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For more than two decades, historians of the United States have energetically debated the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism in the 1770s and 1780s. Was the late eighteenth century a time of progress, and events culminating in the ratification of the Constitution a triumph for individual rights and liberal society, as convention held? Or was it a time of decay, and the events of the founding a renewal of citizen virtue in defense of the common good? Political theorists and constitutional scholars joined the debate, extending it beyond the founding and noting its relevance to our own time. Everyone agreed that liberalism eventually prevailed, more or less completely, for better or for worse. Just when it did so, and why, were questions always asked but never satisfactorily answered as the debate ran its course.

Conceptual history looks for political arguments & finds conceptual change -- the sort of changes modernity's career has brought to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty fused three antecedents reflecting the priorities of different political idioms: in the idiom of classical republicanism, majestas or the awe-inspiring dignity of a corporate person; in the idiom of power & prerogative, imperium or the competence to rule; & in the radical idiom of Protestant republicanism, duty on behalf of the people or agency. The concept of sovereignty stabilized for centuries in association with the liberal idiom of rights & duties extended, by analogy, to states. The circumstances of late modernity challenge the conceptual coherence of sovereignty & herald political arrangements in which majesty, rule, & agency take on separate identities. AA

The Club of Rome was formed to publicize the contemporary human predicament—an unprecedented social pathology which, according to founder Aurelio Peccei, "is aggravated by the interrelatedness … of everything in the human system." The Club has commissioned and accepted nine reports, the first and most famous of which isLimits to Growth(1972). This report's "Malthusian" viewpoint and popular format identified the Club with a controversial issue evidently unacceptable to many of its members, not to mention most economists and technologists. Subsequent reports, with one exception, have progressively retreated from that initial position by denying the predicament's resistance to serial solution. Instead, reports have taken refuge in conventional liberal nostrums and blindly asserted technological optimism. The debate on the future of industrial civilization brought to the fore byLimitsdeserves a better fate.

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International law, its masters tell us, is "the vanishing point of jurisprudence." So must be international politics, and all of international relations, for political theory. The recurrent and directing theme in political theory is the problem of order—how it is provided, maintained, altered, and so on. Order resides in orderly relations, that is, patterned and predictable relations, among people, but is abstracted from those relations as any arrangement of norms and institutions that distributes values among people. Among peoples, political theorists favor the alternative premise that anarchy, not order, reigns. By not existing, international order needs no explaining. Evidence to the contrary can be explained away as anomalous or ephemeral, and therefore not of theoretical interest. From this follows the dominance of concern for conflict and disorder and the paucity of theory in the study of international politics.