The Wellek Library Lectures from which these two books developed were given in 1996. The English version (2015) translates the material of the lectures that address the themes of “the conversion of violence,” in particular in the philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel, and of “inconvertible violence.” “Inconvertible violence” signals those forms and practices of violence that annihilate possibilities of resistance, that cannot be arrested by political power and transformed into civil and social exchange. The French version (2010) includes a second part made up of further essays—on Clausewitz, Marxism, Lenin and Gandhi, and Schmitt and Hobbes—in which Balibar continues to wrestle with the categories “violence” and “politics” and the complex, elusive relationships between them.

Shakespeare's plays are best studied in clusters if we want to understand the political thought and preoccupations which inform their action rather than, as has been more usual practice, their generic identity. Plays written around the time of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) and the subsequent imposition of the Oath of Allegiance share common concerns regarding the swearing of oaths, honest speech, trustworthiness, and loyalty—issues that transcend distinctions between tragedies, comedies, histories and Roman Plays. I explore the relationship between political language and ideas in Coriolanus and All's Well That Ends Well, plays that are rarely analyzed together yet which use similar language, represent related issues, and address similar anxieties. Both are part of a larger group—including Othello and Macbeth—which engage a contemporary audience of London citizens, representing the difficulty of life in times of acute paranoia.

In the introductory pages of Political Philosophy, Beiner lays out his template for political philosophy. Political philosophers participate in an ongoing dialogue about “rival conceptions of the good” (xvi). “If we do not at least aspire to a theory that presents itself as more rationally compelling than all alternative views, it is hard to see how we can do theory at all” (xxvii). Because Beiner holds this view that a political philosopher aims for a comprehensive picture, he spends a lot of time in these first pages explaining why Isaiah Berlin cannot count as a political philosopher (because Berlin refuses to judge among competing conceptions of the good). A second prologue Beiner devotes to considerations on Freud and Weber. He calls them “epic” theorists (xxix), but they are more than epic: they are tragic. It is in these pages—of prologue no. 2—that we get the keenest insight into what Beiner really thinks political philosophy is. Freud is an Enlightenment rationalist but at the same time a “deep and uncompromising pessimist.” Weber appeals to Beiner because he held that one needs as a scholar “the courage to make up [one's] mind about [one's] ultimate standpoint” (xlix), even while acknowledging that we live in a “brutally disenchanted world” (l). Resolution in the face of tragedy is the core of political philosophy for Beiner.

Beiner's excellent book is the fruit of more than a dozen years teaching his Horizons course that introduced graduate students to a critical examination of a wide range of twentieth-century political philosophers, some familiar to most students, such as Rawls and Arendt, and some unfamiliar, such as Weil and Löwith. In the 1980s and 1990s, before he taught the course, some of my most enjoyable teaching experiences were team teaching with Beiner courses on Foucault and Heidegger, which provided background for his effort to create a twentieth-century canon in his Horizons course. Beiner has been a steadfast defender of canonicity in a university bent on diluting the core curriculum.

As in all or almost all Shakespeare plays the opening scenes of Macbeth are key to setting up the problem the play addresses. In his Scottish play Shakespeare uses the opening scenes to set the two main contexts in which the regicide, usurpation, tyranny, and fall of the tyrant occur. The two are, we might say, the earthly or political context and the cosmic or superhuman context represented by the witches. In presenting these two contexts Shakespeare appears to be engaging in a dialogue with Machiavelli's Prince, taking cues from Machiavelli's political analysis on how to understand the political character of Scotland and taking issue with Machiavelli's ultimate agenda of a conquest of Fortuna.

Shakespeare's most innovative genre was the history play, because it has no precedent in either classical or medieval tradition. In contrast to the focused teleology of Christian medieval drama, Shakespeare's history plays manifest an implicit idea of history that was secular, political, and open-ended. They emphasize human action in a political arena, where the criterion for success is the ability to act in time, without regard to one's spiritual state. Time determines royal succession, which is the focus of all Shakespeare's history plays, as it was the focus of political concern in England in the 1590s, when the plays were written. His emphasis on time and royal succession distinguishes his implied political theory from the moralism and authoritarianism of official Tudor state doctrine on one hand and from the pragmatism of Machiavelli on the other.

I read Beiner's book as the intellectual biography of someone who is both a witness and actor in the contemporary renewal of political philosophy. This is why, in the reflections that follow, I focus not on his perspicacious analyses of the various authors treated in the book, but rather on the manner in which he understands the nature of this renewal and the future of the discipline itself. My reflections are based in a fundamental agreement with the definition of philosophy defended in this work. Political philosophy is a discipline that reflects on the ends of human life in order to rank and to judge them. This is why, according to Beiner, political philosophy has the ambition to present totalizing views of human nature (14).

Many readers have taken the garden scene in Richard II and the voice of its Gardener to constitute a relatively straightforward statement of Shakespeare's notions of good government and constancy in political conduct, in stark contrast to the political disorder depicted in the play. I argue, however, that read in the context of the political and moral issues Shakespeare explored, its value or even relevance to his political world is questionable. The choric voice of the Gardener was not necessarily Shakespeare's. The dramatic point may have been to present, without resolving, the dissonance between the Gardener's vision and the imponderables of political conduct lying beyond his tiny realm.

One of the hazards in writing a book that surveys a large number of thinkers is that readers are likely to praise the book in general but take issue with the chapter that treads into their bailiwick. I am no exception as I will focus on Beiner's chapter on Habermas. I conclude, however, with some general observations about Beiner's idea and ideal of political philosophy. I offer this response in the same spirit in which Beiner wrote the book. He tells his reader that to hold back from the very toughest challenge is a form of condescension (xi). So I will not hold back.

Why does Shakespeare link the psychological disintegration of Hamlet with the political disintegration of Denmark? This essay answers that question by comparing Shakespeare's tragedy to his later history plays, which foreshadow the “antic” Prince Hamlet in the “frantic” King Richard II and the “madcap” Prince Hal. All of these plays insist that a monarch pays a heavy price for claiming that he represents and even embodies the people he rules: he comes to feel internally divided, multiplicitous, populous. But the plays also cast doubt on the ability of the people to achieve any greater coherence as a sovereign power. Through Henry V and Hamlet in particular, Shakespeare offers the theater as a model of power sharing among diverse forces: not only the monarch and the people, but also the actors, the audience, and the author.

Beiner's discussion of Foucault is grounded in the effort to “deconstruct” Foucault's mask “as a mere historian” (152). Beiner unpacks Foucault's Panopticon of post-Enlightenment society which, in a dynamic of power/knowledge, crafts the soul in a “regime of surveillance and discipline” that “maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (155, 158). Beiner forcefully contends that behind Foucault's language in Discipline and Punish there must be some account of the human being that would prefer to be outside of this seemingly dystopic society—one that is entitled “not to be subject to such a regime of normalization and control” (153). There is something disingenuous, Beiner claims, about Foucault's fidelity to the idea that “his intellectual enterprise [as a historian] requires him to disavow the normative power of his own theorizing” (164). I propose an interpretation that will perhaps rescue Foucault from Beiner's accusation of disingenuousness, and simultaneously establish a kinship between Beiner's lament for political philosophy and Foucault's own. The proposal is that Foucault is a madman.