Civic republicans have traditionally appealed to friendship as a means of preserving popular liberty, but Machiavelli is a notable exception to this rule. In fact, I argue, he views efforts to reconcile friendship and politics as (1) philosophically dubious, because grounded in false conceptions of person and society, and (2) practically harmful, because they perpetuate patterns of asymmetric dependence that are inconsistent with a free way of life. Machiavelli's neglected skepticism about the political potential of friendship deepens his critique of the Ciceronian concordia, reveals a diminished idea of the common good, and distances him from the civic republican tradition to which he is so often said to belong.

The problem of the power seeker is of crucial importance for Hobbes's political philosophy. While education might aid in changing the behavior of some people, Hobbes is clear that there are limits to the effectiveness of education and that incurable, unsocial power seekers will persist. In my analysis, I ask whether and, if so, how Hobbes can also get these incurable power seekers on board. The result of my findings that Hobbes provides a huge variety of treatments for power seekers, including incentives to betray and exploit their fellow citizens by employing a public gesture of civility, has implications for Hobbes research: it shows the complexity and costs of Hobbes's “solution” to the problem of war and corrects a widespread developmental hypothesis about the concept of honor in Hobbes's works. Thereby, it can also enrich a recent diagnosis about the decline of honor in modern societies.

This paper offers a new account of Leo Strauss's critique of historicism in Natural Right and History. According to the general view of this critique, Strauss tries to show that historicism wrongly denies the possibility of knowledge of universal and unchangeable principles of right. I argue that this view only reflects Strauss's exoteric critique of historicism, and that, apart from it, he gives an esoteric critique. According to this esoteric critique, historicism ignores the necessity of prudence, in the sense of making “concrete decisions” which suspend universal and unchangeable principles of right. In this light, I also show that Strauss's critique of historicism depends on Carl Schmitt's concept of the “decision,” but that Strauss simultaneously critiques Schmitt in Natural Right and History.

Scholars studying classic political texts face an important decision: Should these texts be read as artifacts of history or as sources for still-valid insights about politics today? Competing historical and “presentist” approaches to political thought do not have a methodological dispute—that is, a disagreement about the most effective scholarly means to an agreed-upon end. They instead have an ethical dispute about the respective value of competing activities that aim at different purposes. This article examines six ethical arguments, drawn primarily from the work of Quentin Skinner, in favor of the historical approach. It concludes that while both intellectual history and presentist theory are ethically justifiable, the best justification of the former enterprise is that it can help us achieve the purposes of the latter.

Jeremy Waldron claims that Isaiah Berlin wrongly neglects, and is hostile to, constitutional and democratic institutions. I argue that although Berlin offers no extended discussion of constitutionalism or democracy, he is not hostile to them. Moreover, the logic of Berlin's value pluralism is strongly supportive of these ideas—for example, it fits well with constitutionalist notions such as the separation of powers and checks and balances. On the other hand, Waldron's rejection of judicial review on the ground of democracy is questionable in these same pluralist terms. Here I argue that Berlinian pluralism supports democracy as long as this is inclusive in its outcomes. But contemporary democracy cannot be relied upon to be sufficiently inclusive, in part because of the effects of the war on terror and the rise of populism. Under these conditions it is unwise for pluralists to dispense with judicial review.