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"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I [...]

Yogi Berra is no Aristotle. But his unintentionally humorous aphorisms, recently collected by him and his family, (1) teach us something about the nature of philosophical reasoning, and jurisprudence in [...]

The FBI played a crucial though unadvertised role in pre-World War II policy by monitoring foreign policy critics. Pres Franklin Delano Roosevelt empowered FBI director Herbert Hoover to create an intelligence arm for the White House.

This article examines the causes behind diplomatic failure in American and Cambodian relations at the onset of the Vietnam War. It posits that the primary reason for failure was the lack of a US policy that acknowledged Cambodia's neutrality while simultaneously opposing Communist expansion in the rest of Southeast Asia.

Charles Taylor appears in Jonathan Seglow's review of recent attempts by liberal political theorists to accommodate nationalism, multiculturalism and the assertion of cultural pluralism in public life.(1) Four aspects of Seglow's interpretation of Taylor are questioned here: 1, Taylor's politics of recognition; 2, his pluralism; 3, his stand on liberal neutrality; and 4, Seglow's ready incorporation of Taylor into the liberal fold. While Taylor endorses some aspects of the liberal tradition of political thought, he rejects others. Ignoring or marginalizing these obscures one of Taylor's central concerns in analysing the politics of recognition, which is to question the meaning of liberalism itself.

US 20th-century foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism and expansionism. The two philosophies mirror the points of view of immigrants and frontiersmen. Immigrants often were distrustful of the countries they fled and did not wish the US to become politically involved with them. Frontiersmen believed in a spirit of continual expansion. The duality complicated the foreign policy of the US, whose dominant global power could not be disputed.

In this paper, I maintain that the argument for a mild form of state perfectionism which Thomas Hurka has tried to make in recent writing on the basis of his Aristotelian perfectionism. I argue that his perfectionism underdetermines the types of activities which the state would have to promote in order to realize the perfectionist values argued for by Hurka. I hold moreover that Hurka operates with a straw-man conception of the doctrine of liberal neutrality. On his view, the liberal state would indeed be reduced to complete inaction. I argue that the liberal state can while remaining neutral in the required sense promote those goods and activities which constitute what I call a 'liberal conception of the good'. These goods and practices are those upon which reasonable concetions of the good already overlap and those which are either conceptually or empirically presupposed by such reasonable conceptions. (author abstract) (original text of author abstract in French)

Many recent liberal theorists have argued that state neutrality is supported by a metaphysical thesis about value, namely pluralism, which asserts that there are some conceptions of the good life which neither form a hierarchy nor represent versions of a single good. It is however doubtful whether neutrality is supported by pluralism; indeed, it may in some cases be precluded by it. Arguments for pluralism can, in many cases, be reconciled with a monistic metaphysics of value, and pluralism itself fails to support neutrality. This is particularly true of traditional liberal policy positions such as religious toleration and opposition to censorship, where attention to diverse conceptions of the good may favour, or demand, non-neutral policies. The political problems which neutrality addresses arise before we accept the metaphysical 'truth' of pluralism, and often remain even if the parties to a political conflict have false conceptions of value. A sharp question for the pluralist neutralist is why conflicting conceptions of the political cannot themselves feature in plural conceptions of the good life. Dispensing with pluralism may not, however, be enough to rescue neutrality, since the disputes which neutrality was designed to deal with may not be resolvable neutrally; and more particularly, some of the traditional liberal policies may be incapable of neutral justification. If so, liberals may find a more traditional form of non-neutral liberalism more attractive.

In the latter half of the 1930s, a loose and informal grouping of English-Canadian intellectuals became determined to keep Canada neutral in a British war or at least to have the Dominion's right of neutrality recognized. The war-scare associated with the Munich crisis of September 1938 provided the catalyst for the most ambitious and organized campaign launched by these non-interventionists. However, the compromise strategy which differences among the non-interventionists forced them to adopt, the irreducible pro-British sentiment of the bulk of English Canadians, and the blatantly treacherous actions of Adolf Hitler combined to defeat the non-interventionist intellectuals by the spring of 1939.

Austria's government is a product of internal and external factors. The desire to remain neutral and seeking to join the European Community (EC) have been driven by domestic response to external events. Recently, the changes in Eastern Europe have made Austria's participation in the EC more desirable than ever for both sides. Full EC membership is likely to alter the political structures within Austria that made membership a priority.