Jean-Jacques Rousseau is well known for his love of the ancients. His use of examples from Sparta and republican Rome emphasized what he found lacking in modern times. This article attempts to establish how Rousseau's views on the ancients are related to his religious-political thought, particularly as it relates to his description of citizen religion in the last chapter of the Social Contract. While Rousseau admired many aspects of citizen religion, he rejects it for two reasons: reasons of humanity in the Geneva Manuscript and reasons of self-interest in the Social Contract. This article attempts to understand how the two can be reconciled through the view of citizen religion's contribution to patriotism and fanaticism.

This paper takes up a deep objection to liberalism associated most clearly with Edmund Burke, that liberalism's tendency to rapid change from generation to generation frustrates a fundamental human desire to participate in what is unchanging. To address this criticism, I examine Kant's political theory from the 1780s and 1790s, focusing on the themes of perpetual peace, revolution, and punishment. I argue that for Kant, the liberal community is best understood as an enduring partnership for the liberation of humanity, rather than as a partnership to protect material interests or rights. Understanding Kant's liberalism in this way confronts Burke's challenge and also helps solve some difficult puzzles in Kant scholarship.

This paper offers a new account of Nietzsche's critique of morality in the first treatise of his On the Genealogy of Morality. According to the general view, Nietzsche places political revenge at the center of slave morality: the priest invents slave morality in order to rule the noble. I argue that this view is incomplete, for Nietzsche's deeper critique reveals that the priest's revenge is not purely political but also radically ontological. Ultimately, the priest aims at supplanting not just the noble but also the rule of nature. This reading reveals the priest's attempt to transform the natural order of rank through imagining the human being as subject to the omnipotent God of monotheism, i.e., the “just God.” This interpretation not only broadens our understanding of Nietzsche's critique of morality but also clarifies its purpose, namely, to show us how the demand for morality can blind us to the world's truths.

A growing number of political activists and scholars defend the idea of state-based or political-institutional civil disobedience: they locate civil disobedience's agency in state rather than civil society–based actors. Diverging from older ideas of civil disobedience as directed against government, the concept of institutional disobedience raises tough questions its exponents have not yet fully answered. Civil disobedience has usually referred to politically motivated lawbreaking that is morally conscientious, nonviolent, and demonstrates basic respect for law. Because of the modern state's normatively ambivalent traits (e.g., its monopoly on legitimate coercion), political-institutional disobedience is incompatible with minimally acceptable interpretations of civil disobedience's core components. Political-institutional civil disobedience's advocates mischaracterize what they in fact are proposing, namely, disobedience to the law by individual state officials. Such offiical disobedience poses challenges distinct from and probably greater than civil society–based disobedience.

It would not be hard to write an essay that treats The Cat in the Hat as a fable for the United States in the age of President Donald Trump. An unpredictable and charismatic figure in a trademark red and white hat (the Cat) blasts onto the stage, upending the unwritten rules of decorum with his wild antics to the simultaneous delight and befuddlement of his constituency (“Sally and I”) all while hectoring nay-sayers (the fish) fret and declare that this is quite irregular and should not be tolerated until things get out of hand and order is reestablished, but not without a sneaking sense that allowing this to have happened at all is a frightening transgression (“Now, what should we do? What would you do if your mother asked you?”). Thankfully, one of America's most influential experimental writers already did it for us, in 1968, when Robert Coover published The Cat in the Hat for President: A Political Fable.

Trying to judge capitalism and the social forms it has brought into being is a bit like asking adolescents to assess puberty as they are going through it. We instinctively recognize that we are living through a particular phase in our development; we notice an expansion of our powers as well as recurrent problems attending their exercise; we find our concerns, attention, and aspirations reoriented in various ways; and our attitudes to our situation swing wildly between optimism, nostalgia, rebellion, exhilaration, and dejection. Similarly, we are uncertain about which aspects of market-saturated social arrangements will turn out to be temporary aberrations rather than permanent fixtures, and wonder constantly whether we must simply learn to cope with their effects, or should instead actively strive to master them. Above all, like the anxieties of adolescence, our assessments are haunted by vanity: Should we be proud or ashamed of what we are becoming and making of ourselves? Since, in one way or another, they address the adequacy of capitalist social forms, the three books under discussion all give voice, and in some cases respond, to these anxieties. They nonetheless belong to very different genres.