Revolution ushered in the modern world, but modernity has killed it. Scholars who examine the causes or contributing conditions of revolutions focus either on structure, agency, or ideas, yet an analysis of each perspective reveals that the alleged causes or conditions have declined or been eliminated. In spite of capitalism's global crisis in the late 1990s, the spread of liberalism and other factors should make revolutions unlikely to occur.

This article discusses possible interpretations of the concept of national interest, with a view to providing a conception more analytically useful than those that have dominated the literature. It argues against the two most prevalent approaches. The first, most obviously represented by political realism, relies on a single overarching assumption that both encompasses the national interest and provides a standard for assessing how successfully it is pursued. The second, identifies a finite set of national objectives which, by possessing a large measure of the formal attributes by which the national interest is defined, are considered its proper subsets. While both approaches have their virtues, each is flawed as a method for establishing correspondence between policy and interest. The approach proposed here relies on a different principle altogether—the nature of the political procedure via which judgments about the link between foreign policy and national interest are made. The article argues that our ability to judge whether a policy does serve the national interest is intimately connected to how democratic the decision behind the policy is.

Plato's Statesman and Laws are usually linked together as “Plato's later political theory.” Yet these dialogues offer contradictory descriptions of the relation between law and reason and thus between political science and philosophy. In particular, the Eleatic Stranger of the Statesman presents an account of the “second-best” regime that differs from that of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws. The Eleatic Stranger's account of the second-best is wrong; his error follows from his view that politics is insignificant for genuinely human purposes. By comparing human statesmanship to animal herding and explicating its nature through the paradigm of weaving, the Eleatic Stranger contends that the true philosopher is too concerned with individual human natures to care for human collectivities. From his perspective, Socratic or Athenian political philosophy is but sophistry.

Only recently have students of political theory begun to pay attention to Plato's Menexenus, and it deserves this closer study. In this article, it is argued that the dialogue is best read as Plato's at least quasi—serious critique of Pericle' famous Funeral Oration, and that a comparison of these two works leads to a paradoxical discovery. For by presenting Socrates in the Menexenus as a defender of a restrained and traditional politics against the bold imperialism of Pericles, Plato presents a figure who is hard to square with the dialectical critic of the city found in dialogues like the Apology. Whether there is nonetheless some thread tying Socrates' venture at political rhetoric to his signature form of philosophy is the deepest question posed by the Menexenus and one which offers new insight on Plato's complex view of the relation between politics and philosophy.

Eric Voegelin thought his “paradox of consciousness” was “the key to all his other works,” but no one has yet explored it as such a key. “participation” is the central term in Voegelin's philosophy, and the “paradox of consciousness” reveals the paradox of participation: a participant-partner is simultaneously a part and the whole (albeit in a perspective) of a reality of consciousness, like a marriage, a polity, or the cosmos.