ABSTRACT
The domestic and international aims of the new Jacobinism will eventually be discussed more fully in relation to the current state of Western democracy. How moral universality is conceived bears directly on how one understands the present condition of democracy and the ideological posture and political ambition of the new Jacobinism. The old Western tradition offered a number of variations on the same general theme of universality. The older Western tradition in morality can be criticized on various grounds. One flaw is its tendency, under the influence of the more rationalistic dimensions of Greek thought, to intellectualize moral universality and turn it into a matter of right thinking. The historical sense emerged in a thinker like Edmund Burke. Without saying so explicitly or with philosophical precision, he came close to understanding human good as the synthesis of universality and particularity.
