Was Leo Strauss wrong about John Locke? Surely that he was has been the consensus among historians of political thought, though their reasons are sometimes at variance. The Cambridge school, influenced by the work of John Dunn, interprets Locke's work in the light of the Calvinism in his family background. Though attacked by spokesmen for the Church of England, Locke quickly gained admirers among dissenting clergy, for his psychology, his politics, and of course his program for religious toleration, and the proponents of the Calvinist interpreta tion explain why: His discourse closely tracks the theological language of his Calvinist contemporaries. Richard Ashcraft, meanwhile, sought to restore Locke's reputation as a revolutionary by investigating his role in English politics under the Restoration, albeit at the price of reducing the Two Treatises to a tract for the moment. James Tully would likewise save him from the charge of being a capitalist apologist, insisting Locke merely offered a defense of Whig landholding, with the responsibilities as well as the privileges embedded in the English law of estate. All these interpretations dismiss or disregard Strauss's account of Locke as an atheist in the mold of Hobbes and Spinoza who succeeded by his mastery of the art of esoteric writing in concealing his unbelief; as the most successful, because most prudent, proponent of the modern doctrine of natural rights, which revolutionized politics around the world; and as the theorist who prepared the way for modern capitalism by his vigorous defense of unlimited acquisition.

James Stoner locates my work on Locke as part of a somewhat broader current we might call “Straussian revisionism.” A group of us who were students of, or influenced by Leo Strauss seek “to return to the early moderns” like Locke “for adequate guidance.” He notes that this “return” has something to do with America, for all of us, in one way or another, look to Locke in the old-fashioned way, as “America's philosopher.” I will not presume to speak here for the others he identifies as part of this current, but I believe he speaks correctly for the most part of my own work. My one reservation concerns his attribution of motive: I came to differ with Strauss on the meaning of Locke not because I sought to find “adequate guidance” in Locke, but because over time parts of Strauss's reading of Locke did not seem adequate to me. A consequence of understanding Locke differently is that he has come to look capable of supplying more “adequate guidance” than Strauss thought he could.

I believe there are three main matters on which Stoner disagrees with my “Straussian revisionism.” First, is Locke rather than Hobbes the founder of liberalism? Second, am I correct to argue that Locke grounds natural right differently than Hobbes? And third, can Locke, as I read him, supply us “guidance”? Does he respond to certain deficiencies Stoner identifies?

It was not the exquisite self-consciousness of a Henry James that I had in mind when I wondered about equality and hierarchy in Locke, but the assertive self-consciousness or—what is for Locke ultimately the same—self-interestedness of an Andrew Carnegie, as exemplified both in the acquisition and the dispersion of his fortune. After all, it was Locke's genius in chapter five of the Second Treatise to make the case for private property on different grounds than had Aristotle because he conceived of property in a different way: as the fruit, not of nature, but of human creativity, less interesting for its use in leisure than for its origin in labor. As Strauss and even Zuckert have suggested, the brilliance of Locke's argument does not eclipse its underlying contradiction, that on the one hand the initial right to acquire seems to depend on there being “enough and as good” left for others, as though man lived amidst natural plenty, while on the other hand the account of the progressive rise in value consequent to enclosure (and the post hoc justification for property rights that it implies) describes natural scarcity. Holding that “a man may deliberately contradict himself in order to indicate his thought rather than to reveal it,” Strauss takes Locke's “revolutionary” teaching about “‘dynamic’ property” to indicate his true intention:

This article argues that Nietzsche uses a rhetorically modern appeal to enact the self-overcoming of modernity and the aim of enlightenment. It demonstrates how Nietzsche aims to move his readers from a prejudice in favor of truthfulness, by appearing to radicalize that aim, to a new measure of nobility. In contrast to some who present Nietzsche's styles as the means to convey a dispersion of meanings, this article argues that, designs his writing to move his age. He adopts the prejudices of his time in Beyond Good and Evil, his mature “critique of modernity” in order to demonstrate the self-overcoming of those prejudices. Beyond merely questioning the value of truth, Nietzsche evaluates by the measure of psychological strength, and describes the character of nobility beyond good and evil and beyond truth and falsity.

Richard Rorty makes the case that Friedrich Nietzsche shared a common pragmatism with William James in order to incorporate certain Nietzschean themes into neo-pragmatism and to give his philosophy stronger pragmatic credentials. In making this connection, he establishes a version of pragmatism that rejects both epistemology and metaphysics, reduces the pragmatic theory of truth to “truth is what works,” places the Darwinian account of man at the center of the human narrative, and makes Nietzschean “self-creation” the chief end of a postmodern, post-religious liberal society. But if one reads James more faithfully (a task that Rorty rejects), it is clear that James does not succumb to the nihilism, perspectivalism, and atheism characteristic of Rorty's Nietzschean pragmatism. A more comprehensive reading of James's philosophy brings together James's pragmatism, his pluralism, and his radical empiricism. And this more complete interpretation of James's pragmatism offers a pluralistic and hopeful approach to politics that does not suffer from Nietzsche's and Rorty's nihilistic, relativistic, and antipolitical tendencies.

The political ideal of neutrality toward conceptions of the good is unsustainable at the extremely abstract level proposed by some liberal theorists. Neutrality is nonetheless a valuable political ideal. One of the many ways that government can go wrong is to take a position on some question that it would, all things considered, be better for it to abstain from deciding. The classic example is the question of which (if any) religion is true. The idea of neutrality holds that government ought to avoid this pathology.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Anti-Federalists wanted representative bodies to mirror the electorate, and that the Federalists envisioned representation as a device for refining and enlarging popular views. This characterization is accurate in a broad sense, but it overlooks an important element in Anti-Federalist thought. I argue that certain key Anti-Federalists, in particular the Federal Farmer and Melancton Smith, synthesized the “mirroring” ideal and the “refining” ideal into a theory of representation that incorporated the best features of each system. This hybrid theory, though overwhelmed in the ratification debates of 1787–88, nevertheless provides a creative alternative model for effective national union.