnerable ethnic collectivities to preserve their cultures by limiting immigration, have major implications for Third World and European countries, which are briefly surveyed. In the United States, concern for producing a united national culture based on the ideal of equal opportunities for individuals has usually precluded attention to preservation of ethnic collectivities distinct from the majority culture. Since most of these collectivities have been traditionally Catholic, their preservation has been especially sensitive to changes in American Catholicism.

It has recently been suggested that in Machiavelli's appreciation of what is grave and what is ridiculous “can be recognized … the spirit of modernity in its early phases, when it was fresh, bright, and eager.” This admittedly problematical assertion draws attention to Machiavelli's transformation of the premodern perception of gravity, wherein gravity and piety are closely associated. In this article, we consider how Machiavelli changes men's approach to gravity and piety by examining in particular his treatment of Dante, a representative of the premodern point of view. We find that Machiavelli discards the old view of gravity and piety because of its utility to the church and because Christian gravity is a safeguard against too readlly taking oaths, one of the things critical for Machiavelli's enterprise.

The view of Rousseau as a romantic for whom history is a fatal acquisition negating what is most essential and valuable in human nature has been powerfully renewed in many recent interpretations. It remains possible, however, to reinterpret Rousseau's view of history as both the key to the whole of his work and his most important contribution to the tradition of radical political thought. The identification of history with fatality is insufficient and misleading in as much as it misunderstands both the substance and the import of his philosophical anthropology. Rousseau's critique of liberalism and the Enlightenment rests not simply upon an intuitive transcendence of civilized artifice, but upon the first major attempt to construct a historical anthropology which, by undoing the identification of man with bourgeois man, poses the problem of human historicity as a social process entailing increasing alienation and repression.

This article is an attempt to confront the assumptions underpinning rational choice Marxism along with its implications for politics and social theory. That initially calls for setting the new tendency within the Marxian tradition in order to see whether its proponents can deal with the issues deriving from the collapse of the old teleological vision. In this way, the subsequent epistemological critique will be undertaken within a theoretical and practical context. From this critique, it will become apparent that rational choice builds on the utilitarian assumptions of what Marx termed “vulgar materialism” and simply ignores the role of philosophical idealism entirely.

The confusion surrounding the current debates on the nature and scope of judicial review is compounded by the failure of the contending parties to relate their positions to a defensible general theory of law and politics. But these debates may also aid in reconstructing such a theory. After a brief survey of four different stands with regard to judicial review, this article concludes by suggesting how the prevailing interpretations of law and politics need to be revised, if judicial review is to be to the Constitution what the practice of government of law is to its theory.