Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thoughton War and Peace by George WeigelReview by: John C. CampbellForeign Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 5 (Summer, 1987), p. 1097Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20043204 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 13:03

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.81 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 13:03:02 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RECENT BOOKS ON international

relations

Edited by Lucy Edwards Despard

General: Political and Legal

John C. Campbell

JANUS AND MINERVA: ESSAYS IN THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS. By Stanley Hoffmann. Boulder (Colo.): Westview Press, 1987, 457 pp. $39.95.

Putting together a collection of random and long-forgotten articles to

make a book and pad a professor's list of publications is an old trick. In this

instance, however, there is much to be said for the device, since the articles

have not become stale and some are new in the sense that their prior appearance was in French publications or was restricted to a very limited

readership. As a whole they represent a body of thought on international

relations that is remarkably consistent even as it has evolved over the years.

Covering a host of specific topics, with principal stress on system and order in international relations, security in the nuclear age, European-American relations and U.S. foreign policy, they reveal Hoffmann as a political philosopher in the mold of the late Raymond Aron, to whom he acknowl

edges a considerable debt. Hoffmann is no ideologist. He recognizes the

ambiguous nature of international relations in both theory and practice? hence Janus; at the same time he does not shun normative prescription infused, he hopes, with wisdom?hence Minerva. Like those in the disci

pline who come under his sharp criticism, he is nothing if not controversial.

Incidentally, George Weigel in his book Tranquillitas Ordinis deplores what he sees as Hoffmann's baleful though indirect influence on the directions taken by Catholic thought on war and peace in the past 20 years (see below).

TRANQUILLITAS ORDINIS: THE PRESENT FAILURE AND FU TURE PROMISE OF AMERICAN CATHOLIC THOUGHT ON WAR AND PEACE. By George Weigel. New York: Oxford University Press,

1987, 489 pp. $27.50. The message is clear and oft-repeated: the American Catholic establish

ment has abandoned traditional thought on questions of war and peace derived from St. Augustine through Aquinas to Vatican II, a tradition that saw peace as inseparable from security and freedom in an ordered political community. This "failure," according to the author, has been marked by 20 years or so of relapse into pacifism, neoisolationism, Third World-ism and an unwillingness to confront the continuing threat of totalitarianism,

culminating in the U.S. Catholic bishops' 1983 statement, "The Challenge of Peace," which he deplores. The policy debate, of course, has relevance for others as well as Catholics. Indeed, Weigel's arguments on current

foreign policy issues such as arms control and Central America follow the same lines, stripped of the theological clothing, as those of the Reagan

Administration in refuting its critics.

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.81 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 13:03:02 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions