The Medea is Euripides' most famous play and perhaps his most enigmatic. The unwieldy character of the play's central figure and the movement of the play as a whole defy the traditional categories of tragedy. Attentiveness to the usually neglected political dimension of Medea sheds new light on some of its persistent enigmas. It also suggests that Euripides was less than sanguine about the kinds of excesses the impending war with Sparta was likely to call forth from citizen soldiers. Most importantly, it brings to light Euripides' sober assessment of an enduring political problem: the irreducibly ambiguous character of spiritedness, the warrior virtue par excellence.

Three novels by Tess Slesinger, Mary McCarthy and Marge Piercy respectively can inform us about American radical movements and perhaps radicalism in general. Each work is a radical self-critique written by political participants who assess their generation's radical experiment and its failure. I argue that there are two sets of arguments common to each critique, one related to the failure of radical imagination and one feminist, and that there is a “submerged” third critique that can be drawn from each narrative. It is from the later submerged critique that we can learn the most about the successive failures of American radicalism.

Hobbes's linguistic conventionalism is one of the most obvious themes of his work. But it has not been considered as closely as it should be, given its prominence. I argue that Hobbes reworked quite traditional materials in such a way as to produce a novel doctrine, but that this novelty did not involve him in the implausible claim that issues of scientific truth and proof could be settled simply on the basis of linguistic agreement. Rather, he grounded his conventionalism in the prelinguistic, naturally given experience he called “mental discourse,” and then linked it to the effort to outflank contemporary skepticism. For these reasons, Hobbes's specific form of conventionalism can then be seen to be central both to the limits of his claims and to what he thought could be established with a certainty robust enough to withstand skeptical challenge.

In The Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz has challenged the anti-perfectionism of orthodox liberal political theory and proposed an alternative form of liberalism based on perfectionist moral premises. Raz maintain that his theory of political morality qualifies as a “liberal” theory in view of the pride of place it gives “autonomy” considered as an intrinsic human good. Nevertheless, autonomy, according to Raz, is valuable only when exercised in the pursuit of morally upright ends. The principal point of contact between Raz's theory and leading antiperfectionist versions of liberalism is his endorsement of a qualified version of J. S. Mill's “harm principle.” Raz argues that, though the law can and should discourage “victimless immortalities” by noncoercive means, it should not criminalize victimless wrongdoing. The article argues that Raz's claims are strongest where his substantive position is weakest. Perfectionist conservatives and antiperfectionist liberals are correct to maintain that Razian perfectionism cannot supply a ground for rejecting coercive legislation to uphold public morality as a matter of principle.

This article examines a recent justificatory argument in defense of liberal political principles. Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, and Will Kymlicka, in his book Liberalism, Community and Culture, argue that liberalism is not based on skepticism or on an implausible individualist metaphysics, as its communitarian critics have contended. They argue that liberalism can be justified as an essential element in human flourishing. This article examines this justificatory argument for liberalism. It argues that this defense of liberalism fails to support the primacy that liberals accord to autonomy over all other values, but that this failure is instructive.