Suchergebnisse

Ours was an old friendship: it was nearly thirty years ago that I met Waldemar Gurian for the first time in Bonn. At that time he was a brilliantly promising young man. He was expected to play an important role in the intellectual renovation which seemed to be underway in Germany. All that was stopped by the coming of the Nazis, which forced him to leave his country. Thanks to the facilities offered him by the University of Notre Dame, Waldemar Gurian resumed his activities as a scholar and a teacher with a courage that I admired. I would like to express also my admiration for his staunch dedication to the principles of freedom, and for his work as an historian of ideas, as a political philosopher and as an expert in international affairs—with regard to Russian bolshevism especially. He had many other interests. His understanding of spiritual life was remarkably broad. His profound Catholic faith made it possible for him to overcome many painful trials, and it was this background of anxiety and nostalgia which, from the very beginning of our association, aroused in me a feeling of affection for him. The founding of the Review of Politics, and its development into a most remarkable work of scholarship, of broad and living understanding of contemporary events, of human and philosophic value and of doctrinal soundness are also traceable to his Catholic faith, as well as to his very firm sense for intellectual and scientific rigor. The death of Waldemar Gurian means to me the loss of a faithful friend, and it is with deep emotion that I pay tribute to his memory

No concept has raised so many conflicting issues and involved nineteenth-century jurists and political theorists in so desperate a maze as the concept of Sovereignty. The reason is perhaps that the original, genuine philosophical meaning of the concept had not been, from the very start, sufficiently examined and seriously tested by them.In the same measure as crucial practical problems dealing with international law developed, the controversies about State Sovereignty, considered in its external aspect (relations between states), grew deeper and more extended. The question was asked whether the international community as a whole is not the true holder of Sovereignty, rather than the individual states. And, in some quarters, the very notion of Sovereignty was challenged. Such was the stand taken first by Triepel, then by several other international lawyers, including Willoughby and Foulke. Yet that challenge to the concept of Sovereignty remained only juridical in nature, and did not go to the philosophical roots of the matter.My aim, in this essay, is to discuss Sovereignty not in terms of juridical theory, but in terms of political philosophy. I think that the grounds for doing so are all the better since "Sovereignty," as Jellinek once observed, "in its historical origins is a political concept which later became transformed" in order to secure a juristic asset to the political power of the State.

I Should like to consider in this essay one particular aspect of the present spiritual crisis—namely, contemporary atheism and its inner meaning, Such a topic, the meaning of contemporary atheism, involves very deep and intricate problems. I do not pretend to dogmatize about them; the views that I shall offer are somewhat tentative views, which originate in a desire to look for the hidden spiritual significance of the present agony of the world.In an introductory part I shall try, first, to analyze briefly the various kinds of atheism we might have to deal with, in order to characterize more accurately contemporary atheism.

The subject I am discussing here deals with a very peculiar kind of knowledge — a kind of knowledge whose means is not concepts and reasoning, but affective inclination or affinity, and which is often disregarded by philosophers interested only in the rational kind of knowing. Henri Bergson liked to quote a sentence he found in the letters of a French philosopher; the sentence was as follows: "I have suffered from this friend enough to know him." When I know a friend to the core — not through having submitted him to a complete series of psychological tests, but because I have suffered from him and have got in myself the habit of his nature — then we may say in philosophical language that I know this man by connaturality.

My purpose is to consider Machiavellianism. Regarding Machiavelli himself, some preliminary observations seem necessary. Innumerable studies, some of them very good, have been dedicated to Machiavelli. Jean Bodin, in the XVIth Century, criticized The Prince in a profound and wise manner. Later on Frederick the Great of Prussia was to write a refutation of Machiavelli in order to exercise his own hypocrisy in a hyper-Machiavellian fashion, and to shelter cynicism in virtue. During the XIXth Century, the leaders of the bourgeoisie, for instance the French political writer Charles Benoist, were thoroughly, naïvely and stupidly fascinated by the clever Florentine.