The present issue of the review of politics is given over to essays by members of the editorial staff. These and the other contributors are members of the faculty in the University of Notre Dame. This action is the only real means the REVIEW has of publicly recognizing a great and wonderful event: the completion of the first hundred years in the life of Notre Dame. Other activities and other writers will celebrate and assess, in their own time and place, other virtues and achievements of the University. The editors of the REVIEW, writing here on various modern spiritual, political and social problems, wish to affirm, among other things, the freshness and diversity of the intellectual interests that are the University's today, although, of course, these are represented here by the words and work of but a few of the many indebted to the University. Yet we hope, by means of these essays, to pay tribute, implicitly, to the strength, at this high moment, of the whole University in the world of the mind of man and in the translation of that world to man's life in society.

In that famous passage in his De Civitate Dei which has been called the first “Mirror of Princes,” St. Augustine outlines the qualities of the good king. The passage is toolong to quote here, but certain of the qualities listed are pertinent to this discussion. He tells us that kings are happy

If they rule justly; … if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; … if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have partners; if they are slow to punish, quick to pardon; if they apply that punishment as necessary to government and the defense of the republic, and not to gratify their own enmity; … if they prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatsoever; and if they do all these things, not through ardent desire of empty glory, but through love of eternal felicity, not neglecting to offer to the true God, who is their God, for their sins the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer.

My purpose is to consider Machiavellianism. Regarding Machiavelli himself, some preliminary observations seem necessary. Innumerable studies, some of them very good, have been dedicated to Machiavelli. Jean Bodin, in the XVIth Century, criticized The Prince in a profound and wise manner. Later on Frederick the Great of Prussia was to write a refutation of Machiavelli in order to exercise his own hypocrisy in a hyper-Machiavellian fashion, and to shelter cynicism in virtue. During the XIXth Century, the leaders of the bourgeoisie, for instance the French political writer Charles Benoist, were thoroughly, naïvely and stupidly fascinated by the clever Florentine.

“…. Quand il se presente à nous quelque doctrine nouvelle,” wrote the greatest French skeptic, “nous avons grande occasion de nous en deffier, et de considerer qu'avant qu'elle fust produite sa contraire estoit en crédit et authorité…. Je ne change pas aisément, de peur que j'ay de perdre au change…. Je suis desgoustée d la nouvelleté quelque visage qu'elle porte.”

Whether, some day, the twentieth century may claim to have inaugurated as fundamental a change in economic organization as did the monetary revolution of the sixteenth and the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century is still an open question. While in most European countries the transformation is evident, and from Spain to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to the Balkan states, it has been intensified under the impact of war economy, American public opinion still hesitates to admit any break with the past. Most people believe that expansion of governmental activities, concentration of economic power, rigidities, monopolies, public indebtedness and taxation as consequential as they are should be evaluated as accessories of an economic system which in its foundation has remained intact. In its very essence, this system is supposed to rest upon the great principles of private property, freedom of enterprise and social mobility.

Are the Germans really behind the Nazi Government? Despite— or because of?—the steadily rising flood of books dealing with the Third Reich this question is answered in most different ways. There is no agreement concerning the relations between the German people and the National Socialist regime. But one's attitude towards the conduct of the war and the post-war problems is, to a large extent, determined by the opinion that one holds about these relations. Therefore, some remarks about the different answers which are given to the question: What are the sources of Hitler's power in Germany? may be of general interest.

When Alexis de Tocqueville, a perceptive young French aristocrat, was thrown against the turmoil of the nineteenth century, he became a student of social structure and a political philosopher. By background he was Catholic in faith and of the nobility in outlook. But he faced revolution in France and everspreading social change in European society. An unwilling child of the French Revolution, he was led to see broad meaning behind the passing events of the political hour. This ability to extrapolate into the future the present incident permitted him to see many of the social trends which have come to tragic cacophony in the wars of the twentieth century. No one today is ashamed to read the provocative pages Tocqueville wrote, and all who read him find relevance to the present world.

Defeatism is one of the most characteristic attitudes of the present period, though the thing is not as new as the word for it. It is also one of the facts through which modern wars are in part decided, and defeats are brought about. Defeatism, therefore, is at least as important a factor for modern warfare as tanks and planes. And yet, while much is said about these physical means of destruction, little is heard about this psychological medium of destruction, despite the noteworthy fact that defeatism is the very thing aggressors try to attain with their propaganda. The National Socialists, for instance, do not propagandize their own political system if it is obvious from the outset that no converts to their political conception can be made.

Max Weber died in 1920, when Communism was in its beginnings and Fascism had not appeared on the scene at all. There can be no question of his having predicted anything like the exact nature of these movements. But he did develop a line of thought which, in connection with his broader analysis of authority, has an important bearing on the understanding of the process by which they came into prominence, and some of the possible consequence of their dominance.

In The Catholic Church in the United States one can detect with differences of proportion, almost all the elements which go to make up this great democracy of ours. There are rich Catholics and poor, educated Catholics and illiterate, native-born and immigrant, urban and rural, and in one sense, there are even practicing Catholics and fallen away. Yet, despite the formlessness of American Catholicism, there is a definite tangible unity among Catholics which has been baffling to many outside her fold. This unity is derived from the special purpose and the nature of the Catholic organization which transcend those accidental relationships.

The Russian Revolution is one of the major events in the history of the 20th century. It is one of the “turning points” not only in the history of Russia, but also in universal history. Its result, i.e., the creation, in Russia, of a Communist society, has become a challenge to the Western World, as an invitation to imitation, and, at the same time, as a threat of forcible transformation

We are living in a time when men most urgently feel the need of intellectual clarification of the social and political situation in which they stand. By no means all the great masters of social thought who have made important potential contributions to such clarification are sufficiently well known, even among social and political scientists. One of these is Max Weber who, in the English-speaking world, is known more as a sociologist of religion and a methodologist of social science than as an interpreter of the political scene. Weber's scope of interest in institutional problems, with specific reference to the modern Western world, was, however, exceedingly broad, and a substantial part of his work was centered o nthe field of political institutions, particularly in their relations to the economic order and to other aspects of the social structure.

While Roman Catholic commentary on specific phases of American life and politics fills many volumes, particularly in the form of periodical literature, systematic analyses of American government in terms of the philosophy of-the Church Fathers and the great scholastics are rarely encountered. Certainly, such an examination addressed to the general reading public is exceptional. Even more unusual is it to find a work from this viewpoint accepted as an influential element in our intellectual development and heritage. Such, however, has been the happy fate of Orestes A. Brownson's The American Republic, which has found its way even into text book discussions of American political ideas. Yet, while the reasons for its notice are, in historical retrospect, understandable, the resultant analysis has done the work somewhat less than justice. It has been treated almost exclusively as part of the literature which marked the triumph of Republicanism and nationalism against the Confederacy and the states' rights doctrine. Now, while Brownson, who entered his spiritual and intellectual resting place after finding Presbyterianism, Universalism, and Unitarianism successively inadequate to his needs, undoubtedly desired to justify the triumphant federal union against its opponents, his fundamental objective, in which he revealed the ardor not unusual in converts, was to show the nature of American political institutions in the light of the tradition of Roman Catholic moral and political philosophy. Indeed, while he deplored the extreme states' rights idea as manifested in Secession, he was even more concerned with the problem of excessive centralization, which he saw as the great potential danger for the future.

In applying his theory of the state to the problem of discovering and expounding the true nature of the American republic Brownson deals with three major questions: the formation of the union under his concept of the Providential constitution; the proper distribution of governmental powers in terms of his theory of territorial democracy; and the resolution of the leading political problems of the United States in the light of the real meaning of American federalism thus revealed.

Banal statements are not always useless. We may therefore recall that the master artisan combines in his person the factors of production: capital and labor. The shop management and the business transactions (purchase of raw material and sale of products) were so limited that he could also do manual labor. He therefore differed so little from the journeyman, who had always the chance of becoming master, and from the apprentice, who himself was a future journeyman, that a community spirit reigned among them. When we leave the handicraft economics of the Middle Ages to study modern industry, we face a dissociation of the factors of production: the functions of capital and labor are rested in distinct economic subjects and labor is divided into the specializations that we have mentioned above. The trades are many within each enterprise and the workers are hired after offering their services to the owners' representatives: hence, the phenomenon of an exchange of service for wages, which is its price. In capitalism, the factors of production meet in a market, and are united by a contract. We had to recall these obvious facts concerning the labor market, and the labor contract, because European corporativism challenges these fundamental ideas.

The Adoption Of “Fight for Freedom” as the battle cry of the United Nations, and the eager assumption, by those schools of thought who have long been advocating social reform among us, that they themselves have a special right to call this battle cry their own raises an interesting question which has all too often been ignored: the question as to whether or not the program of the reformers is permanently compatible with genuine freedom.

Almost exactly a century after August Comte inaugurated modern sociology under the flag of positivism, of progress and of mankind marching toward an era of glorious self-revelation, another sociologist directs the heavy artillery of a sweeping criticism just at that positivism and faith in progress, and at those achievements of mankind which Comte anticipated as the results of man's being himself and nothing but himself. P. A. Sorokin, an outstanding scholar, a studious analyst of social dynamics, the watchful observer of the Russian revolution and all that followed from it, presents us with an analysis of that phase of western civilization in which we have both the privilege and the anguish to exist—to live would be too pretentious a word. This analysis goes to the very heart of the crisis. And Sorokin does not mince words nor spare susceptibilities and prejudices.

In the present crisis of Europe, some forward-looking observers are placing their ultimate hope in a corporative order. Within the first pages of a book recently published in Paris, a young French economist states that in the light of his country's defeat, “the modes of thought and action of a whole century, the XIXth, have been judged by their results and found wanting;” furthermore, under the stimulus of individualistic and utilitarian philosophies, joined with economic liberalism, a “disintegration” of society has resulted. After a close analysis of ancient and modern corporative regimes, Professor Denis concludes: “The only chance for salvation seemingly lies in the desperate effort of a small number of the old countries of the West to recreate a new community spirit, one manifestation of which would be the fostering of vocational groups. If this effort were not made or should fail, Europe would suffer irremediable decadence. … a new Dark Ages, without the hope of the Thirteenth Century.” We can recognize in this threat the pessimistic frame of mind which was so characteristic of young European intellectuals during the past decade. We shall see, however, that psychology is no less necessary than political science and economics for an understanding of the corporative movement in Europe.

When the earliest cooperative units were formed, the members seem to have assumed that the step had relevance only for themselves and only for their economic good. At Fenwick in Scotland eleven men agreed in 1769 “to take what money we have in our Box and buy what victual may be thought Nessassar to sell for the benefit of our society.” The sole end was the economic benefit of the little group. Near the close of the century, “the poor inhabitants” of Hull in England set up a cooperative mill. The harvest had been lean, and the price of flour was very high, so that the people felt “much trouble and sorrow” in their persons and families, and thought they should take every care to preserve themselves “from the invasion of covetous and merciless men in the future.” They also asked the mayor to give something toward “this great enterprise.”