Populism has lately become a matter of concern in both popular and academic circles. Yet contemporary writers have had difficulty parsing populism's relationship to democracy, partly because they are universally committed to the latter. It is worth turning to a thinker like Aristotle, who—despite not explicitly addressing populism itself—is able to reflect clearly on various democratic phenomena that we tend to consider populist, because he does not share our normative or analytical assumptions about democracy. Aristotle's discussions in books 3 and 4 of the Politics allow us to see that what we call populism is a function of a broader problem of class conflict in democracies. In light of this analysis, we can see populist movements not as an external challenge to the democratic regime, but rather as a characteristic expression of a recurring dispute over the contours and prerogatives of the people.

Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnians educates the crowd that he creates as a character on stage, as well as the crowd gathered to watch his comedy, about what is truly in their interest: the peace that allows them to be happy by satisfying their longings for good food and frequent sex. I suggest, invoking the medieval language of vox populi vox dei, that Aristophanes (like the politicians and demagogues of today) competes to become the one who gives the people their voice. His comedy imagines that both the crowd in the play and the audience in the theater learn through the action of the comedy the value of peace for private happiness. The crowd so educated will give voice to Aristophanes's wisdom when they vote in their democratic assemblies about what seems best to the people.

Plato's antipathy to crowds is a commonplace that reinforces a prevailing portrait of the Socratic method as a practice that centers on individuals, to the exclusion of crowds and the many. This canonical view, however, comes into tension with the tendency of Plato's Socrates to conduct his dialogues in the presence of collective audiences. I argue that Plato's position on crowds is at once more complex and more ambivalent than has been commonly accepted. I distinguish between two distinct lines of critique that Plato develops against crowds: the argument that the incentive structures that move crowds are unconducive to philosophy; and a more ambiguous argument that crowds tend not to be as amenable to control as their portrayal in the Athenian democratic imaginary seems to promise. Plato's depiction of Socratic practice can be understood as an effort to explore an alternative vision of crowd control.

Ceva and Ferretti have written an important book on how we should understand political corruption, which they argue entails a public official acting in their institutional capacity as an officeholder but pursuing an agenda that cannot be justified by the specific mandate of their role. Their definition, in stressing the relational nature of political corruption, underpins their argument that its wrongfulness must be understood as a breach of interactive justice and addressed from within. Only by ensuring that individual public officeholders remain accountable and mutually answerable for their conduct (because institutions are constituted by individuals who have interactive duties to their colleagues) can the threat of political corruption be meaningfully addressed. Office accountability as the core duty of officeholders, to be exercised through the practice of answerability, is crucial to developing a meaningful defense against the risk of corruption within organizations and institutions. The central argument of Ceva and Ferretti's book is both powerful and persuasive and makes a significant contribution to the literature on identifying and tackling political corruption.

Ceva and Ferretti provide rich, comprehensive, and thought-provoking answers to the question of what political corruption—understood as corruption that occurs in public institutions—is and when and why it is morally wrong. One aspect that greatly contributes to the book's originality and political relevance is its commitment to a “continuist” conception of (public) institutions (14), according to which institutions are nothing but the interrelated actions of their members—the officeholders entrusted, by virtue of their institutional role, with specific powers that they should always be able to use with a certain level of discretion. This conceptual starting point makes this book a compelling reminder that, even if designing and reforming formal institutions can be done effectively to shape the powers and incentives of institutional actors, we cannot focus only on formal institutional and procedural design to have functioning institutions. As Ceva and Ferretti argue, “no institution can be designed in such a way that makes it immune from political corruption, which may always sneak in per the officeholders’ work” (61)—namely, whenever public officeholders use their entrusted powers in a manner that is incompatible with the terms of their power mandate.

Thirty-five years ago, Joseph Carens published “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders” in the Review of Politics. It is only a slight overstatement to say that this article created the subfield of political theory of migration. Today, the field is flourishing. Migration continues to be one of today's most politically fraught and morally urgent issues. An estimated hundred million people have fled violence and persecution. Hundreds of millions more cross international borders every year. States have responded with highly restrictive policies, in which people need to resort to perilous routes, often in the hands of smugglers, to claim asylum.

Transparency has become the constant refrain of democratic politics. However, executive branch officials consistently seek to insulate their activities from public scrutiny. A recurrent rationale presents secrecy as a necessary measure called for in circumstances in which the basic interests of the state are at stake. The purpose of this paper is to normatively assess the appeals to the necessity of executive secrecy in democratic governance. The paper fleshes out two ways in which the necessity argument has been framed. It argues that an appeal to necessity fails to confer political and/or legal authority on the state's resort to secrecy because necessity escapes normative codification both in the moral and legal domain (“necessity knows no law”). Drawing a distinction between legitimacy and vindication, it argues, however, that even though a state resorting to secrecy acts beyond its democratic authority, this action may be vindicated.

Popular-vote processes — such as plebiscites, referendums, and initiatives — are frequently understood as Rousseauian instruments of popular sovereignty. Yet, Rousseau did not theorize these devices himself. As a result, he has been claimed by proponents of competing theories of popular-vote processes. Theorists of sleeping sovereignty have claimed Rousseau's distinction between sovereignty and government in support of rare, constitutional referendums. Theorists of direct democracy invoke Rousseau's criticism of representation to demand frequent referendums. Plebiscitarianism casts Rousseau's general will as demanding the unification of the nation in one popularly legitimated leader through top-down plebiscites. Lastly, Condorcet's proposal for the “censure of the people” outlines how the sovereign could initiate popular votes itself in order to check the power of the government. I contend that Condorcet's account provides the most compelling link between Rousseau's account of popular sovereignty and the institutional design of popular-vote processes.

This article interprets Michel Foucault as a thinker of political coalition. While Foucault is often associated with a localist “micro-politics,” he also sought to help dispersed struggles “generalize” themselves into bigger, cohesive movements. Foucault gave his fullest account of the politics of generalization in manuscripts and drafts associated with two courses at the Collège de France, entitled Security, Territory, Population (1978) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1979), which are well known to political theorists for their discussions of “governmentality.” Intellectual historians have recently generated controversy by proposing that Foucault used his governmentality lectures to flirt with neoliberal positions. By reconstructing Foucault's coalitional project in the late 1970s, this article offers an alternative contextualist account of his purposes, while encouraging political theorists to reappraise the lectures as the basis for a Foucauldian theory of large-scale alliance politics.