“Social justice” is a powerful idea today, but its origins and meaning are unclear. One of the first to use the term was Antonio Rosmini, author of The Constitution under Social Justice (1848) and other works of moral philosophy. I argue that Rosmini arrived at his idea of social justice by developing Thomistic natural law theory into a novel view of the common good that balances two principles: (1) the equal rights and dignity of persons as ends-in-themselves, a version of “personalism” influenced by Kant and Christianity; and (2) unequal rewards for those who contribute most to society, a version of Aristotelian “proportionalism” based on the social nature of man. I conclude by comparing Rosmini's idea of social justice to John Rawls's “theory of justice” and Catholic social teaching.

The agonistic critique of liberalism argues that liberal theory unwisely eliminates conflict from the design of liberal-democratic institutions and understandings of liberal citizenship. John Stuart Mill anticipates and resolves the agonistic critique by incorporating several theories of antagonism into his political theory. At the institutional level, Mill places two antagonisms at the center of his political theory: the tension between the popular and bureaucratic elements in representative government, on the one hand, and that between the democratic and aristocratic elements in modern society, on the other. These tensions guarantee the fluidity of the political sphere. At the experiential level, Mill's embrace of antagonism is even more complete, as he argues that even our objectively correct opinions must be ceaselessly contested to become properly ours. The theory that emerges is both agonistic and liberal; further, it calls into question current liberal attitudes concerning conflict and antagonism.

Jürgen Habermas levels the charge of performative contradiction as a scathing rebuke of inconsistency in his recent engagements with post-Nietzschean and Frankfurt critical theory. Focusing on this aspect of Habermas's critique of Theodor W. Adorno, the article argues against Habermas that Adorno's radical critique of reason actually pursues consistency in its radical critique of reason. It is contended that while Adorno's radical critique of reason may be total, it is not thereby hopeless and “aporetic” as critique. At root Adorno's critical theory may embody a “performative contradiction,” but this does not mean his project is necessarily incoherent or inconsistent.

According to Rousseau in The Government of Poland, the “love of liberty,” when properly cultivated, engenders the patriotism and virtue of citizens. The citizen's love of liberty, however, is not his enjoyment of liberty; it is his fiery longing or passion for national liberty, which has endured in the hearts of Poles owing to the constant threat posed by Russian imperialism. Unless the Poles continue to believe their liberty is threatened, they will begin to believe they can enjoy the luxury of possessing liberty; and then Poland will start down the familiar path of bourgeois corruption, culminating in despotism. Therefore, Rousseau's proposed “reform” of Polish institutions in fact aims to refine “the advantageous evils” of Poland's weakness and anarchy. His intention is to intensify and to orchestrate the defensiveness of all Polish citizens—against internal as well as external threats to liberty—for Rousseau understands that state of soul to be “the leaven” of the magnificent virtues of the ancients.

Abul Aʿla Maududi (1903–1979), the influential Indo-Pakistani Islamist thinker, proposed a detailed vision of what he called “theodemocracy.” This has been seen widely as a theocracy despite Maududi's explicit rejection of the term and its philosophical underpinnings. I suggest here that Maududi's vision of theodemocracy opens up a productive space for reflection on the relationship between popular and state sovereignty. Maududi saw popular sovereignty as an ethical problem; it corrupted the potential for individual moral development that the institutional mechanism of the state could otherwise allow for. Highlighting the complicated relationship of his ideas with colonial rule, and showing that he used the colonial liberal state as both a foil and model for his analysis, I argue here that “theodemocracy” was his attempt at divorcing sovereignty from the state. This endeavor generated creative tensions, and forms an important contribution to the global discussion about sovereignty and the state.

Although the relatively flexible state constitutional amendment and revision procedures are generally considered to be inferior to the corresponding procedures in the U.S. Constitution, there have been few efforts to explain why state constitution-makers adopted these procedures, and as a result we have not been in a position to assess adequately the merits of the state approach. This article undertakes to explain the development of state constitutional amendment and revision procedures by examining the state convention debates that have been conducted throughout American history. The adoption of these procedures can be attributed, in part, to a different theoretical understanding of constitutionalism than prevailed at the national level, and, in part, to a desire to overcome various problems of governance at the state level, including the need to overcome entrenched geographic interests in the nineteenth century, and the need to overcome powerful special interests, as well as intransigent judges, in the twentieth century.

An analysis of Leo Strauss's difficult and relatively neglected criticism of Max Weber in Natural Right and History reveals the fundamental difficulties that political science, and social science more generally, must overcome in order to be a genuine science. In Strauss's view, the inadequacy of the fact-value distinction, which is now widely acknowledged, compels a re-examination of Weber's denial of the possibility of valid knowledge of values. Strauss identifies the serious ground of this denial as Weber's insight that modern philosophy or science cannot refute religion. Believing that philosophy or science cannot ultimately give an account of itself that meets the challenge of religion, Weber maintained a “tragic” view of the human situation. Strauss also expresses profound doubt about the possibility of philosophy or science, but ultimately he suggests that a certain kind of study of the history of political philosophy might resolve the conflict between philosophy and divine revelation, and, therewith, the “value problem.”

This article examines Reinhold Niebuhr's contributions both to twentieth-century liberalism and to reflection on liberalism's relationship to political ethics. These contributions are, I argue, twofold. First, Niebuhr's account of moral psychology chastens liberal ambitions and assumptions, offering a more “realistic” liberalism (while avoiding certain weaknesses of “realist” theories). Second, Niebuhr's thought points to the importance of ethos—the combination of dispositions, temperament, and perceptions that shape individual conduct—in defining liberalism and determining the quality of political action. In articulating an ethos of humility, moderation, skepticism, irony, and self-restraint, Niebuhr offers a reformulation and defense of liberalism, and a warning against dangers that threaten liberalism both from within and without.

Social justice is that form of justice which impels men to promote the common good; that is, the welfare of the community as such, as a unified entity, and also the common good as comprising the welfare of all members of society. This was the meaning attached to the term by Pope Pius XI. In Atheistic Communism he declared: “It is impossible to care for the social organism and the good of society as a unit unless each single part and each individual member… is supplied with all that is necessary for the exercise of his social functions.”

During the 1930s and 1940s, many Japanese intellectuals resisted Western cultural imperialism. This theoretical movement was unfortunately complicit with wartime nationalism. Kitaro Nishida, the founder of modern Japanese philosophy and the leading figure of the Kyoto School, has been the focus of a controversy as to whether his philosophy was inherently nationalist or not. Nishida's defenders claim that his philosophical “universalism” was incompatible with the particularistic nationalism of Japan's imperialist state. From the standpoint of postcolonial critique, it is argued that this defense is insufficient. Philosophical universalism is not in itself anti-imperialist, but can in fact contribute to imperialist ideology.

In this essay, I explore some connections between Rousseau's works and modern environmental works in which the author experiences what Rousseau characterizes as “reverie,” the blissful loss of consciousness of the self in the awareness that the self is truly only part of the all-encompassing whole, “Nature.” While others have recognized that Rousseau's writings share much of the form and substance of later nature writing, no one has explored how Rousseau's work helps us understand the character of nature writing as a genre of political thought. Based on a careful reading of some key passages from the Reveries and comparisons to the writings of Thoreau, I argue that Rousseau's peculiar approach to his own self-consciousness provides a key for understanding the character of writings of this sort and the limits that are always present within them. Environmentalists must reflect on Rousseau's suggestion “that the price paid for experiencing anything is the experience of ourselves as alienated.”

The Cyropaedia is a biographical account of what Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, knew in order to rule human beings. This essay focuses on Cyrus's twofold Persian education, which consisted of his conventional and heterodox educations. The former emphasized the rule of law, while the latter stressed the need for absolute rule by a single leader. In order to evaluate Cyrus's revolution, one must grasp the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Persian regime that educated him, especially in light of the impressive but short-lived empire he founded. In the end, the Cyropaedia unfolds as a deeply ironic work. Despite Cyrus's prodigious wisdom, the empire he founded was for Xenophon neither unequivocally lasting nor good. In this sense, Xenophon's own knowledge rivals and supercedes that of Cyrus, insofar as Xenophon realized that wisdom is no match for the chaotic world of politics, a sobering and realistic outlook still applicable today.

Hume's famous “Conclusion” to Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature has been an enduring source of interest and controversy to scholars, with some going so far as to argue that the Treatise is inconsistent. Yet in the opening pages of the book Hume makes an odd, rarely noticed allusion to Socrates that helps explain the “Conclusion.” This article argues that the “Conclusion” is Hume's version of calling philosophy down from the heavens, establishing it in the cities, and compelling to inquire into morality and human affairs. Recognizing Hume's Socratic allusion focuses our attention on the centrality of moral and political topics to his mature thought and sheds light on the character of his skepticism. Far from being a confession of despair, Hume's skeptical crisis is an argument for a new conception of philosophy that takes self-knowledge as the indispensable condition of philosophizing about anything.

This essay argues for Walt Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of “aesthetic democracy” emphasizes the affective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, world-making power. Through his poetic translation of the vox populi, Whitman hoped to engender a robustly transformative democratic politics. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life.

Tocqueville's writings on pauperism have gained renewed attention in the last decade. Scholars study his Memoir on Pauperism (1835) to contextualize his thought in the nineteenth century, to question the extent of his liberalism, or to locate his policy solutions on a spectrum from private charity to state welfare. Yet Tocqueville's response to pauperism must be interpreted in light of “the social question,” or the problem of how to alleviate not only the material ills of poverty, but also the phenomenon of social exclusion that accompanied it. His discussion of the social question, I argue, illuminates his particular theory of rights and their possibilities. His thoughts on the poor laws culminate in a novel theory of the educative potential of property rights. This theory of rights prompts us to revisit his position on extending political rights and on the role of political participation in overcoming class division.

In late 1927 the Communist Party of South Africa learned with surprise and shock that the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow had drafted a radical new policy for its distant affiliate in southernmost Africa, the only communist party south of the Sahara. The new policy, focused upon the slogan, “an independent native South African republic, as a stage towards a workers' and peasants' government with full, equal rights for all races, black, colored, and white” seemed to a majority of the small multiracial membership of the South African party to be directly counter to the old policy which, after a difficult process of internal disagreements and tactical reorientation, was bringing its first significant wave of recruits and support among the black majority of the country. The slogan proposed from Moscow, quenching dreams of socialism, generated widespread opposition within the party, but an unhearing Comintern decreed in October, 1928, that the South Africans must accept the new line. The consequences of the imposition of the new slogan and the subsequent bolshevization of the party shook the Communist Party of South Africa to its roots.

Transitions from dictatorship to democracy often raise the perplexing question of whether a new government may punish actions which, although reprehensible, were considered legal under the old regime. In these instances, the desire for condign punishment of evil acts confronts the principle that forbids retroactive criminal prosecutions. After German unification, problems of this type arose in trials of East German border guards for the use of deadly force at the Berlin Wall, along with prosecutions of military and civilian officials higher in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) chain of command. In this article, the author discusses these prosecutions and analyzes the response of the German courts to the difficult problems of retroactivity that the cases raise. In its concluding section, the article suggests that these cases may evoke issues concerning the legitimacy of the GDR that were the subject of bitter debates during Germany's divided past.

In the more than fifty years since the publication of Carl Mannheim's classic essay “Conservative Thought,” a sizable body of literature has come into being concerning the nature of modern European and American conservatism. In this article I propose to review and assess some of the more significant pieces of this literature, to indicate my own views on the nature of conservative thought, and to map out some areas I think students of conserivatism might want to explore further. Such a study of the problem of defining conservatism is, I believe, a worthwhile enterprise, not only because of the intrinsic historical importance of modern conservatism, but also because of the light which our understanding of conservative thought may shed on the development of political theory as a whole during the last two centuries.

This paper explores Simone Weil's objections to a philosophy grounded on human rights. Weil thinks impersonal justice cannot be expressed in terms of personal rights. Rights, for Weil, are personal possessions; they are claimed or borne by some subject or person (me, you, her or them). The right or the just, however, is not susceptible to possession. When one substitutes a personal pronoun for the definite article before the word right (my right or their right instead of the right), justice is articulated in the manner of liberal contractualism but is biased against a notion of impersonal justice which Weil champions. The incompatibility of Weil's understanding of justice and a rights-based notion of justice is the subject-matter investigated in this article.

Democracies do not fight one another. This is because they are self-organizing systems and therefore fundamentally distinct from other states. As systems, liberal democracies have more in common with science and the market than they do with undemocratic states. By contrast, undemocratic states are best conceived as instrumental organizations pursuing relatively well defined goals. Liberal democracies do not normally pursue particular goals, are rarely comprehensible as rational actors, have unusually open boundaries, are self-transforming, and handle greater complexity than instrumental organizations. These characteristics provide the foundation for their mutually pacific relationships. The U.S. president's partial insulation from these characteristics explains why the United States has sometimes undermined small quasi-democratic states. This analysis sheds light on how norms and institutions help maintain the democratic peace.