ABSTRACT
The advent of political philosophy in a society usually augurs ill for the society itself. Political wisdom drifts into the public forum as do leaves in early autumn portending the coming of winter. Almost always a meditation by men who remember past glories, fancied or real, political philosophy grips the souls of men who are stiffening themselves for the ice and the gales and the snows of an inclement and soonto-be-suffered season of hardship and even danger. No politi cal philosopher worth his salt ever thought that he could restore a golden past threatened in the autumn of an aging civilization too tired to take up its burden of responsibility or too numbed to understand the splendor of its inheritance. The very irreducibility of history as it is lived not only by societies but by every man in each fleeting hour of the day prohibits calling back into being what has sunk into nothing ness. The past can be expiated by penance and it can be propitiated by piety but the past cannot be perpetuated by the present. Mythic return to the timelessness of things as they were "in the beginning" is an illusory door through which the philosopher must not enter at the peril of betraying his voca tion. Philosophers do not construct Utopias, be they reaction ary or futuristic. Wisdom is not an ideologue who justifies his desires by masking them under pseudosciences. Political philosophy as understood by the author in these pages has nothing in common with the rationalism of the Enlighten ment or the resentment of the Marxes and Hegels who truly do believe with Leibniz that at bottom the only tragedy is not to be God.
