This article challenges the prevailing interpretations of Hobbes's thought as providing only minimal protection for the natural right of individuals in political society. Natural right requires the protection of not just the subjects' lives, but their ability to live commodiously, and as a result the protection that natural right receives in political society places substantive constraints on the actions of the sovereign. When those entrusted with sovereign power overstep this constraint, they cease to be sovereign and the former subjects are returned to the state of nature to seek protection as each judges fit. I develop the substance of commodious living more thoroughly than similar analyses and demonstrate that this understanding is not limited to Leviathan but can be found in Hobbes's earlier political work as well.

In Nietzsche's early and late writings, he appears as an antimodern, antiliberal political revolutionary, championing the world-transformative characters of (first) Richard Wagner and (later) Zarathustra. By contrast, in the writings of his “middle period,” Nietzsche struck up a rapprochement with the modern world, and developed the ideal of a “free spirit.” Among those writings, The Wanderer and His Shadow sheds the most revealing light on the free spirit ideal. It shows that, even as Nietzsche sought to avoid some of the hazards associated with his more revolutionary writings, he continued to advocate a sharply critical engagement with political and cultural life. And it reveals what Nietzsche understood to be most challenging or problematic about the free spirit ideal—and, thereby, what later moved him away from it.

This paper defends the traditional distinctive notion of the common good against the claim that it is normatively redundant on the aggregative conception. The first two sections of the paper outline the different candidate conceptions of the common good and the normative role of the common good within natural law theories. The paper then considers some difficulties faced by the instrumental and aggregative conceptions, before developing an Aristotelian account of the distinctive conception of the common good and demonstrating its normative significance for a natural law account of political and legal authority.

While numerous methodological and interpretive challenges confront the study of cross-cultural political theory, this essay examines a particular premodern Indian tradition as an example of such difficulties and one way in which they can be overcome. Exploring the problematic ways in which people have interpreted and made use of India's ancient past, it critically examines arguments for the existence of secularism, free elections, and democratic assemblies in the Vedas. Defending what I call a “critical revivalist” position, it is argued that predominant approaches to premodern traditions in contemporary Indian political theory place significant constraints on cross-cultural intelligibility and theory building within the Indian context. To elaborate this point, I shift from a “political” to rājan-oriented categorical register in an effort to reposition current understandings of self-rule (swaraj) in India within a broader rajanical tradition. Finally, this essay explains how contemporary Indian political theory can draw insights from this native tradition without necessarily reverting to familiar Western idioms.

In the introductory pages of Political Philosophy, Beiner lays out his template for political philosophy. Political philosophers participate in an ongoing dialogue about “rival conceptions of the good” (xvi). “If we do not at least aspire to a theory that presents itself as more rationally compelling than all alternative views, it is hard to see how we can do theory at all” (xxvii). Because Beiner holds this view that a political philosopher aims for a comprehensive picture, he spends a lot of time in these first pages explaining why Isaiah Berlin cannot count as a political philosopher (because Berlin refuses to judge among competing conceptions of the good). A second prologue Beiner devotes to considerations on Freud and Weber. He calls them “epic” theorists (xxix), but they are more than epic: they are tragic. It is in these pages—of prologue no. 2—that we get the keenest insight into what Beiner really thinks political philosophy is. Freud is an Enlightenment rationalist but at the same time a “deep and uncompromising pessimist.” Weber appeals to Beiner because he held that one needs as a scholar “the courage to make up [one's] mind about [one's] ultimate standpoint” (xlix), even while acknowledging that we live in a “brutally disenchanted world” (l). Resolution in the face of tragedy is the core of political philosophy for Beiner.

Beiner's excellent book is the fruit of more than a dozen years teaching his Horizons course that introduced graduate students to a critical examination of a wide range of twentieth-century political philosophers, some familiar to most students, such as Rawls and Arendt, and some unfamiliar, such as Weil and Löwith. In the 1980s and 1990s, before he taught the course, some of my most enjoyable teaching experiences were team teaching with Beiner courses on Foucault and Heidegger, which provided background for his effort to create a twentieth-century canon in his Horizons course. Beiner has been a steadfast defender of canonicity in a university bent on diluting the core curriculum.

I read Beiner's book as the intellectual biography of someone who is both a witness and actor in the contemporary renewal of political philosophy. This is why, in the reflections that follow, I focus not on his perspicacious analyses of the various authors treated in the book, but rather on the manner in which he understands the nature of this renewal and the future of the discipline itself. My reflections are based in a fundamental agreement with the definition of philosophy defended in this work. Political philosophy is a discipline that reflects on the ends of human life in order to rank and to judge them. This is why, according to Beiner, political philosophy has the ambition to present totalizing views of human nature (14).

One of the hazards in writing a book that surveys a large number of thinkers is that readers are likely to praise the book in general but take issue with the chapter that treads into their bailiwick. I am no exception as I will focus on Beiner's chapter on Habermas. I conclude, however, with some general observations about Beiner's idea and ideal of political philosophy. I offer this response in the same spirit in which Beiner wrote the book. He tells his reader that to hold back from the very toughest challenge is a form of condescension (xi). So I will not hold back.

Beiner's discussion of Foucault is grounded in the effort to “deconstruct” Foucault's mask “as a mere historian” (152). Beiner unpacks Foucault's Panopticon of post-Enlightenment society which, in a dynamic of power/knowledge, crafts the soul in a “regime of surveillance and discipline” that “maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (155, 158). Beiner forcefully contends that behind Foucault's language in Discipline and Punish there must be some account of the human being that would prefer to be outside of this seemingly dystopic society—one that is entitled “not to be subject to such a regime of normalization and control” (153). There is something disingenuous, Beiner claims, about Foucault's fidelity to the idea that “his intellectual enterprise [as a historian] requires him to disavow the normative power of his own theorizing” (164). I propose an interpretation that will perhaps rescue Foucault from Beiner's accusation of disingenuousness, and simultaneously establish a kinship between Beiner's lament for political philosophy and Foucault's own. The proposal is that Foucault is a madman.

Ronald Beiner wants to have it both ways. We know this because, near the end of his book, he tells us that he is a “dualist,” someone for whom “philosophy and citizenship are defined by radically distinct purposes: the job of philosophy is to strive unconditionally for truth, and the job of citizenship is to strive for good and prudent judgment about the common purposes of civic life, and each should focus strictly on fulfilling its own appointed end without worrying too much about the other.” So there needs to be “a steady appreciation of the fundamental chasm between what we (as citizens) need in the world of practice and what we (as human beings) need from the world of theory” (224). This, however, would be abhorrent to most of the political philosophers Beiner covers. Because they are not dualists but monists; to them, theory and practice should be one.

Theory at its best should be a kind of friendship. Thinking is something one does on one's own; but having thought one's way to a set of theoretical positions, one exposes those intellectual commitments to the test of seeing how they stand up to friendly but challenging scrutiny. I'm grateful for the critical commentaries on my book featured in this symposium because they seem to me to have generated interesting and thoughtful responses to what I have written; but I'm no less grateful because they also nicely exemplify this spirit of dialogical friendship. In that way, they help to vindicate the enterprise of theory as I have just characterized it. These theorists are also my friends, and the friendship is constitutively grounded in a shared commitment to theory as a vocation.