ForSome reason, understandable by Providence only, it was decided that the most ancient member of Phi Beta Kappa roundabout should talk for a while to the second group of students elected to nearly the youngest chapter of the Society. I consider it an imposition on you but insofar as I am concerned it is an honor. To be sure, there really is no generation gap here insofar as Notre Dame is concerned. It could have had a chapter long ago had it not been for temporary obscurantism in high places. I like to think that the spirits of the distinguished men of learning and inquiry who lived on this campus during times long past, Zahm, Nieuwland and Scheier among them, may be watching in Our Town fashion what we are doing this day. Perhaps Emerson, in spite of his absentmindedness, has come along to join them. For it was he who fixed the imprint of approval on the whole enterprise.

HerbertMarcuse has been called the philosopher of the New Left. If this title is warranted—and I believe it is—then we have in the New Left not only a rejection of American society, but a rejection of the traditions of Western civilization. What is remarkable, however, is that the New Left can disrupt colleges and universities, the guardians of civilization, and frequently be assured of apologists within those very colleges and universities. Herbert Marcuse is not one of their apologists so much as one of their teachers. What lures many of these innocents and not-so-innocents to his teaching is its utopianism. This utopianism appears to provide an attractive alternative to American society. It is seemingly based on a solid and comprehensive critique of contemporaryliberalism and the conservative vestiges of nineteenth-century liberalism. It condemns not only economic but intellectual and moral laissez-faire. And yet, as we shall see, this new utopianism is itself rooted in the underlying principle of modern liberalism, a principle which Marcuse develops to its ultimate logical conclusion and, in so doing, poses a threat to the very existence of civilized society.

Any inquiry into the values of a thinker, and particularly a thinker like Marx, such a large proportion of whose thought was political, must include a discussion of the kind of society that he considers desirable. With an individualist thinker this might only involve a discussion of his idea of what was basic to individual human nature, as in Hobbes or Locke, but for Marx human nature was inconceivable outside society and, when considering possible future developments, it was always man-in-society that Marx had in mind.

In October, 1963, Professor Vincent De Santis published a provocative revisionist essay on the realities of national politics in the United States during the Gilded Age. His perceptive comments and illustrations showed that the lion's share of the blame for the continuing misunderstanding of the politics of the period should be laid at the doors of Lord Bryce and Henry Adams. He demonstrated clearly that the distinguished, aristocratic Englishman and the Bostonian child of the eighteenth century were guilty of judging the passing parade of American political life by the standards of their own provincial and noncontemporary value systems. He went on to delineate the social, cultural and economic environment in which Gilded Age politicos functioned. These included the equating of democracy and capitalism, blind adherence to laissez-faire, cultural lag as to the theory of states' rights, the blight of two serious depressions, and a remarkably even balance of party and sectional power, especially after 1875.

Few philosophers in our tradition have raised structures of speculation more complex than those of Giambattista Vico. Nevertheless, in following the course of his speculation, from the earliest orations through the De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, the massive Diritto Universale, and, finally, the successive transformations of the Scienze Nuova, certain definite themes appear which engage his meditation at every stage and impart, as a consequence, unity and coherence, though never simplicity, to the whole. Basic among these is the theme of the civil education of man.

The philosophical framework for Lord Acton's theory of nationality, or to be more accurate his theory of multinationality, derives both from Aristotle and from Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. In Aristotle he found the view that the nature of the state is to be a plurality. Aquinas gave him “a very large element of political liberalism,” while Leibnitz contributed the idea of development, particularly the notion that development involves continuity and progress. Combining these points of view, Acton embraced a patently individualistic position, believing firmly that only the individual man possesses moral and political rights. Classes, races and states are at best chance groupings, at worst tortuous human inventions, and consequently have no inherent rights. It is “easier to find people fit to govern themselves,” according to Acton, “than people fit to govern others.”

The historian initially marks off his subject matter from the past's welter or continuum by emphasizing the unique color and tone of the events he has selected. He, therefore, appears to be preoccupied with the transient and, as we may say, in self-preoccupation, with mortality. But the point about our mortality is that, as we have so far had successors, our transiency is within a cycle of death and birth. From this cycle some of our works escape, perhaps to join a larger cycle. Flux has, then, no unlimited dominion. If we cannot step twice into quite the same river, our words win a metaphysical triumph for constancy when we define river as embanked watery flux. Still more happily, at any rate so far as the present occasion is concerned, some of our institutions endure. This endurance of St. Mary's and its promise for the future are what we celebrate.