Plutarch is generally not considered a philosopher in his own right. However, a careful reading of his life of Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, in conjunction with an examination of his philosophical essays, shows that Plutarch is engaged in a debate with Epicureans and Stoics whose misjudgments of the worth and limits of human passions lead them knowingly or unknowingly to draw lines between the happy philosophical life and the life of politics. Through the life of Solon, Plutarch demonstrates how a philosopher would actually engage in politics, and with his proper understanding of human nature, educate that society through wise laws that encourage a moderate and healthy form of erotic life in the city. In doing so, Plutarch makes a case for a substantive contribution of Platonic philosophy to the guidance of the statesman.

Political conflicts around the world increasingly reflect a religious challenge to liberal rationalism. Given the tendency of modern political rationalism to underestimate the power of religion, it seems reasonable to consider the classical analysis of religious antirationalism set forth with great clarity in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. The play seeks to demonstrate that religious antirationalism—as exemplified by Oedipus—is self-contradictory and self-destructive, but also that it is rooted in such enduring human traits as our awareness of our mortality, our hope for immortality, and our angry refusal to accept our mortality. Sophocles advocates a sober and cautious political rationalism that recognizes the dangers of religious passion to political life, but also the permanence of religious passion within political life. Such a political rationalism, embodied by Theseus, constitutes a middle way between a blind piety which rejects reason and an excessively hopeful political rationalism which underestimates the power of religion.

In this article, the work of the cultural historian Jean-Pierre Vernant and the philosophical anthropologist René Girard provides grounds for reflecting on Plato's adaptation of tragedy in the Apology, and in particular on Plato's implicit comparison of Socrates with the character of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. The Apology uses certain thematic and formal elements of tragedy – including systematic ambiguity, dramatic reversal and recognition, and the figure of a hero who is also a scapegoat – in order to expose the paradoxical combination of persuasion and compulsion at the heart of political life and of philosophical passion and aggression in the soul of the philosopher.

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke intends that gentlemen educated according to his standards quietly dethrone the aristocrats as the model for society. Locke hopes to direct most gentlemen away from a desire to imitate aristocratic manners and toward practical economic goals consistent with the needs of all. The excellent example of the new gentlemen will combine with their good treatment of the lower classes to entice the latter to imitate them. Locke thus hopes to reconcile gentlemen and the common man. Crucial components of this education include a tough physical regimen, the humane treatment of servants, and the re-education of fathers. Locke's educational program supports his political goals in the Second Treatise and is somewhat adaptable to our own democratic age.

In the light of the emerging global ecumene there is an ongoing intellectual discourse that focuses on the quest for a reorientation of political theorizing. It challenges the more or less canonized approaches to the understanding of political life and thought that dominate Western mainstream political and social science. This essay critically explores the epistemological assumptions underlying the prevalent paradigm of socio-political analysis, and points out its weakness in coming to grips with the multi-civilizational cosmos of human self-understanding which makes up the historico-political world. It argues that a genuine hermeneutical science is needed in order to restate the meaningful pattern of human self-interpretation across cultures and civilizations in its historical depth and global reach. It takes as its starting point the rise of the great civilizations in the axial times and their respective visions of order which still shape modernity. These post-axial visions, various as they were in appearance and content, merged with political power to provide the meaning-creating symbolic forms of societal self-understanding, thus providing society with a logic of order. This essay defines the common ground of the intercivilizational modality of human existence in history and society as the proper subject of comparative political theorizing, insofar as it intends to bring to our attention the essence of the political in all of its historical modalities.

Thomas Hobbes sought a reconstruction of philosophy, ethics, and politics that would end, once and for all, the bitter disputes that led to the English Civil War. This reconstruction begins with the first principles of matter and motion and extends to a unique account of consent and political obligation. Hobbes intended to produce a unified philosophical system linking his materialist account of human nature to his moral and political theory. However, his materialism gives rise to a set of perceptions, imagination, and desires that contribute to the chaos of the state of nature. The sort of person that emerges from Hobbes's materialist anthropology is unlikely to be able to make the necessary agreements about common meaning and language that constitute the ground of the social contract. Therefore, Hobbes's materialism frustrates the very purpose for which it is conceived.

The essay traces the juridical origins of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty as developed by the monarchomach jurists of the late sixteenth century. Particularly, the use of doctrines from the Roman law of property explains the sovereign right of the people to resist and reconstitute the commonwealth. Reviving the civilian concept of dominium during the French Wars of Religion and dynastic royal politics, these radical jurists articulated the claim that the people, not kings, have property rights over the commonwealth. By conceptualizing the people corporately as property-owners in this way, they were able to draw on legal arguments from Roman law to justify popular resistance as an assertion of a corporate property right. In doing so, the monarchomachs expressed an elaborate theory of state and sovereignty within the grammar of the Roman private law.

Scholars have generally traced J.S. Mill's interest in the United States to the commercial and democratic aspects of American society. Yet Mill also suggested a third respect in which America was unique: it was the only existing nation founded on the basis of “abstract principles.” This insight provides the key to a fuller understanding of Mill's various writings on America. In his early essays, Mill worried that America's founding principles and institutions were beginning to take on the characteristics of dogma: they were universally accepted, but no longer discussed. Mill responded optimistically to the Civil War because he believed the struggle to extinguish slavery would ultimately restore the meaning or vitality of the founding principles of liberty and equality. With the nation thus “regenerated,” Mill predicted that Americans would soon recognize and address other illiberal aspects of American society, including the subordinate status of women.

Karl Jaspers coined the term the “axial period” to refer to what he saw as the simultaneous development in several different and separate societies—China, India, Iran, Israel, Greece—of “a new departure within mankind.” What he meant has been characterized as “a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.” While it is true that people in each of these separate cultures began to develop new ways of talking about the cosmos, ethics, and community, Jaspers's approach and description of these phenomena were, I shall argue, highly defective. This has led to serious misunderstandings of what was involved.

A problem within liberal constitutionalism is determining whether the majority actually consents to its government, and, in particular, to those extraordinary acts that take place in the silence of the law. This paper explores this problem in the U.S. context by presenting Thomas Jefferson's understanding of the impeachment power. Jefferson preferred a theory of impeachment that, like his theory of coordinate review, would allow each department to participate in the impeachment process, because he believed that executive participation would improve the law bringing its own character, or will, to it. As an alternative to the more common political understanding of impeachment, which leans toward legislative exclusivity, and the dominant legal understanding, which tends toward judicial finality, Jefferson's theory offers a way for the people to judge whether a particular act of lawlessness is in the public good.

Most scholars agree that Frederick Douglass was a liberal—he was committed to individual rights, toleration, limited government, and self-reliance. Wilson Carey McWilliams deviated from this view by suggesting that Douglass's experience as a slave led him to appreciate human interdependence and reject liberalism in favor of fraternal communitarianism. In this essay, Douglass's response to the problem of slavery is examined in order to demonstrate that both the liberal and the fraternal readings are correct. Douglass's aims were undoubtedly liberal, but he thought these aims could only be realized in a community of individuals who felt strong obligations to one another. As a statesman, Douglass was confronted with the challenge of convincing free people that they ought to care about those who are enslaved. My aim here is to explore how he met that challenge and with what consequences for how we think about liberal statesmanship.

The essay reconsiders the argument of Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History with “radical historicism” and above all its leading representative, Martin Heidegger. Strauss's critique of such historicism is not motivated by the need to recover a teleological natural philosophy for the grounding of natural right. Strauss's turn to “the fundamental problems coeval with human thought” is in accord with Heidegger's claim that the whole is mysterious. His reservation rather concerns Heidegger's attempt, both longing and hopeful, to show that radical questioning of rationalism can solve the problem of philosophy's homelessness in human affairs, thereby taking further modern efforts to make humans “absolutely at home on earth.” In Strauss's judgment Socratic knowledge of ignorance is more authentically open to the aporetic character of the human relation to Being.

This essay explores Nietzsche's attitude to the Enlightenment, which the author argues underwent a major reversal between his so-called middle works and his later writings. The author examines the nature of this change and considers some of the reasons behind it. In the process, some of Nietzsche's “postmodern” admirers are taken to task for appropriating his criticisms of the Enlightenment without acknowledging his ambivalence toward it. Furthermore, the radical change in Nietzsche's view of the Enlightenment is taken as evidence of the periodization of his thought, which some prominent Nietzsche scholars (e.g. Walter Kaufmann) have disputed.

This article explores Mahatma Gandhi's contributions towards the evolution of the modern Indian political canon. Beginning with the Arthasastra, classical India had a political canon of its own. It flourished for over a millennium, but it suffered near extinction with the introduction in the nineteenth century of the Western political canon by the colonial state. Gandhi in the twentieth century intervened and challenged the dominance of the Western canon. He updated the old canon by deleting what was obsolete in it, preserving what was viable, and adding to it what was new and modern.

This essay explores the work of C.L.R. James in an effort to rethink the democratic import of dialectical thought. James is best known as a West Indian Marxist and the author of The Black Jacobins, but he is also a deeply democratic thinker and a creative reader of Hegel. Alongside the more orthodox Marxist strand of his thought, James develops a mode of dialectical reflection that is attentive to a sense of democratic uncertainty and that aims to enrich political participation among ordinary citizens. By thinking both with and against James, and by exploiting the ambiguities in his postwar writings on dialectics and American democratic culture, I argue that James inspires a kind of participatory democratic ethos grounded in the language and conceptual resources of Hegelian humanist thought and modern dialectical reflection.

Arguably, there have been few contemporary political theorists who have had as great an impact as John Rawls. During his lifetime his work was referred to as “epoch-making” and “cataclysmic in its effect” on the field of political theory. On numerous occasions he was proclaimed “the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century,” and other titles equally celebratory. A number of individuals have gone so far as to credit Rawls with reviving political philosophy, breathing new life into what was (according to Peter Laslett's now famous 1956 declaration) a dead discipline, once again making it a valid and valuable enterprise. While the accuracy of such a claim has been questioned, one fact seems indisputable: Rawls redefined late twentieth-century political theory, altering its “premises and principles.” Indeed, “political philosophy since the early 1970s has been—at least in the English-speaking world—in very substantial part a commentary on Rawls's work.”

This article assesses the recent use of contractarian strategies for the justification of cosmopolitan distributive principles. It deals in particular with the cosmopolitan critique of political membership and tries to reject the claim that political communities are arbitrary for the scope of global justice. By focusing on the circumstances of justice, the nature of the parties, the veil of ignorance, and the sense of justice, the article tries to show that the cosmopolitan critique of political membership modifies the contractarian premises in a way that is both unwarranted and unnecessary. While failing to establish principles of global distributive justice, existing cosmopolitan adaptations of the social contract device simply weaken the method's justificatory potential.

This article integrates economic and social history, biography, and political theory as it explores how the personal ties of Marx and Engels to Ireland stamped their thought. Marx and Engels struggled to integrate Ireland into their theory of revolution, conceptualizing it as a “special case” of capitalist accumulation, a formulation partly motivated by their human sympathies for the Irish (especially strong in the case of Engels and Marx's daughters). Extended attention in this essay is thus devoted to the special place of Ireland in Marxist theory and praxis, which is pursued on two interconnected research fronts: Ireland's anomalous role in Marx's revolutionary vision and the Irish people's prominent role in the lives of Marx and Engels. While Marx's primary aim was always to capture the citadels of capitalism such as Great Britain, he and Engels concluded in the late 1860s that the thrust could not be administered frontally: they would have to strike at England's soft underbelly – Ireland. Throughout the life of the First International (1864–72), Ireland's place in Marx's strategic vision moved to the center, transforming Ireland into the “lever” of a European-wide revolution. For a half decade in the late 1860s to the early 1870s, Marx and Engels invested the Irish peasantry with this decisive geopolitical role; soon thereafter, their conception of Ireland's theoretical significance altered and dissolved alongside their fading hopes for a European socialist revolution.

The relevance of Arendt's reflections on evil is analyzed in three respects. She warns that the appeal to absolutes (good or evil) destroys politics; her claim that radical evil involves making human beings as human beings superfluous is relevant to contemporary concerns with the vast refugee and stateless populations; and her idea of the banality of evil focuses our attention on the evil deeds that persons commit even when they do not have evil motives or intentions.