In actual regimes as described by Aristotle, authoritative civic choices were not the outcome of speech among citizens about the noble things and the just things. Rather, he saw them as products of the flawed presuppositions and misperceptions of dominant factions. Since he held that the human good was dependent on the persistence of lawful systems of rule, no matter how flawed, he viewed the tendency of dominant factions toward regime-destructive extremism as the fundamental political problem. His short-term response was to teach manipulative rhetoric and the outline of a strategy for regime preservation to his students. This equipped his students to prevail against the speech of the ignorant and malevolent and impressed those students with the need to acquire political knowledge. His long-term response was the initiation of a system of education that would turn citizens away from regime-destructive predilections.

This essay reads Euripides's Medea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the making of a refugee. Alongside the common claim that the drama depicting a wife murdering her children to punish an unfaithful husband is about gender inequity, I draw out another dimension: that the text's exploration of women's subordination doubles as a rendering of refuge seeking. Euripides introduces Medea as a phugas, the term for a person exiled, on the run, displaced, vulnerable, and in need of refuge. I adopt the phugas as a lens for interpreting the tragedy and generating enduring insights into dynamics of “forced” migration. Taking this political predicament as the organizing question of the text enables us to understand how dislocation from the gender-structured family can produce physical displacement and a need for asylum while casting the political meaning of Medea's kin violence in a new light.

This paper examines the social contract theories of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke, highlighting the failure of their contractarian defenses of the military and military service. In order to ground the duties of military service, each theorist presumes a chivalric gender order wherein men as men are expected to be willing to sacrifice themselves as violent instruments for the sake of their families and communities. While Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf use the contract method to defend absolute, or near absolute, political authority wherein subject's primary political obligation is to serve the sovereign in war upon command, Locke uses the contract method to create a liberal political order that preserves the natural rights of subjects. Nevertheless, Locke maintains the commitment to self-sacrificial military service. In Locke, then, the military is peeled away from liberal civil society and we see the first statement of the civil-military distinction that persists today.

Seventeenth-century English common lawyer Sir John Davies sets forth, in his Irish Reports, a provocative and interesting argument on the nature of custom and its relation to the common law. This relatively unexplored argument shows how actions may emerge from conditions of liberty and slowly acquire qualities of social benefit and agreeability that are essential if the common law is to be identified with custom. Davies not only provides a coherent account of how custom might possess some reasonability, but he also seems to suggest that custom is unintended, thereby anticipating a theme found in eighteenth-century thinkers such as Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, and Burke. In addition, Davies's account has important implications for political theory: the priority of the social over the political and a notion of political consent that arises via custom itself.

Edmund Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings for his conduct as governor-general in India represented the era's most serious internal challenge to British imperialism. But the impeachment's legal and institutional implications have been neglected. The central points of contention were the nature of impeachment in Britain and the nature of law in India. Burke insisted that impeachment must override the “low” and “mean” standards of the common law, yet he celebrated India for its dense judicial institutions. Hastings took the opposite position, demanding that the impeachment adhere strictly to the common law, yet defending his conduct in India by appeal to its political expediency, rather than its lawfulness. Each found himself in a “rhetorical contradiction,” alternately arguing in praise of, and in critique of, legal reasoning and procedures. While Hastings attempted to surmount the contradiction through the discourse of realism, Burke turned to the discourse of natural law—a language of lawfulness without legalism.