In recent years the question of the feasibility and importance of participatory forms of government has been increasingly debated. Academicians, students, workers, poverty groups, party members, and environmental action groups have demanded greater participation in decision-making. They have concluded that civic involvement is the answer to what they characterize as the malaise of contemporary society: loss of governmental authority, feelings of powerlessness, overcentralization and bureaucratic manipulation, and inauthenticity.

This emphasis on participation is the dominant theme in Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. Arendt argues that a truly human life must have a public dimension to it. In many respects, though, her political thought in general, and her case for participation in particular, are distinctively different from others who also favor greater citizen involvement.

In the beginning of his Politics Aristotle argues that “man is by nature a political animal.” In fact man is more a political animal than any herding animal, for “man alone of the animals has speech,” “man alone of the animals has reason,” “man alone of the animals has logos.” In other contexts the word logos can also be translated as word, account, argument, or ratio. Logos is connected with the verb legōo which means to speak and to gather, to pick out, to select, to count. The English words collect, select, and elect are related to the same verb. Logosis selected, elected, and chosen speech, meaningful speech, thoughtful speech. The traditional definition of man as the rational animal, stemming from Aristotle, goes back to this statement, that man alone of the animals possesses logos, possesses thoughtful speech. Aristotle goes on to say:

When Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953, twenty years of Democratic rule ended, and many changes followed. These were most obvious on the personal side. Prominent figures of the New Deal and Fair Deal disappeared from the Washington scene, and new men, largely from the business world, took over. But on policy matters the changes were less abrupt. Eisenhower had pledged during the 1952 campaign not “to turn the clock back—ever.” And so there was no wholesale reversal of New Deal and Fair Deal policies. It is important to remember that Eisenhower accepted most of the social welfare legislation of the two preceding decades, although he disappointed Republican conservatives in doing so. Thus, in the 1950's, the New Deal largely was eliminated as an active political issue and became an accepted part of American history. It is doubtful whether any other Republican political figure could have achieved that change and could have made palatable to most of his fellow Republicans the social welfare legislation of the 1930's and 1940's.

In the preface to his doctoral dissertation Marx wrote: “Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus, 'in a word I detest all the Gods,' is her own profession, her own slogan against all the gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man's self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.” Now this attitude of defying God goes hand in hand with an attitude toward the world: one who cannot endure the idea of God's sovereignty often resents even the “givenness” of things with specific natures. It is not just that he senses that they would lead him back to God, but also that they, each with its own inner logos which imposes itself on man, are themselves felt to belong to the detested gods. Such a man approaches these things to destroy their givenness, and to make new objects out of them which reflect himself and his powers, and depend on him. The Austrian art historian, Hans Sedlmayr, describes this attitude as follows:

Dem Menschen, der sich ganz autonom proklamiert, muss es unertraeglich sein, Kreaturen zu begegnen, die offenbar nicht seine Geschoepfe sind. Es ist ein prometheischer und im Grund narzistischer Traum, sich durch Technik und naturfreie Kunst eine menschliche Umwelt zu bauen, in der man nichts und niemandem begegnet als den Schoepfungen des eigensten Menschengestes.

In the development of American liberal thought in the twentieth century Reinhold Niebuhr occupies a central, but only partially examined, place. Numerous writers have noted that his active forty-year career followed a pattern typical of many other American intellectuals in the middle third of the century. From a rejection of liberalism and an attachment to Marxism in the thirties, he emerged in the postwar period with a renascent liberal faith, which in the fifties assumed an increasingly rigid, anticommunist cast.