A collection of essays, speeches, and conversations from a conference sponsored by Southwestern University Law Review and held in Los Angeles in 1977 in commemoration of the 190th anniversary of the Constitution, this book has some 36 contributors. The majority of these are law professors, including Laurence Tribe of Harvard, Bernard Schwartz of NYU, Ruth Bader Ginsburg of Columbia, Lino A. Graglia of the University of Texas, and Martin Shapiro of the University of California at Berkeley. Several contributions are by (...) Federal judges, including ones by Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., and Constance Baker Motley. There is also a sprinkling of historians, political scientists, journalists, and lawyers. The contributors include a number of little known, as well as many well-known commentators on the Constitution. (shrink)

Morality and the Inner Life is not a commentary on the Gorgias but a book which independently examines some of the themes from Plato’s dialogue. It does not attempt to understand the Gorgias as a whole or even to clarify some particular part of it. Indeed, one could read Morality and the Inner Life without ever learning that the theme of Plato’s dialogue is rhetoric. Rather, parts of the Gorgias are used as vehicles for the presentation of Dilman’s own reflections (...) about morality. His procedure is to extract various statements made in the course of Plato’s dialogue and then to offer his thoughts about the meaning they might be given and their truth or falsity. He examines such contentions as that virtue is knowledge, that the just man is the happy man, that punishment is a blessing for the wrongdoer, that justice is only a convention, and that no man does evil willingly. The procedure is justified by the argument that a "great philosopher" provides us with questions which we, too, must ask if we would be philosophers. (shrink)

The greatest defender of democracy in the twentieth century could only say of it that it was a bad form of government, but better than any of the alternatives. It is thus a tribute to academic insularity that there can continue to be an academic discipline, subdiscipline, or interdiscipline devoted to "democratic theory." The major premise of "democratic theory" is that, contrary to the experience of Churchill and all other perceptive democratic statesmen, democracy can be viewed and justified without reference (...) to the circumstances in which it is found or to the available alternatives. On Justifying Democracy is a contribution to this dubious enterprise. (shrink)

This book has both a philosophic and a practical aim. Its philosophic aim is to understand civil religion. Its practical aim is to help restore confidence in the West by showing the superiority of the American civil religion to that of the Soviet Union. In the first part of the book, Rome is examined to show how the problem of civil religion first arose. In the second, the United States is used both to show how civil religion may develop gradually (...) and to set forward a model of a good—or, at least, potentially good-civil religion. In the final section, several modern political thinkers are discussed in order to trace the steps leading to the civil religion of Marxism. Henry’s thesis is that both the American and Communist civil religions are secularizations of Christianity, but, while the American civil religion lives in tension between a "public philosophy" that judges the United States by universal standards and a "civil theology" that deifies her existence, Communist ideology has no "public philosophy" but only a "civil theology" deifying the power of the state. (shrink)