In his famous article, “Zwischenbetrachtung (Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions)”, Weber describes the possible tensions existing between religion and the world. Among such tensions, the most interesting is the one between religion and the political sphere. The mutual strangeness of both of them is ‘all the more the case because, in contrast to economics, politics may come into direct competition with religious ethics at decisive points’. According to Weber, it is an unusual pathos and feeling of community created by war that makes politics emulate religious ethics. This pathos is so unique as well as powerful, because only in war the individual can believe that his death, and therefore his life, obtains ‘meaning’.
  Such descriptions suggest the central characteristics of Weber’s ‘concept of political’ which is formed against the background of ‘rationalization’ in the western modernity. This paper tries to explain how Weber sees the relation between war and the peculiarity of modern politics and also how his theoretical reflections on this matter in his sociology of religion are consistent with his arguments in his wartime-political essays.

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  Hannah Arendt discussed it about political theory of revolution and violence, but never told it about political theory of war. Political theory of Arendt comes out of experience in the days of totalitarianism. Arendt rediscovered “the revolutionary tradition and its lost treasure” and evaluated it as a nucleus of new political theory. Political theory of Arendt makes the public sphere which constitutional power of multitude creates a theme. Arendt discovered an opportunity to let public sphere revive and argued in possibility of non-violent revolution. Arendt interested in French Revolution and American Revolution, Russian Revolution and German Revolution, Hungarian uprising and the Spring of Prague as experience of revolution of modern times and the present age. Arendt pays her attention to experience of revolution not experience of war daringly and searches experience of the beginning that is not accompanied with violence. Arendt catches a war phenomenon as a problem of a pre-political stage and is interested in experience of the foundation as a political action. This article wants to clarify outlook on the Arendtian Revolution.

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  Whereas there is growing recognition that democracies are less likely to be engaged in military conflict than any other regime type, the United States and Britain, or some other democracies, have finally decided, despite domestic opposition and protest, that they should commit their forces to change Iraq’s regime. The democratic pacifism assuming that a state’s domestic political system is the primary determinant of international behavior and that the spread of democracy is an important factor of world peace has been called into question by the Iraq War.
  In fact, Western democracies have more frequently used, in recent years, military force in the cases of Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. This chapter then reconsiders the old and new dialectics between democracy and use of force in a changing environment. What difficulties do democracies face in using force in the pursuit of higher values than national interest? In what manner can democracies reconcile the use of force with the moral and political value of democracy? These are the pivotal questions around which we evolve arguments in this chapter.

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  It is often argued that democracies do not go to war with each other. This democratic peace thesis might be true. At the dark side of democratic peace, however, democracies often go to war with other regimes. It means that democracies are peaceful towards each other, but in general they are as war-prone as any other regime type. It is true that the theory of democratic peace remains fragmentary as long as it fails to account for the practice of war on the part of democracies.
  In the history of political thought about the relationship between democracy and war, Athenian imperialism by Pericles in the funeral oration shows moral justifications of war. Moreover, Tocqueville points out that democracy in America is war-prone. In fact, the United States often goes to war for creating democracies. In this sense, the democratic peace thesis is a democratic war thesis. The purpose of this paper is to deal with the involvement of democracies in war in terms of international political thought.

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  Today, we are no longer satisfied with merely ideological justification of war. Instead, we want theory that enables us to think about it more critically. This article aims to show what problems political theory has in order to meet this need by assessing just war theory, which is used most frequently by political theorists to argue about war. Because the most problematic aspect of modern war is its inevitableness of causing deaths of civilians, this article focuses on two issues: 1) the theoretical foundation of “noncombatant immunity principle” and 2) the validity of “double effect principle”. With regard to the first, it examines arguments advanced by A. J. Coates and H. Shue, and to the second, it explores accounts of J. P. Sterba and H. Shue. As a consequence, this article argues that just war theory demands a stricter set of criteria for justifiable war than usually understood and its strictness mainly comes from the priority of “jus ad bellum” over “jus in bello” because the former belongs to the political process, the latter to the military process. Finally this article points out that just war theory deals only with the decision-making phase of the political process, and that political theory in general ought to cover the entire policy-making phase: political theory ought to take into consideration the outcomes of policy-oriented studies, in particular security studies and peace researches.

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  Titmuss’s “War and Social Policy” (1955) is known as a masterpiece Warfare-Welfare thesis, a thesis that emphasises the close linkage between warfare and welfare. His thesis presents a historical view that the Second World War (WWII) promoted the development of universal social services, and that post-war social policies succeeded the legacy as unfinished business. However, revisionist historians qualified this view, some of them calling it a myth. This paper examines why Titmuss presented such a so-called myth in the contemporary political context of the National Health Service.
  The examination reveals that, on the one hand, Titmuss’s Warfare-Welfare thesis systematises the view that welfare, or social policy, had functioned as an essential elements of modern warfare. On the other hand, in the early 1950s’ controversial context, Titmuss’s argument signified a trade-off model of the Warfare-Welfare thesis. He regarded WWII as war to win a peace in which welfare would be given a higher priority. He also stressed the continuity between the Great War and post-war social policy, including the National Health Service. This view, in practice, functioned as the basis for antagonism against the rearmament of the early 1950s.

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  So-called “radical democracy” has been concerned with problems of inclusion and exclusion, discussing difference, identity or citizenship. Now radical democracy seems to be divided into two models, agonistic and deliberative. Chantal Mouffe strongly criticizes deliberative democracy through insisting conflict as a fundamental element of “the political”. On the other hand, Iris Young, whose democratic theory is not simply labelled as agonistic or deliberative, conceptualized inclusive democratic model which can be bound on Mouffe’s. Both of them reject the essentialist idea of identity and acknowledge the fact that the constitution of “we” needs the determination of “they”. Mouffe’s idea of “adversary” and Young’s recognition of communication as “struggle” show that democratic dialogue can be a non-violent conflict in a public sphere. Such a conflict should be a type of inclusion because any identity cannot exist without others. The acknowledgement of changeableness of self-identity or self-interest seems to require what Young called “reasonableness” as “hearing the other”, which is not based on particular culture (e. g., white male) nor contain any notion of the common good which might oppress diversity. This can meet Mouffe’s emphasis upon a “practice of civility” which is based on Michael Oakeshott’s notion of societas.

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