Book Review: Liberalism at the Crossroads. by Christopher Wolfe and John Hittinger.

Book review: Liberalism at the Crossroads. By Christopher Wolfe and John Hittinger. Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, MD. 1994. Pp. ix-183. Reviewed by: Michael Zuckert

Book Review: Distributive Justice: A Social- Psychological Perspective. by Morton Deutsch; Equality in America: The View from the Top. by Sidney Verbat and Gary R. Orren.

Book review: Distributive Justice: A Social- Psychological Perspective. By Morton Deutsch. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1985. Pp. vii, 313 ; Equality in America: The View from the Top. By Sidney Verbat and Gary R. Orren. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1985. Pp. x, 334. Reviewed by: Catherine Zucker

Leo Strauss: Fascist, authoritarian, imperialist?

"In a letter he wrote to Karl Loewith on May 19, 1933 (just after the Nazis had come to power in Germany), Leo Strauss insisted in strong terms that he could not return to Germany so long as the Nazis were in power: I see no acceptable possibility of living under the swastika, i.e., under a symbol that says nothing more to me than: you and your ilk, you are physei [by nature] subhumans and therefore justly pariahs. There is in this case just one solution. We ... “men of science” – as our predecessors in the Arab Middle Ages called themselves – non habemus locum manentem, sed quaerimus [have no place to rest, but must seek]. But, Strauss continued: The fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us [Jews] says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination. I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio… parcere subjectis et debellare superbos [You rule the world, sparing the vanquished and crushing the proud]. There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto."(...

Thinkin’ about Lincoln

"I have chosen my title not merely for its poetic qualities, but because it points us in the right direction on Lincoln: he supplies matter for thinking beyond any other figure of our national life.1 Something of why this is so is suggested by Woodrow Wilson, who looked back to Lincoln in order to understand what Lincoln’s greatness implied for the challenges the U.S. and Wilson himself faced in the early twentieth century. On the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth Wilson asked his audience: Have you ever looked at some of those singular statues of the great French sculptor Rodin – those pieces of marble in which only some part of a figure is revealed and the rest is left in the hidden lines of the marble itself; here there emerges the arm and the bust and the eager face, it may be, of a man, but his body is appears in the general bulk of the stone, and the lines fall off vaguely?"(...

Musings on mortality

"Death is a pervasive fact of human existence that both unites and divides us. The rational capacity that distinguishes human beings from other animals allows us to know—in a way more instinctively regulated creatures apparently do not, that we are going to die—and thus to take measure to forestall the inevitable. Many more human beings now live, on the average, much longer, than they did in the past—and yet, we still know, even better, if possible, that we are all going to die eventually, later if not sooner. The question thus arises, how do we live in the face of that fact—and, how should we?"(...

Book Review: Distributive Justice: A Social- Psychological Perspective. by Morton Deutsch; Equality in America: The View from the Top. by Sidney Verbat and Gary R. Orren.

Book review: Distributive Justice: A Social- Psychological Perspective. By Morton Deutsch. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1985. Pp. vii, 313 ; Equality in America: The View from the Top. By Sidney Verbat and Gary R. Orren. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1985. Pp. x, 334. Reviewed by: Catherine Zucker

Legality and Legitimacy in \u3cem\u3eDred Scott\u3c/em\u3e: The Crisis of the Incomplete Constitution

The original Constitution was incomplete in that it contained a disparity between the principles of legitimacy of the system and the legality of the institution of slavery. Political communities marked by such disharmony are beset with pressures to make the system consistent in one way or another. Such indeed was the fate of the U.S. during the antebellum era. Three typical responses arose: to make legality correspond to legality (by redefining the principles of legitimacy of the system), to make legality conform to legitimacy (by doing away with slavery), or to maintain the tension in ever more creative ways. The Dred Scott case represents a late stage of this dynamic process—seven of the Justices chose one or another version of the legality-over-legitimacy strategy, one chose a nascent version of the legitimacy-over-legality position, and only one worked to reaffirm the original constitutional tension between legality and legitimacy