In this article, the work of the cultural historian Jean-Pierre Vernant and the philosophical anthropologist René Girard provides grounds for reflecting on Plato's adaptation of tragedy in the Apology, and in particular on Plato's implicit comparison of Socrates with the character of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. The Apology uses certain thematic and formal elements of tragedy – including systematic ambiguity, dramatic reversal and recognition, and the figure of a hero who is also a scapegoat – in order to expose the paradoxical combination of persuasion and compulsion at the heart of political life and of philosophical passion and aggression in the soul of the philosopher.

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke intends that gentlemen educated according to his standards quietly dethrone the aristocrats as the model for society. Locke hopes to direct most gentlemen away from a desire to imitate aristocratic manners and toward practical economic goals consistent with the needs of all. The excellent example of the new gentlemen will combine with their good treatment of the lower classes to entice the latter to imitate them. Locke thus hopes to reconcile gentlemen and the common man. Crucial components of this education include a tough physical regimen, the humane treatment of servants, and the re-education of fathers. Locke's educational program supports his political goals in the Second Treatise and is somewhat adaptable to our own democratic age.

A problem within liberal constitutionalism is determining whether the majority actually consents to its government, and, in particular, to those extraordinary acts that take place in the silence of the law. This paper explores this problem in the U.S. context by presenting Thomas Jefferson's understanding of the impeachment power. Jefferson preferred a theory of impeachment that, like his theory of coordinate review, would allow each department to participate in the impeachment process, because he believed that executive participation would improve the law bringing its own character, or will, to it. As an alternative to the more common political understanding of impeachment, which leans toward legislative exclusivity, and the dominant legal understanding, which tends toward judicial finality, Jefferson's theory offers a way for the people to judge whether a particular act of lawlessness is in the public good.

This essay explores Nietzsche's attitude to the Enlightenment, which the author argues underwent a major reversal between his so-called middle works and his later writings. The author examines the nature of this change and considers some of the reasons behind it. In the process, some of Nietzsche's “postmodern” admirers are taken to task for appropriating his criticisms of the Enlightenment without acknowledging his ambivalence toward it. Furthermore, the radical change in Nietzsche's view of the Enlightenment is taken as evidence of the periodization of his thought, which some prominent Nietzsche scholars (e.g. Walter Kaufmann) have disputed.

This article integrates economic and social history, biography, and political theory as it explores how the personal ties of Marx and Engels to Ireland stamped their thought. Marx and Engels struggled to integrate Ireland into their theory of revolution, conceptualizing it as a “special case” of capitalist accumulation, a formulation partly motivated by their human sympathies for the Irish (especially strong in the case of Engels and Marx's daughters). Extended attention in this essay is thus devoted to the special place of Ireland in Marxist theory and praxis, which is pursued on two interconnected research fronts: Ireland's anomalous role in Marx's revolutionary vision and the Irish people's prominent role in the lives of Marx and Engels. While Marx's primary aim was always to capture the citadels of capitalism such as Great Britain, he and Engels concluded in the late 1860s that the thrust could not be administered frontally: they would have to strike at England's soft underbelly – Ireland. Throughout the life of the First International (1864–72), Ireland's place in Marx's strategic vision moved to the center, transforming Ireland into the “lever” of a European-wide revolution. For a half decade in the late 1860s to the early 1870s, Marx and Engels invested the Irish peasantry with this decisive geopolitical role; soon thereafter, their conception of Ireland's theoretical significance altered and dissolved alongside their fading hopes for a European socialist revolution.