The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable [with the standing army] to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. Henry Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience” It is easy to say — and often (...) is said — that we cannot have tolerable relations with new revolutionary regimes. The problem is that our anticommunist paranoia has made it impossible to find out. We do not know whether Mao's declared interest in a relationship with the Americans in the 1940s or Ho Chi Minh's were sincere. And the reason we don't know is that we never tried to find out. Those who reported it was a possibility were hounded out of the foreign service because of our suspicion and fear of communism. The legacy of that era brings to mind Ivan the Terrible's practice of murdering the bearer of bad news. We are more civilized than that; we have been content simply to ruin people's careers. J. William Fulbright, in The Price of Empire This poisonous thing I'm trying to describe is [a] characteristic way of dealing with criticism. It used to be enough to brand a critic as a radical or a leftist to make people turn away. Now we need only to call him a liberal. Soon “moderate” will be the M word, “conservative” will be the C word and only fascists will be in the mainstream. E. L. Doctorow, Brandeis Commencement, May 21, 1989 We have lived with violence for seven years It was not worth one single life But the patriot's fist is at her throat Her voice is in mortal danger... Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources,” in Dream of a Common Language. (shrink)

The paper addresses the topic of the unavoidability of contradiction in dealing with issues of scepticism – and how coherence can be restored to sceptical arguments and texts. It considers six classic paradoxes in the history of Western thought – of how language works to undermine and derail the coherence of thought. It also theorizes a philosophy of language approach to restore coherence in the classic instances discussed. As its major example, the paper explores how and why the image of (...) successful, long-standing constitutions is a minimalist image through a discussion of the relationship between epistemological scepticism generally and textual scepticism specifically. (shrink)

This article reconstructs J. G. A. Pocock's debt to Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in The Machiavellian Moment and argues that her presentation of classical politics in The Human Condition and her account of the secular nature of American foundation in On Revolution were important sources for Pocock's analysis of American liberal insecurity. However, a contextualization of The Machiavellian Moment within Pocock's immediate intellectual and professional milieu indicates that he placed himself in critical relation to Arendt's civic republican theory and located (...) her philosophy of history in the same spectrum as the American political tradition he sought to historicize. While they did share a similar perspective on the ethical and political value of locating oneself within a long historical durée, their different conceptions of the problem of continuity for secular political structures provides a crucial context for their disparate responses to the discourse of political crisis in the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s. (shrink)