In book VII of the Politics, Aristotle requires that the best regime be eusunoptos, “easily taken in at a glance.” Throughout the history of political thought, the attendant ideal of the polis as a compact and surveyable society was particularly influential. However, closer scrutiny of the way in which Aristotle uses eusunoptos suggests that it designates a problem rather than a solution, to wit, the problems of defining political unity and of attuning the individual and the common good. Exploring the different contexts in which eusunoptos occurs in Aristotle's works, this paper argues that it has political, rhetorical, and poetical meanings that cannot be entirely distinguished from each other. As such, the notion is shown to be germane to the general design of book VII, which constructs the best regime in order to bring to light the limits of politics.

Modern politics is at times a balancing act between universal claims about the human (equal rights, dignity, and respect) and political actions which may seem to violate these claims (torture, just wars, repudiation of certain cultural practices, tacit discrimination). An exploration of some of the philosophical roots of the modern understanding of the person, when it was the subject of debate, provides a perspective at the origin of Modernity from which to evaluate the tenuous relationship between moral universalism and alterity at the heart of this tension. The debates at Valladolid in 1550–51 between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, arguing their conceptions of the human, can shed light on how and why arguments for inequality creep back into the modern discourse on alterity. The lessons from Valladolid, therefore, might help to limit or clarify recourse to such arguments.

Upon close examination of Rousseau's accounts of human development, we find that Rousseau presents us with paradoxical chronologies in which the experience of supposed immediacy from which humans are said to originate always seems to be informed by, and even require, previous mediation. More specifically, reflection, comparison, and imagination are thought to exist only after the onset of perfectibility, but these mediating capacities are always already present in pity and self-love, as well as for the “independent” savage, calling into question the possibility that any human sentiment or condition could be immediately accessible and fundamentally imbuing human life with ambiguity, fluidity, and disorder. Consequently, morality and freedom for Rousseau require the negotiation, stabilization, or management of the unstable “things between” human beings and their experiences, the object world, and others, even as such management is best hidden from view and experienced as given and true.

Rousseau refers to the Jews in major and minor works, setting them alongside the Greeks and Romans as models for republican politics. Yet Rousseau's use of the Jewish example has been almost entirely neglected. I argue that this example, which for Rousseau stands between paganism and Christianity, plays a unique role in Rousseau's political thought. In particular, Judaism, as Rousseau presents it, surpasses Christianity in its this-worldly emphasis on compassion and justice, an emphasis that even the classical republics that are Rousseau's usual models for social and political well-being cannot match. It does so, moreover, without fostering the dogmatism that, along with Christian otherworldiness, has, in Rousseau's estimation, helped to spoil European politics.

Thomas Paine is customarily regarded as a pamphleteer, rhetorician, and polemicist rather than a significant political theorist. This article takes the philosophical content of Paine's thought seriously and argues that his account of property rights constitutes a distinct contribution to theoretical debates on the subject. Drawing on Paine's Agrarian Justice and other writings, this article shows that his theory of property defends a libertarian concern with private ownership that contains within its logic an egalitarian commitment to the redistribution of resources. Paine's justification of property is distinct from that of various other important figures in the history of ideas (including Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke) and represents his simultaneous commitment to foundational liberal values of individual freedom and moral equality.

In the decades after World War Two, most scholars working on genocide focused on particular cases, providing historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence but rarely branching out beyond a specific case. The study of the Holocaust is typical of this; the vast majority of works on the Nazi genocide had little comparative dimension and instead examined the ways in which anti-Semitism and certain policies condemned disfavored minorities to persecution and extermination. These earlier works are particularly important because they gave us rich understandings of the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination. Nevertheless, multi-case studies were the exception, and generally received little attention in the social sciences.