The so-called Madisonian dilemma has dominated recent debates over the role of the Supreme Court and suggested a “majoritarian paradigm” for constitutional interpretation. But a reexamination of James Madison's unique contributions to republican theory indicates that the “Madisonian dilemma” is in many ways misleading and unfaithful to his political vision. Madison, argues the author in Section I, worked a conceptual change in republican theory. Madison did so because he was convinced that republican liberty (and government) was primarily threatened by popular majorities and legislative majoritarianism in Congress and the states. For that reason, Madison advanced his well-known “naturalist” argument for republicanism and, on that basis, argued for buttressing the political architecture of republican government with “auxiliary precautions” for securing republican liberty. From Madison's reconstruction of republicanism, Section II moves to his conversion to the project of amending the Constitution with a declaration of rights and the basis he laid for the Supreme Court's role in defending republican government and liberty. Finally, Section III takes up Madison's view of the role of the Supreme Court and his articulation of a novel theory of pragmatic constitutional interpretivism.

The Medea is Euripides' most famous play and perhaps his most enigmatic. The unwieldy character of the play's central figure and the movement of the play as a whole defy the traditional categories of tragedy. Attentiveness to the usually neglected political dimension of Medea sheds new light on some of its persistent enigmas. It also suggests that Euripides was less than sanguine about the kinds of excesses the impending war with Sparta was likely to call forth from citizen soldiers. Most importantly, it brings to light Euripides' sober assessment of an enduring political problem: the irreducibly ambiguous character of spiritedness, the warrior virtue par excellence.

There has been much debate about how to locate Hannah Arendt within the tradition of political philosophy. This article argues for an “existentialist” reading, claiming that Karl Jaspers's categories reappear, politicized, in Arendt's own thought. Her language and arguments do not, in fact, become completely intelligible until read in the context of Jaspers's Existentz philosophy. The authors contend that the apparent obscurity and ambiguity of Arendt's writings owe to her attempt to stretch the framework of existentialism to fit the milieu of classical antiquity, to which it is fundamentally alien. Conversely, Arendt appropriated only those aspects of Aristotelian theory that suited her existentially defined concerns while ignoring the rest, a procedure that accounts for many of the tensions and contradictions found in her work.

Interest in Leo Strauss has grown considerably since his death in 1973. His incisive commentaries on the great texts of the Western political tradition have contributed to the revival of scholarly attention to the quarrels between Athens and Jerusalem, poetry and philosophy, the ancients and the moderns, the philosopher and the city as well as to the crisis of liberal democracy. Strauss's teachings that bear on the problem of liberal education have encouraged many of his students and others to write and speak boldly about “the closing of the American mind.”

Three novels by Tess Slesinger, Mary McCarthy and Marge Piercy respectively can inform us about American radical movements and perhaps radicalism in general. Each work is a radical self-critique written by political participants who assess their generation's radical experiment and its failure. I argue that there are two sets of arguments common to each critique, one related to the failure of radical imagination and one feminist, and that there is a “submerged” third critique that can be drawn from each narrative. It is from the later submerged critique that we can learn the most about the successive failures of American radicalism.

Foundation is a crucial concept in Hannah Arendt's work. She was especially interested in modern attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to found new bodies politic. Arendt maintained, however, that totalitarian movements were hostile to the project of foundation. Far from seeking to stabilize the world, totalitarianism set the world in motion and tried to keep it moving. But when we turn to National Socialist ideology itself we discover that foundation was vital to the Nazi project; Hitler understood himself as the founder of his people. Arendt's own interpretation of Nazism is mistaken, but I believe that her general theory of foundation can help us to make sense of the National Socialist experience. This article examines the project of foundation in Hitler's Weltanschauung and redeploys Arendt's concepts to explain his unsuccessful attempt to create a new body politic.

In just three decades rational choice theory has emerged as one of the most active, influential, and ambitious subfields in the discipline of political science. Rational choice theory contends that political behavior is best explained through the application of its supposedly “value-neutral” assumptions which posit man as a self-interested, purposeful, maximizing being. Through the logic of methodological individualism, assumptions about human nature are treated as empirical discoveries. My central argument is that by assuming that self-interest is an empirically established component of human nature, rational choice theory supports and perpetuates a political life which is antithetical to important tenets of normative democratic theory. Rational choice theory offers an incoherent account of democratic citizenship and produces a political system which shows a constant biased against political change and pursuit of the public interest. This article concludes by discussing the merits of democratic deliberation for achieving these transformative ends.

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.”

That Machiavelli is an innovator of political philosophy is universally acknowledged. The program of innovation is outlined in The Prince, chapter 15: he wants to depart from the orders of his predecessors. The goal of the new philosophy is “effectual truth,” and not the imagination of it. Actual states, not “imagined republics and kingdoms” are its real concerns. The distinction between how one lives and how one ought to live is still made, but only in order to point out that what is done should never be abandoned for what should be done. Preservation of the state has emerged as the new summum bonum, in the interest of which everything becomes permitted. The distinction between virtue and vice is no longer important; and the new type of ruler, if he is good, must learn how to be not good. The Preface to Discourses I also proposes a similar program: he is determined “to enter a path not yet trodden by anyone” and to introduce “new modes and orders.”

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.

Hobbes's linguistic conventionalism is one of the most obvious themes of his work. But it has not been considered as closely as it should be, given its prominence. I argue that Hobbes reworked quite traditional materials in such a way as to produce a novel doctrine, but that this novelty did not involve him in the implausible claim that issues of scientific truth and proof could be settled simply on the basis of linguistic agreement. Rather, he grounded his conventionalism in the prelinguistic, naturally given experience he called “mental discourse,” and then linked it to the effort to outflank contemporary skepticism. For these reasons, Hobbes's specific form of conventionalism can then be seen to be central both to the limits of his claims and to what he thought could be established with a certainty robust enough to withstand skeptical challenge.

“The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.” So wrote Leo Strauss in his Thoughts on Machiavelli. The sentence may seem to be a passing remark, and yet it states his main hermeneutical principle. On the one hand it articulates the abiding hypothesis that what is first for us, the very looks of things, is somehow first in itself. On the other hand it guides his commentaries on great books, ancient as well as modern. What if we let this principle guide our commentaries on Strauss's own books? Then the heart of Natural Right and History, for example, is arguably the disproportion between what first appears to be his teaching about natural right and what first appears to be his skepticism about the knowability of natural right.

Although scholars routinely agree that a relative absence of socialism marks one way in which the United States is exceptional, they have argued over why we are distinct in this way. As representatives of an enduring comparative public policy issue, two “camps” of analysts have offered broad, competing explanations resting on cultural and structural variables, respectively. This article implements a strategy for demonstrating: (1) specific cultural and structural independent variables are applied most appropriately to explain specific aspects of policy development, and (2) cultural and structural contributions are thus complementary rather than competing. I proceed by focusing on an exception to the “laggard” character of the American welfare state, the unusual success of the social security program. Dealing with the obverse of the usual “why-America-lags” concern provides a more observable dependent variable, enabling us to highlight the actual operation of distinct cultural and structural forces. I then show how this strategy can be applied to broader questions of American exceptionalism and public policy development.

In The Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz has challenged the anti-perfectionism of orthodox liberal political theory and proposed an alternative form of liberalism based on perfectionist moral premises. Raz maintain that his theory of political morality qualifies as a “liberal” theory in view of the pride of place it gives “autonomy” considered as an intrinsic human good. Nevertheless, autonomy, according to Raz, is valuable only when exercised in the pursuit of morally upright ends. The principal point of contact between Raz's theory and leading antiperfectionist versions of liberalism is his endorsement of a qualified version of J. S. Mill's “harm principle.” Raz argues that, though the law can and should discourage “victimless immortalities” by noncoercive means, it should not criminalize victimless wrongdoing. The article argues that Raz's claims are strongest where his substantive position is weakest. Perfectionist conservatives and antiperfectionist liberals are correct to maintain that Razian perfectionism cannot supply a ground for rejecting coercive legislation to uphold public morality as a matter of principle.

The role of elites within liberal democracy is a perennial issue. One reason why is an inappropriate theoretical conception of democracy. They are self-organizing systems rather than instrumental organizations. As such they have more in common systemically with science and the market than with democratic organizations or undemocratic states. Examining the role of elites within science and the market sheds light on how they work within democracies. Such an examination shows them to be both necessary and dangerous. Traditional “elitist” analyses of democracy suffer from confusions which the self-organizing model clears up. It also offers improvements on traditional “pluralist” conceptions.

Even a casual glance at the list of Leo Strauss's writings devoted in whole or in part to medieval Jewish texts is sufficient to make clear that in any ordinary sense he left a substantial legacy to this field of study. They include two books, Philosophy and Law and Persecution and the Art of Writing, the monograph length essay which serves as the introduction to the English translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed done by Shlomo Pines and a number of articles.

Moreover it is relatively clear that his study of these texts form an important part of his legacy as such. They remained important to his inquiries through his long scholarly career and do not belong only to one phase. Several of the articles devoted to such texts, he chose to republish in subsequent volumes concerned with major themes of his work. More important still, even towards the end of his life when his work was largely devoted to classical Greek texts, medieval Jewish texts continued to play some important role. The last work planned by Strauss, Studies on Platonic Philosophy, contains new, albeit short, treatments of Maimonides' Treatise on Logic and his Letter on Astrology which are the only essays first published in this book.

In a mental experiment that divested man of all institutions of order, Thomas Hobbes called the resulting imaginary situation “the state of nature,” and described it as “war of all against all.” In other words, he established an assumption that aggression is the original quality of human nature, an assumption he supported with correct observations. I submit that, if such a mental experiment made sense, it would be more to the point to call this imaginary nonsocial man “confused,” and I am ready to support this assumption with correct observation. I have found myself in a country whose language I could not speak, whose writing I could not read, and whose habits I did not know. The native person accompanying me as an interpreter was separated from me by crowds. Here I was, all alone. I did not know the name of my street, the look of my house, or even the direction of the compass, since the day was clouded. The confusion that befell me was general, all-encompassing, basic, and utterly frightening. While I was completely free to go in any direction I wanted, all these possibilities were the same to me, like to Buridan's ass, so that I could not move for simple lack of discernment. I can easily conceive an imaginary nonsocial man being in the same mental condition, much more easily than a warrior engaged in a big enterprise such as a “war against all.” This is the assumption underlying the following investigations on authority and alienation.

This article examines a recent justificatory argument in defense of liberal political principles. Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, and Will Kymlicka, in his book Liberalism, Community and Culture, argue that liberalism is not based on skepticism or on an implausible individualist metaphysics, as its communitarian critics have contended. They argue that liberalism can be justified as an essential element in human flourishing. This article examines this justificatory argument for liberalism. It argues that this defense of liberalism fails to support the primacy that liberals accord to autonomy over all other values, but that this failure is instructive.

Christianity has influenced Western culture more than any factor save human nature itself, and yet its influence is now greatly diminished. Reactions to this have usually taken the form of a Hegelian affirmation that Christianity, having served its historical purpose, is no longer important in itself; a nostalgic conservatism which rejects the culture of modernity simply; or a revivalism which ignores it. An alternative view rests on an analysis of culture and the enlightenment process of secularization to which the Church reacted by closing in on itself until the Second Vatican Council affirmed the legitimate autonomy of the secular. The Church itself, partly to blame for secularization through its practical demystification of nature and attempt to coercively supplant all pre- and non-Christian religious experience, should engage modernity while giving witness to human dignity and promoting a more human culture. Such a constructive recovery of Christian culture must avoid both politicization and moralism.

Despite the impact of Leo Strauss on American political science and political theory, where, exactly, Strauss was “coming from,” in both senses of that phrase, has been far from clear. Carl Friedrich, reviewing the, at that point, unknown author's book on Hobbes, noted that Strauss might have been more forthcoming about his own position, but he believed that it was safe to conclude that he was a “historical relativist.” Friedrich may have been closer to the mark than many subsequent commentators realized, but in order to understand Strauss's work, it is necessary to return to the universe he inhabited before “coming to America.” Since Strauss's death, his enterprise has been subject to careful scrutiny, but his early life and work have remained opaque.