Although it is largely overlooked, Thomas Hobbes spent the final years of his life translating Homer’s epic poetry. Despite an overwhelmingly popular extant English edition of the Iliad by George Chapman, Hobbes chose to proffer his own account, often taking great liberties with the source material. Juxtaposed against Chapman’s translation, we see that Hobbes implicitly critiques the political philosophy it commends—a philosophy which disrespects kingly power, misunderstands sovereign authority, and abdicates human virtue. Hobbes sees these elements as corrupting the poetic imagination of England, precipitating much of the unrest we see in the seventeenth century. In correcting and reframing these tales for a new world, Hobbes provides a moral scaffolding for his political philosophy through one of the most widely read classical texts of his time.

This article explores Francesco Guicciardini’s concept of the imagination and argues that it plays a vital, yet hitherto unexplored, role in his political thought. What are called “imaginary conceptions” determine the effects that different governmental strategies have upon a given society. As these both affective and cognitive conceptions are tied to shared, symbolic representations, understanding informal aspects of political life becomes a crucial aspect of Guicciardini’s construal of effective government. To understand these aspects it is necessary to reconstruct the historical genesis of the communal representations as it determines the specificity of the society under consideration. The historical contingency of a society’s imaginary conceptions forces political theory to “imaginatively construct” the institutional forms it suggests, rather than “discover” them among the exempla of the past. The centrality of contingent, imaginary conceptions to political reality leads Guicciardini to break with former Renaissance conceptions of exemplarity.

During the nineteenth century, liberalism played a fundamental role in the newly formed Latin American nation-states. Yet little attention has been paid to how liberal thinkers on the periphery reacted against liberal theories suffused with pro-colonial rhetoric and Eurocentric bias. This study examines the underexplored reaction of José Victorino Lastarria to John Stuart Mill’s liberal project. Lastarria, one of the most influential nineteenth-century Latin American liberals, critically engaged with Mill’s liberalism, discerning there an example of Eurocentrism that missed insights from the republican Latin American experience. This article examines the intellectual connections and disconnections between Mill’s liberalism, representing the imperial metropole, and Lastarria’s thought, a form of liberalism in the newly independent peripheral states. By reconstructing his discussion of Mill, this article presents Lastarria’s main political ideas to a broader audience.

Kant begins the 1781 Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason with a history of metaphysics told as a sequence of failed political regimes. This history has been largely passed over both in the literature on Kant’s metaphysics and in that on his political philosophy. This article provides an interpretation of Kant’s history of metaphysical regimes as a way of exploring the political themes and aims of the First Critique. Kant’s opening narrative articulates the role his critique of metaphysics plays in establishing the possibility of a lawful order of reason that defends morality against threats arising from reason’s theoretical dissatisfaction. The political history of metaphysics presented in the A Preface reveals Kant’s understanding of the public role philosophy must undertake in the context of the modern crisis of reason.

Alexis de Tocqueville highlights a paradox at the heart of the democratic spirit. Egalitarians are allergic to markers of social hierarchy and are on the hunt to identify and abolish remnants of the old regime’s entrenchment of aristocratic rank. The resulting abolition of personal hierarchy, however, does not deliver equality and freedom. Rather it inclines democrats to accept depersonalized forms of discipline at the hands of public opinion, the tutelary state, and the market economy. Tocqueville argues that the commitment to an “imaginary equality” lies at the root of the soft despotism he finds across democratized institutions, mores, and economic relationships. He develops a distinct account of the emergence of domination under conditions of formal equality. Social dependence in liberal societies does not derive from a new class of elites or the rise of capitalist economic formations. Equality is itself connected to new, impersonal forms of servitude.

Adam Smith argued that human beings naturally desire to dominate others and that they enjoy it. He showed how ancient masters, landlords, and economic actors in some eighteenth-century English and colonial markets were driven by their love of domination against their own economic interests. Recent scholarship argues that to fully understand the role libido dominandi plays in Smith’s thought, love of domination should be associated with the broader concept of vanity and esteem-seeking. This article challenges that interpretation, showing that, for Smith, the love of domination has nothing to do with the love of praise but that most of the pleasure people derive from it is to see their ends promoted by others without the need to persuade them about the utility of those ends. This understanding locates the love of domination outside commercial society where, under certain socio-economic circumstances, mutual persuasion among individuals is the rule.

In his recent analysis of digital platforms as a medium for (democratic) political communication, Jürgen Habermas has proclaimed a constitutional imperative to maintain a functioning public sphere—leaving open, however, what this would require. While a growing literature develops ideas for social media reforms, these models put the cart before the horse. To restructure social media in a targeted manner, one first needs to determine the platforms’ desired contribution to democracy—which is far from obvious. Social media have a plurality of democratic affordances and can thus be assigned different, sometimes competing roles. To determine social media’s place in democracy, we need to do what Habermas has failed to do: locate social media in the center–periphery model of political communication in media society. In doing so, I argue that social media reforms should primarily aim to empower agents in the periphery.

This article traces the conceptual history of key terms used to describe and criticize bad political regimes, focusing on the displacement of “tyranny” by “dictatorship” and “authoritarianism.” Classical Greek thought understood tyranny primarily in terms of the character of rulers, whereas the modern idea of dictatorship emerged from a Roman conceptual framework that focused on authority and its legitimation. New problems of legitimation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries diminished the utility of the character-centric concept of tyranny and increased the fruitfulness of dictatorship for political analysis. The emergence of the modern state in the nineteenth century shaped the conceptual field by increasing the salience of problems concerning the appropriation or usurpation of sovereignty, the distortion of popular legitimation and accountability, and the incentives for submission to illegitimate orders. I conclude that the use of “authoritarianism” is likely to increase in prominence, but that retaining multiple regime concepts enriches analysis.

The Currency of Politics is a major contribution to the history of economic thought, a history too often neglected by political theorists. Especially important are Eich’s arguments about the fragility of trust, and the way in which money both enables and undermines such trust. In his words, monetary trust “does not simply imply the enforcement of existing contracts but the realization of a more fundamental, and more equitable, social contract that requires a sharing of sacrifices and benefits. … In a democratic society monetary trust must be tied to a negotiation over justice” (18). In discussing Aristotle and the Greek world, Eich retrieves claims about the role of currency in contributing to reciprocal justice, especially if not exclusively in democracies. Money is a tool of reciprocity and equality—coinage can enable the spread of a “specifically egalitarian political ideology” (37). Money enables us to recognize injustices, and “possibly, amend them. Currency contains within itself the necessary condition for its own improvement” (27).

My comments on Kahan’s new history of liberalism have a relatively narrow focus: the book’s organizing concept, fear, rather than its insightful accounts of different authors and movements. I suppose that makes me a “lumper,” in the familiar dichotomy between lumpers and splitters that Kahan cites in his introductory chapter. But I’m afraid that even historians have to lump it sometimes. For you need to know just what idea you’re splitting up, even if your goal is to trace its different manifestations. You need to identify the genus correctly if you want to record the lives of its most interesting species.

I commend Kahan for this ambitious and erudite new intellectual history of liberalism. Freedom from Fear tells a story of liberalism’s development that de-centers concepts such as natural rights, consent, equality, constitutionalism, or even the proverbial social contract with which liberalism is commonly identified. Locke is out; Adam Smith and Montesquieu are in. Instead of fixating on seventeenth-century England or the so-called “Enlightenment,” the “short 19th century” (9–22, 77–120) becomes decisive. Contrary to reductionist criticisms of liberalism as atomistic, secular, or deracinated, Kahan emphasizes that liberalism has traditionally been bolstered by three distinct “pillars” of political freedom, free markets, and morality. These pillars have been marshaled at successive stages of liberalism’s development in response to a number of liberal “fears,” ranging from the threats posed to liberty by the arbitrary power of church and state, by social and political revolutions, poverty, nationalism, totalitarianism, populism, and so forth. Extrapolating from Judith Shklar’s seminal understanding of liberalism in terms of minimizing cruelty, Kahan expands her concern with fear to a wide range of periods and thinkers, offering fresh interpretations of canonical figures such as J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville while showcasing lesser-known thinkers such as A. V. Dicey, Léon Bourgeois, L. T. Hobhouse, the Ordoliberals, and many others. Kahan’s readings of individual thinkers are consistently illuminating and worthy of discussion in their own right, but my remarks focus on the book’s larger conceptual framework.

Eich’s book is a tour de force. It takes us through six episodes in which the history of political theory and the history of political economy intersect through the topic of money. From Aristotle to Locke and Fichte and then through to Marx and Keynes before a final episode costarring Hayek, Rawls, Habermas, and Walzer, we are treated to a fascinating set of reflections on what money is and should be, each articulated in the face of a particular historical crisis. This approach gives us a new way of thinking about what is salient in the history of political thought, but it also helps us think about the present. Eich hopes to move us beyond narrow debates over the depoliticization of money by insisting that money is always already political even when it announces itself as antipolitical, so that the real question is which conception of political life—which values but also which underlying social theory—we want to be embedded in monetary institutions. In explicitly tethering his patient, detailed historical scholarship to the broader goal of stimulating and invigorating reflection on one of the central issues of our own day, Eich tries to overcome the divide between historical work and contemporary debate.

There is much to praise in Freedom from Fear, including Kahan’s compelling case that liberalism must be studied in relation to the concrete conditions which shaped liberal fears and hopes; his fair-minded exploration of liberalism’s complex relationships with democracy, religion, imperialism, feminism, and economic transformation; and his recovery of important, oft-neglected figures. But, as Kahan reminds us, liberalism valorizes conflict. Accordingly, I dwell on my disagreement or doubts concerning Kahan’s definition of liberalism, his depiction of liberalism’s “third wave,” and his suggestions for liberalism’s response to populism.

Why has contemporary political theory been silent on money? The answer Stefan Eich provides in his brilliant book The Currency of Politics begins with John Rawls. Rawls’s silence on money and monetary policy is, for Eich, mostly a result of indifference—an indifference that reflected the fact that Rawls took for granted a “confident postwar context” characterized by affluence and a relatively stable international monetary system (181). The real “silent revolution,” as Eich calls it (20, 177), comes after Rawls. By the 1980s, the international monetary regime undergoes drastic changes, including the lifting of capital controls and the rise of central bank independence. As Eich insightfully argues, this depoliticization of money was itself a political strategy. By letting consequential economic decisions remain outside the realm of political contestation, states tried to avoid excessive pressures. According to Eich, major political theorists, including Jürgen Habermas and Michael Walzer, fell prey to this neoliberal logic. In part because of the inflationary demands that a democratization of the economy would imply, such thinkers grew skeptical of the possibility of any such democratization. The disappearance of money from political theory was one of the consequences of this more general turning away from economic democracy (197–99).

The Currency of Politics should: change the way political theorists understand their texts and contexts; lead to the reworking of their concepts and events; and ultimately alter the very subject matter that constitutes their field. For too long the subfield of political theory, along with the whole discipline of political science, has been complicit in the bankrupt project of neoclassical economics. I call modern economics bankrupt because its founding assumptions and fundamental models have repeatedly been proved false, untenable, and unproductive for our understanding of the economic forces and relations that partially constitute the capitalist social orders in which we live. I call political science (and acutely, political theory) complicit because in hiving off economic questions—or worse, “the economy”— and leaving those issues to economists we have reified the very dichotomy between politics and economics that capitalism itself instantiates and exacerbates.1

According to Eich, “the history of political thinking about money” accumulates in “layers of crisis,” since crises provoke “an openness to new ideas” that interrupts the calm reproduction of meaning (xiii–xiv). Couldn’t we apply this insight to the history of critical democratic theory? Running through and beneath its explicit excavation of the political thought attending and provoked by monetary crises of the past, Eich’s book also turns up traces of what we could call a crisis of democracy and a crisis of critique. I attend to these traces to ask what we might learn from Eich’s book about the limits and internal tensions of critical theory.