Critics of liberalism and even some liberal theorists themselves have criticized a liberal emphasis on autonomy, because they associate autonomy with self sufficiency. That association reinforces the worst aspects of atomistic individualism: social isolation, insulation from the views of others, and a rejection of society's values and interests. But the association of autonomy with self-sufficiency is uncalled for; those who see that association are mistaken, for self-sufficiency represents not a fulfillment of autonomy but the abandonment of it. Autonomy, it is argued, has a social nature: It not only develops through sociality, but it also requires sociality for its exercise. In short, to be autonomous one must know one is autonomous; to know one is autonomous requires giving an account to others of the reasons for a decision or action. The social nature of autonomy may incline theorists to see persons as communitarian or socially situated selves. But communitarians such as Charles Taylor find the self defined in part by communal boundaries and thus see them as context-dependent. Autonomy is bounded by language, not community. It is both context-free and context-related, but not context-dependent. Liberal theorists who champion autonomy should therefore abandon any notions of selves as social atoms or isolates and build liberalism on the implications of autonomy's social nature. Part of those implications is that social institutions that foster and exercise autonomy must involve dialogue or communicative exchange. The most important and effective institutions of that kind are those of direct democracy.

Hegel's concept of patriotism helps specify an account of the just association of collective identity and state power. This concept has three main features. First, as a distinctly modern virtue, patriotism is limited by Hegel's account of modernity and its link to “subjective freedom.” Second, patriotism forges an important connection between critical reflection and habitual practice, illuminated in a comparison of Hegel's thoughts on ethical education with Aristotelian practical philosophy. Third, these first two dimensions are brought together with a decision grounded in the acceptance of the irreducibly collective dimension of freedom— the will to war for one–s country. Hegel's account of war is also a “test case” for his internally limited patriotism, as a comparison with Kant's argument for “perpetual peace” reveals. In conclusion, this account connects traditional liberal institutions with a republican concern for self-rule in a framework that offers legitimate bounds to a “right to national self-determination”.

“The national interest” is frequently criticized in the contemporary study of international relations as an ambiguous term that lends itself to the support of unethical state policies by justifying single-minded national selfishness. This article argues that much of the criticism of the national interest on normative grounds in fact derives from confusion over the meaning of the concept. It separates two meanings — national interest as the common good of the national society, set off from the international environment, and national interests as the concrete objects of value over which states bargain, within that international setting. It surveys six views of the link among the national interest, the international society that legitimates various state interests, and the demands of ethical action, and concludes that statesmanship which relies on both definitions of national interest can provide the best guide to ethical state conduct within the “anarchical society” of international politics.

This paper aims to illuminate the ongoing significance of Locke's political philosophy. It argues that the legitimacy of political authority lies, according to Locke, in the extent to which it collaborates with individuals so as to allow them to be themselves more effectively, and in its answerability to the consent such individuals should thereby give it. The first section discusses how the free will inevitably asserts its authority; the second shows the inevitability of the will's incorporation of authority as a kind of prosthesis, which in turn transforms the operation of the will; and the third treats the issue of consent, arguing that Locke is less interested in explicit acts of consent than in the norm of consent, in answerability to which structures of authority should be shaped so as to honor the beings whose capacity to consent is definitive for them.

The relevance of Arendt's reflections on evil is analyzed in three respects. She warns that the appeal to absolutes (good or evil) destroys politics; her claim that radical evil involves making human beings as human beings superfluous is relevant to contemporary concerns with the vast refugee and stateless populations; and her idea of the banality of evil focuses our attention on the evil deeds that persons commit even when they do not have evil motives or intentions.

Constructivist political theory, championed most prominently by John Rawls, builds up a conception of justice from the minimal requirements of political life. It has two powerful attractions. It promises a kind of civic unity in the face of irresolvable differences about the good life. It also offers a foundation for human rights that is secure in the face of those same differences. The very parsimony that is its strength, however, deprives it of the resources to condemn some atrocities. Because it focuses on the political aspect of persons, it has difficulty cognizing violence done to those aspects of the person that are not political, preeminently the body. Constructivism thus can be only a part of an acceptable theory of justice.

Locke's doctrine of toleration is best understood in the context of his larger argument about the political significance of Christ. Christ, Locke argues, separated the spiritual and political realm. His argument for separating the two realms, his basis for insisting that magistrates be tolerant of religious heterodoxy, is essentially theological. This claim is further developed by exploring Locke's thoughts of the unconcealment of foundation of moral duty which Christ was purported to have brought about. The bearing this unconcealment has on Locke's thoughts of the necessity of toleration is also explored. Finally, some comparisons between Locke and Hobbes's understanding of the significance of Christ are made, with a view to providing a new theoretical approach to their thought.

Is statesmanship still compatible with democracy? Democratic theorists once viewed democracy as a partnership between citizens and statesmen, to which each brought complementary virtues. Statesmanship has come to be condemned by many contemporary democratic theorists, however, as inimical to democracy. By turning statesmen into “facilitators,” they seek to displace statesmanship with an expanded concept of citizenship. In response, and stung by charges of elitism, embattled liberal defenders of statesmanship have begun to recast it in light of this line of attack. Most notably, the liberal Bruce Ackerman has sought to advance a new concept of nonelitist, “neutral” liberal statesmanship that is compatible with democracy. This study examines both the criticisms that led to this rethinking of statesmanship—especially in the thought of Benjamin R. Barber, liberal statesmanship's leading critic—and Ackerman's success in meeting them. Our study tries to demonstrate that Ackerman actually reconstructs liberal statesmanship on the basis of Barber's arguments and thereby further undermines the statesmanship he purports to defend. I conclude with an effort to rehabilitatean older understanding of liberal statesmanship.

John Dewey was both a devoted student of politics and an eminent philosopher. He constructed his theory of political democracy according to his own philosophical orientation. At the same time, he believed that political science should be pursued independently of political philosophy on the assumption that the “scientific method” alone is meaningful in resolving political questions. It is through his philosophy of “experience,” instrumentalism, that Dewey resolved the potential antithesis between philosophy and experimental science as he understood it. It is the scientific method alone, Dewey insists, that can do justice to the integrity of “experience.” Moreover, through its application to political democracy, the scientific method is the link connecting philosophical instrumentalism and democracy. Accordingly, this essay will attempt to show: 1) the threefold relationship among philosophy, science, and democracy provides the key to an understanding of Dewey's political thought; 2) the philosophical antecedents of instrumentalism, being inseparable from Dewey's “scientific method,” provide normative content for his democratic theory; and 3) the purpose of Dewey's application of the scientific method to political democracy is to reshape traditional values in accordance with the philosophical — and not necessarily scientific — antecedents of instrumentalism.

The appraisal of national conventions as mechanisms for nominating presidents involves many problems of political theory. Who should be entrusted with the task of nomination? Can we reconcile the desirability of popular participation with the need for maintaining a strong party leadership? To what extent does the nominating convention contribute to the maintenance of the political system in which it is imbedded? Does the apparent lack of decorum in this high political body adversely affect the kinds of decisions it makes? What are the implications of increasing the visibility of convention nominations? Any attempt to deal with these and similar questions necessarily involves an admixture of normative and descriptive theory. Postulation of what ought to be can hardly be separated from consideration of the actual or likely consequences of alternative courses of action. The merits of existing party platforms, for example, cannot be fruitfully discussed apart from knowledge of the relevance of issues to voters. In this context, I propose to evaluate national conventions and the various proposals for altering or abolishing them in the light of the degree to which they meet widely shared goals for the American political system.

This article examines a certain critique of what I will take the liberty of calling “Straussianism,” a critique which raises questions I believe are worth discussing, especially by all those interested in the work of Leo Strauss. This particular critique appeared in a review of a book on Platonic political philosophy, a review by a young scholar who had published only a couple of articles on classical political philosophy himself.

This reviewer aptly characterizes the author as one who, “thoroughly dissatisfied with modern philosophy in all its forms, and unwilling to take refuge in Thomism … turns back to classical philosophy, to the teaching of Plato and Aristotle, as the true teaching” (p. 326). According to this perceptive critic, the author considered the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns “definitely settled in favor of the classics. After having disposed of this fundamental question, which as such is a theoretical question, he can pursue a practical or political intention on the foundation of the classical teaching.”

Eleven years after his death, economists (strangely enough, the only ones who seem to care) still ponder the paradoxes of Joseph A. Schumpeter. While the contributions of the late Lord Keynes, not without intriguing paradoxes of their own, are being rapidly assimilated into the “common sense” of statesmen, Schumpeter, the only other truly great economist the twentieth century has produced, exerted no appreciable influence over public policy. Apart from a few misunderstood cliches, such as “creative destruction,” “obsolescence of entrepreneurial function,” and so on, his ideas have generated no “school” among young intellectuals. Indeed, it is doubtful that they ever will, even though Schumpeter is a profound and honest thinker in the tradition of Marx, Weber, and Tawney grappling with one of the crucial problems of our age: the innovating and growth capacities of various social systems under an advanced industrial technology.

Any inquiry into the values of a thinker, and particularly a thinker like Marx, such a large proportion of whose thought was political, must include a discussion of the kind of society that he considers desirable. With an individualist thinker this might only involve a discussion of his idea of what was basic to individual human nature, as in Hobbes or Locke, but for Marx human nature was inconceivable outside society and, when considering possible future developments, it was always man-in-society that Marx had in mind.

Through an extended critical engagement with John P. McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy, this paper aims to shed light on Machiavelli's account of relations among the many and the few in the Discourses on Livy. While we agree with McCormick that Machiavelli should not be too quickly subsumed within the republican tradition, as interpreted by the “Cambridge School,” we reject the idea that Machiavelli's central thrust is prodemocratic. By focusing on the structure and logic of Machiavelli's arguments, we show that Machiavelli was critical of the capacities of ordinary citizens to govern themselves. As a result, Machiavelli emphasized and endorsed continuous elite intervention in the political life of the mixed regime, even as he paid due attention to the people's participation in a political regime with appropriate laws and institutions. Machiavelli's political theory, as embodied in the Discourses on Livy, challenges the transparency and equality that contemporary egalitarians and democrats embrace.

This article moves on two fronts. It continues the challenge to the belief that politics is not central to the concerns of Friedrich Nietzsche but questions attempts to transvalue Nietzsche into a democrat. With their illiberal and inegalitarian political views, Nietzsche's writings best serve democratic political theory in an antidotal way. The article discusses Nietzsche's aesthetic approach to political action and architectonic conception of politics. It also explores some of the qualities he believes future rulers would need and the mechanisms they could use to exercise and legitimate their power. Just as Nietzsche thinks of political action in aesthetic terms, so his own art has a political purpose for he envisages the formation of a social, cultural and political élite and hopes, through his writings, to galvanize this élite.

It is frequently suggested, today, that toleration and relativism are the same thing. This essay focuses on how John Locke dealt with this issue, that is, how he defended his principle of toleration against the charges of Jonas Proast that it would devolve into unbelief and moral relativism. In replying to Proast, Locke attempts to demonstrate that his principle of toleration will not become a sanction for unbelief and that while it extends to competing conceptions of salvation it does not extend to competing conceptions of the good. That is to say, Locke builds a fire wall between the two areas, the aim of which is to confine toleration to the realm of mere theology—it is this barrier, its basis and its extent and its durability, which I explore.

Liberalism has always had a powerful concern with the education of its citizens. But who should exercise final authority over the education—parents or the state? The answer rests, in large part, on our understanding of the character of the self-rule or autonomy to be taught. For as “autonomy” comes to mean unpredetermined “choice,” it becomes ever more difficult to justify parental control of education. In fact, parental control, supported by the earliest liberals, is now thought to produce “ethical servility.” Liberal theorists—such as John Dewey, Amy Gutmann, and Eamonn Callan—break with thinkers like Locke and Mill in allowing the state to override parental preferences in the name of greater equality, preparation for autonomy, and democratic deliberation. We argue that taking educational authority away from parents and giving it to the state is an illiberal policy, meaning one that fails to abide by Locke's central distinction of political and parental power. This failure will lead both to greater ethical servility and to fewer reasonable alternatives from which autonomous individuals can choose.

Long an icon of the American cultural tradition, Henry Thoreau has recently been welcomed into political theory as a theorist whose political writings go beyond the essays on resistance to government, and contain ideas deeply important for understanding the American contribution to democratic experience. I extend this new appreciation by showing how Thoreau presents a specific model of self-government, individual self-government, that occurs under the frequently irrelevant roof provided by liberal democratic state institutions. Thoreau's model of self-government imagines women and men who are largely free of, or indifferent to, the state; but fully involved in an everyday experience that is deeply political because it allocates values for the individual. Walden is, in this sense, less an escape from government than it is an escape to it. Thoreau spans the spectrum of political philosophy, from Socrates′ concern with justice in the individual, to Nietzsche's model of the self as a governable community, but Thoreau's work is unique, and distinctively American, in its model of a hard-headed individual self-government based upon an unsentimentalized natural world.

On the face of it, there would seem to be little evidence suggesting that the political science of Thomas Jefferson owed much, if anything, to the speculation of Niccolò Machiavelli. The Virginian appears to have mentioned the Florentine by name but once, and he did so in a manner conveying his disdain for the author of The Prince. And yet, as I try to show in this article, Jefferson's commitment to limited government, his advocacy of a politics of distrust, his eager embrace of a species of populism, his ultimate understanding of the executive power, and the intention guiding the comprehensive legislative program that he devised for Virginia make sense only when understood in terms of the new science of republican politics articulated by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy.

While Plato's political dialogues give much attention to the relation of the legal and the divine, this subject receives scant notice in Aristotle's Politics. But this is not a sign that Aristotle neglects or dismisses the subject; it is in fact perfectly consistent with what the author understands to be Aristotle's view of the proper political relation of laws and gods. This view emerges indirectly, and only after reflection on the substance and manner of Aristotle's “umpiring” of a staged debate over the rule of the “best laws” versus that of the “best man” (Politics III). From the standpoint of the highest, Aristotle finds law to be both regime-derivative and somewhat prudence-impeding. At the same time, the “apolitical” character of the best man's rule necessitates the rule of law, and with it —for largely utilitarian reasons — Aristotle's public acquiescence in the apotheosis of the legal. But this teaching, and its basis, emerge fully only when the Politics' relative “silence” is interpreted in light of the open statements of a text much less palatable and thus much less accessible to statesmen and citizens (and even to political scientists): the Metaphysics. The Politics' obliqueness, argues the author, owes to the fact that Aristotle's final understanding of the relation of laws and gods cannot be fully disclosed publicly if it is to achieve its end of improving public life.