Benjamin R. Barber

A. Season of Service: Introducing Service Learning into the Liberal Arts Curriculum

We live in times when rights and obligations have become uncoupled. Individuals regard themselves almost exclusively as private persons with responsibilities only to family and job, yet possessing endless rights against a distant and alien state in relationship to which they think of themselves, at best, as watchdogs and clients and, at worst, as adversaries and victims. The idea of service to country or to the institutions by which rights and liberty are legitimized and sustained has fairly vanished.

Can Democracy Survive Globalization

Democracy is far less fragile than we sometimes imagine. Although hard to establish, it is remarkably robust and is corrupted only by dint of persistent effort. Yet, as Rousseau wrote of freedom, once lost, democracy is nearly impossible to regain. Today, the forces of democracy face a new source of corruption all the more sinister because it appears so innocuous, often even identifying itself with the liberty it undermines. Having survived the nation-state and in time subordinated it to its own liberal purposes, can democracy now survive globalization? Only if democracy is globalized. At present, the encompassing practices of globalization have created an ironic and radical asymmetry: we have managed to globalize markets in goods, labour, currencies and information without globalizing the civic and democratic institutions that have historically comprised the free markets indispensable context. Put simply, we have removed capitalism from the institutional ‘box’ that has (quite literally) domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human face.

An American Civic Forum: Civil Society Between Market Individuals and the Political Community

The polarization of the individual and the community that underlies much of the debate between individualists and communitarians is made possible in part by the literal vanishingof civil society—the domain whose middling terms mediate the stark opposition of state and private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that is both voluntary and public. Modern democratic ideology and the reality of our political practices sometimesseem to yield only a choice between elephantine and paternalistic government or a radically solipsistic and nearly anarchic private market sector—overnment gargantuanism or private greed.Americans do not much like either one. President Clintons callfor national service draws us out of our selfishness without kindling any affection for government. Private markets service our avarice without causing us to like ourselves. The question of how Americas decentralized and multi-vocal public can secure a coherentvoice in debates over public policy under the conditions precipitated by so hollow and disjunctive a dichotomy is perhaps the most important issue facing both the political theory and social science of democracy and the practice of democratic politics in America today. Two recent stories out of Washington suggest just how grave the situation has become. Health-care reform failed in a paroxysm of mutual recrimination highlighted by the successful campaign of the private sector (well represented in Congress) against a presidential program that seemed to be widely misunderstood. The public at large simply went missing in the debates.

Justifying Justice: Problems of Psychology, Measurement, and Politics in Rawls *

The intention of this essay is to raise certain questions about A Theory of Justice in Rawlss own terms—accepting his premises but examining his reasoning by his own stated criteria. I believe that such an examination will show that the abstract justificatory appeal to an “original position†is unsatisfactory in certain vital psychological and philosophical ways; that the Rawlsian analysis raises problems of comparison and measurement not adequately disposed of by the doctrine of justice as fairness and its corollary strategy of “maximin†; and that the appeal to congruence on which the latter part of Rawlss argument depends is founded on an inadequate political and historical sociology—which in turn creates further problems for the argument from the original position. In sum, I wish to show that while Rawls has lit his candle at both ends, he has got neither end to burn.

The Nature of Contemporary Political Science: A Roundtable Discussion

What is the nature of contemporary political science? What shared concerns bind us together as a discipline, providing a common definition and direction to our intellectual enterprise? These questions were on my mind as I organized the section on formal and normative political theory for the 1989 APSA meetings. Initially, I had wanted to sponsor a panel to address the nature of formal and normative theory. I knew I was a bit uncertain about the precise nature of these fields and sensed that other scholars shared my desire for greater clarity. Then I read Gabriel Almonds Separate Tables (PS: Political Science and Politics, 1988). The surprisingly diverse and intense reaction this article generated in the profession suggested the confusion extended beyond my own subfield and into the discipline as a whole. All of this provided the impetus for the round table whose discussion is summarized below. Since Almonds article argues there is a methodological separateness that limits us as a discipline, I tried to choose panel discussants to reflect the disparate parts of political science. I spoke with each panelist in advance and, drawing on their suggestions, I constructed and circulated a few key questions around which our discussion would be organized. As is obvious in the following remarks, panelists expressed quite different views, but each participant touched on the following questions in some way: Is there a core to contemporary political science? If so, what is it? If not, does its absence matter? Should there be a core? And how important is communication among the different branches of political science? Each panelist made a brief statement on this topic, focusing on these particular questions. Their remarks are reprinted below, with their per-

Participation and Swiss Democracy

AS THE GREAT HISTORIAN LOUIS HARTZ TAUGHT US IN HIS remarkable study The Liberal Tradition in America , anyone wishing to focus on the special character of a regime would do well to begin by taking the measure of what is absent rather than what is present. Like America, Switzerland has long been regarded as an exception to many of the conventional rules of historical and democratic development — Sonderfall Schweiz is how the Swiss portray and perhaps boast a little about their national exceptionalism. Switzerland possesses a unique form of democratic government the hallmarks of which are participatory democracy, neutrality and radical federalism (decentrahsm or localism, what the Swiss sometimes call Kantonligeist ). These hallmarks give to it a character which stands in stark contrast to traditional Anglo-American democracy. The student of comparative politics will observe at once that a great many of Switzerlands leading political features seem to have no analogue in either the English common law or the American Constitution. Swiss democracy is English democracy minus most of English democracys salient features: which is to say, it is scarcely English democracy at all. The powerful idea of natural rights as the armour of the individual against illegitimate authority (originally against the illegitimacy of absolute monarchy, later against the hyper-legitimacy of majoritarian tyranny) is largely missing, for example. Missing too is the tradition of an independent judiciary devoted to the protection of wholly private rights against an alien, power-mongering state. When Alexis de Tocqueville, whose liberal premises suited America so well, went looking in the Alps for something like the English liberties, he went astray. Not finding English liberties, he quite misunderstood Switzerlands regime.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ‘Preface to Narcisse’: (translated, edited and with an introduction by Benjamin R. Barber and Janis Forman): I. Introduction

Narcisse was the last of seven plays and three operettas Rousseau composed before and during his.stay in Paris from 1742 to 1752. Although he claims to have written a first draft a t 18, he was in fact 21. Moreover, it is likely that the piece was redrafted a number of timesonce by the better-known playwright Marivaux, who “retouched” it in 1742-a decade before its performance. Rousseav is something less than precise in his account of that performance at the Comedie Franqaise in December 1752,just two months after his charming Le Deviii dii village was done for the king a t Fontainebleau. In the Preface as well as in the Coiflessions he gives a convincing description of failure. But in fact, Narcisse was apparently quite successful, and was limited to two performances only because Rousseau withdrew it. On a double bill with Voltaire’s Didon (the first night) and Merope (the second), it seems to have outdrawn both of Voltaire’s plays when they were shown on a different bill the previous week. Hence,’his attempt to belittle his own achievement a t the Caf; Procope during the performance (he spoke anonymously and derisively about the play while it was being performed across the street) would seemas the Prej’uce tends to confirm-to derive from embarrassment a t the work‘s success rather than its failure.

Letter From America: The 1994 Elections—Herbert Hoover Redux?

READERS OF GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION WILL NOT BE strangers to the events of November that led to a crushing defeat for the Democrats and the first all-Republican Congress in a very long time, if for no other reason than that they have read my colleague Harvey Mansfields account in the winter issue. There was quite a lot of conservative gloating in November and December (and why not?). There is a little less now that the Gingrich revolution has begun to face up to the two dauntingly unalterable realities of American politics: the reality of the centre and the reality of divided government.

SOLIPSISTIC POLITICS: RUSSELL'S EMPIRICIST LIBERALISM*

AMONG the multiple products of Bertrand Russell’s panoptic intelligence, his writings on politics have been rather slighted. Admirers of his analytic lucidity are content to celebrate his mathematical philosophy and some of his later work in the philosophy of science and pliilosophy of mind, while those stunned by his persona and toucned by his moral courage dwell on his life--his practical engagement in the great issues of suffrage, pacifism, n d e a r disarmament and world peace. Consequently, his political thought, falling somewhere between pure theory and vigorous praxis, is often treated as a function of his journalism. The political books, in this view, are a kind of tribute exacted by his political principles, popular ‘potboilers’ (Russell’s own term) to pay the bills academic emoluments might have met had he kept his politics to himself and lived passively as a distinguished academic logician. A. J. Ayer thus pays Russell’s political thought little heed, passing over it entirely in his Rzrssell and Moore and just grazing it in his Modern Musters account. Nor can it be said that Russell’s political writings evince the systematic continuity and relative immunity to time and topicality that might attract permanent attention. The early works assail Bolshevism with a spirit of ardent individualism, principled pacifism and a hint of anarchism. Later, power and authority emerge as dominant concepts, while the quest for liberty seems overshadowed by the quest for peace-almost at any cost. Each book thus seems to speak its own language, develop its own inflections, create its own context depending on the relevant issues of the day and the pertinent subject at hand. Each is to some degree a l i iw ti‘occusion, although Russell’s lively independence assures that the liure is always a good deal less fashionable than the occrrsion. Finally, Russell’s political theory may seem even to the sympathetic obscrver to be superficial, journalistic, inconsistent, eclectic and unoriginal-too often the hostage of Russell’s practical engagements, too seldom addressed to the great discourse that defines the history of mankind’s political thought. Yet such a judgement would undervalue Russell’s political writing egregiously. To begin with. charges of inconsistency and lack of continuity seem quite beside the point. The ieaps that carried Russell from pacifism to humanistic patriotism, from visions of mutualist utopia to reluctant advocacy of American or Russian world hegemony in the name of survival were no more staggering and certainly

HENRY J. MERRY. Montesquieu's System of Natural Government. Pp. xvi, 414. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Studies, 1970.

his intellectual personality. The question is nonetheless an intriguing one, and the unitarian dogma of Marx worshippers and believers is not likely to dispose of it. Unlike most investigators of the young Marx who have proceeded from the man to the intellectual ambience in tracing the influences on him, Mr. McLellan has applied the reverse approach and investigated the development of the ambience before and as it affected Marx. The philosophical milieu with which Mr. McLellan is con-