The intent of the issue, which features a groundbreaking symposium on "Leibniz and the American Revolution," is set forth by Lyndon LaRouche in his essay "The Next Generations," a tour de force synthesis of the historical development of the arts, sciences, and politics. LaRouche poses the challenge before today's youth, if they are to asssume their place in world history:

"There is no perfect model of a just form of modern nation-state in practice today. The principle is clear; but, the practice is contested and usually contradictory. The job is, to bring practice into conformity with scientific principle ... to establish the Classical principle securely in power, at last."

LaRouche highlights the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, discovered by Carl Gauss, as an example of an idea whose mastery provides an efficient understanding of the difference between formalist "learning," and true knowledge based upon the transformation of reality. - Leibniz and America -

Contrary to the lying history that claims the American Republic was based on "property" and personal greed, the issue's symposium demonstrates the seminal role of John Locke's political and scientific opponent, G.W. Leibniz, in providing the intellectual basis for the "American exception" wrought by Benjamin Franklin and the Founding Fathers:

• Edward Spannaus reports on the trans-Atlantic dialogue between Franklin's mentor Cotton Mather and the Leibnizian educator A.H. Francke.

• David Shavin presents an overview of the political offensive of cultural optimism, incorporating the efforts of the Goettingen circle around Gauss's teacher Abraham Kaestner, to focus Franklin's decades-long struggle to found a republic based on Life, Liberty, and Leibnizian "Happiness."
  
  
• Marcia Merry Baker shows that England's Industrial Revolution sprang from the same Leibnizian outlook as the American Revolution.
  
  
• The spring Fidelio also includes a pedagogical exercise reviewing Brunelleschi's construction of the Dome of the Cathedral of Florence, from the advanced standpoint of Gauss and Bernhard Riemann.
• - On Immortality -

This issue of Fidelio also contains something else, of great importance. The life of Schiller Institute vice president Marianna Wertz, who died Jan. 15, is celebrated by her husband, Fidelio editor-in-chief Will Wertz, and by editorial remarks on immortality by Lyndon LaRouche. As a tribute to her passing, the Schiller Institute has re-issued "Bridge Across Jordan," the autobiography of Marianna's friend, Civil Rights heroine Amelia Boynton Robinson, with a new dedication written by Mrs. Robinson in Marianna's memory.