Once upon a time there was a set of propositions that made up the Faith. Not everyone knew even most of these propositions; not even the pope knew all of them, for they weren't all uttered yet, and perhaps some later pope would promulgate a proposition that the present pope didn't know, except of course implicitly;for we all—unless we were heretics—held implicitly all the true propositions of Faith there could be, right to the end of time. There were many difficult problems: those that gathered round the early chapters of Genesis—the woman fashioned out of a rib, the talking serpent, the ages of the patriarchs; those that arose from reflection upon the history of the church—the rough and depraved and inadequate men who had held the Roman bishopric from time to time, the prevalence historically of an attachment (thought down to modern times almost a badge of orthodoxy) to the practice of religious persecution.

It is by now a commonplace among American political scientists that the philosophical grounding of political inquiry is in dire need of critical reflection and serious repair, if not radical reconstruction. The sources of this widespread recognition are no doubt diverse, but not the least resides in the impact of the key ideas of Thomas Kuhn's celebrated work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For, although Kuhn's work was narrowly interpreted by Almond, Truman, and other key figures in the behavioral elite corps to conform to their image of science (basically a naive positivist image), the very breadth and subtlety of Kuhn's work, his commitment to formulating his conception of science from the history of science as practiced, and his ultimate antagonism to that tradition of the philosophy of science (logical positivism/empiricism) which behavioralists have embraced ensured that a lively and contentious debate would ensue.

Felix Raab has argued that the interpretation of James Harrington's thought is today a key issue in the study of midseventeenth- century English history because, “at one point or another, hisideas have become relevant to every recent analysis of that difficult period.” In the not too distant past such a statement would have been unthinkable. Harrington's place in the history of political thought is unsettled, as might be expected of a thinker generally known as the creator of an exceptionally mundane Utopia. However, the rise, elaboration, and criticism of interpretations of Harrington in the last few decades has produced a rather large and discordant body of literature, enlivened by the peculiar assertion of exactly contrary interpretations of Harrington's intent and of his relations to the politics of his own day. Another curious aspect of this renewed interest in Harrington is the extent to which the various interpretations cohere with the ideological commitments of the interpreters—a fact which by itself warrants no more then caution in accepting any of these readings, but which also displays continuity with other uses2 that have been made of Harrington.

The similarities between postwar France and Italy are striking. Both countries are traditionally Catholic. Both emerged from the Second World War with vital Communist organizations enjoying widespread popular support—owing in large measure to the leading roles the Communists played in their national resistance movements during World War II. Since the war, both the French and Italian Communist political parties-—by themselves—could count on commanding between one-fifth and one-fourth of the vote. France and Italy also emerged from the war with significant Christian Democratic movements and parties—-much stronger than analogous groupings in prewar days. Both countries had threatening Communist movements powerful enough to make credible attempts at seizing power without the aid of Soviet troops. And in both countries the Christian Democratic movement was a major obstacle to Communist designs. In both countries Social Democratic movements reemerged, but inferior to the Communists in cohesionand poised awkwardly between massive Communist and Catholic subcultures. In both countries a substantial part of the labor movement was dominated, not by gradualists, but by Marxist-Leninists who challengedthe very legitimacy of the regime. Not surprisingly, the character of the opposition reflected deep traditions of civic alienation, skepticism, and apathy. Finally, both countries have suffered from an ill-developed history of democratic practices, and have been notably subject to governmental instability.

The conventional wisdom on the basic philosophy of the constitutional concept of the separation of powers is well stated in The Federalist. In No. 47, citing the authority of the “celebrated Montesquieu,” James Madison wrote that “the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Clearly the Founding Fathers feared the corrupting influence of power. As Madison asked in No. 51, “what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Another concise statement of the separation of powers concept is found in the famous remark made by Justice Brandeis in 1926, in his dissenting opinion in the Myers case, that “the doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”

Greek historical writing began at much the same time as Greek philosophic-scientific speculation. It experienced an even more rapid growth than philosophy, which it resembled in culminating its development in two men of genius. Contemporary events, the principal subject matter of early history, became the subject of inquiry, when some among the literate could not look at or understand events in the epic or mythic terms that had served the past and had to serve as a past.