Our nation's bicentennial year 1976 also marks the centennial of the death of Orestes A. Brownson (1803–1876). Throughout his life, Brownson was a lecturer and editor as well as a prolific writer on all aspects of nineteenth-century American life. His voluminous writings are of sweeping range. They include political treatises on American democracy, church-state relations, foreign policy, theological works, social commentaries on slavery, war and peace, the feminist movement, education, economic writings on the relationship between business and government, philosophical critiques of French, German, Italian and British philosophy, literary criticism and aesthetic evaluations of poetry and native American literature.

The assertion that we are living a moment in which a deep transformation of human relations will emerge is no longer commonplace dictum. Everybody talks of crisis, but not any longer in the purely economic sense of disturbances to the process involving production and consumption, but rather in the sense of general confusion and disarray, in the sense of uncertainty before measures taken unsuccessfully, which often provoke greater inconveniences than those to be remedied.

A neglected issue in the study of modernization is how the person transfers his pursuit of ultimate ends and meanings from religious to secular perspectives. If one could speak of a modern paradigm, it would include, at a minimum, commitments to rationalism and immanence. Unifying debates between classical rationalists and empiricists, Marxists and positivists, and idealists and realists, is the notion that some form of human reason is the court of last resort for disputes, whether reason be interpreted deductively, inductively, instrumentally, dialectically, or vitally; and the belief that ultimate meaning resides, if at all, in the public situation or in history. Modern perspectives demand, then, that the person confronts and overcomes in some way religious desires, such as the wills to immortality, plenitude, and eternal justice. Methods must be devised by which these desires are either channeled into political or historical perspectives, transferred from the public to the private realm, or denied altogether.

In Egypt, as in most developing countries, universities form part of the state system. The university is regarded as a government department. The Egyptian government not only appropriates money for higher education, but also controls the administrative structure of the universities and the higher institutes. Academic appointments as well as promotions and dismissals are in the hands of state officials. This kind of relationship dates back to 1925, when the Egyptian government “nationalized” and created what is now the University of Cairo. This development is closely related to the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the efforts of Egyptian leaders to achieve independence from British rule. Right from the beginning, the university was therefore conceived as an important instrument for the realization of national (political) goals.

In his analysis of Plato's Republic, Aristotle objects to his teacher's abstract and psychological method by suggesting that “there is another matter which must not be ignored—the teaching of actual experience. We are bound to pay some regard to the long past and the passage of the years, in which these things…would not have gone unnoticed if they had been really good.” Ever since that time, political theorists have been divided on the question of the appropriate approach to the study of politics, and often, as in the case of Plato and Aristotle, the focal point of the disagreement has been whether politics is best seen through the lens of history or the study of human nature and the development of a consequent psychology. This, for example, is the crux of the argument between James Mill and T. B. Macaulay. Mill is the proponent of a psychological approach; he maintains “it is immediately obvious that a wide and difficult field is presented, and that the whole science of human nature must be explored to lay a foundation for the science of government.” Macaulay disagrees, for he believes that “the style which the Utilitarians admire, suits only those subjects on which it is possible to reason a priori.” Indeed, in Macaulay's view, Mill belongs in the Middle Ages: “of those schoolmen Mr. Mill has inherited both the spirit and the style. He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth century, born out of due season.” Far better, continues Macaulay, is the inductive historical method which observes the world, examines facts, devotes itself to the careful study of the past, and checks itself “by perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test of new facts….”