Chapter 1 presents the debate about republicanism before the French Revolution. Montesquieu played an important part in this debate as he formulated the influential “scale thesis” according to which republicanism could not be adequate for a large country. Montesquieu raised a set of challenges to would-be republicans in France (the “motivation,” “unity,” and “epistemic” challenges). The rest of the chapter presents theoretical resources in different republican traditions (notably Italian, English, American) that informed the French republicans on key issues (conquest, freedom, commerce, institutions). This chapter retraces the context in which the myth of outdated republicanism was born, but also how the elitist and martial dimensions of the republican tradition shaped French republicanism.

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

Chapter Two analyzes the rebirth of sortition in the West during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It explores the mutations of the medieval and Renaissance Italian republics, as well as the practices of sortition in Early Modern Spain, Switzerland, and other European countries. During these periods, sortition was widespread and took many different guises, though it was always combined with elections and cooption. It was above all a means to channel the competition for power and resources among groups, and especially among the elite. It was a key element of “distributive aristocracies” in different republican contexts, in which a relatively small subsections of elite citizens could develop self-government in the name of the common good and enjoy the privileges of administrating the polity. In the Italian Communes of the thirteenth century and for limited periods of time in Florence, republican self-government was extended to a larger circle of citizens. Practices of sortition in India are also described. Prior to modernity, although the scientific notion of representative sampling was still unknown, political sortition was linked to an empirical “taming of chance” and used as a rational instrument of government.

This overview chapter introduces philosophical tools that can be used to aid managers in making decisions in situations which go beyond simple cost/benefit analyses. Value terms such as right, wrong, fair, justice, beneficence, responsibility, eco-consciousness, and discrimination are discussed and illustrated using real-world examples. Starting with the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, India and the contemporary aftermath, it examines the complexities such situations present and assesses the usefulness of creating a theoretical framework that can lead to principled and defensible policies and actions. The challenges of exclusive self-interest and ethical relativism are examined, where morality simply echoes personal preference. Immediate profit maximization is compared to a more subtle long-term and more encompassing stakeholder approach. Reliance on the law is shown to be an insufficient ethical guide, while principle-based approaches that can be applied across a wide range of cases are more successful in working out what we should do in novel and difficult situations.

Machiavelli criticizes Plato’s explicit celebration of the contemplative philosophic life over the active political life as harmful both to politics and to philosophy, he praises Homer as an effective teacher of political leaders or "princes," and he follows the example of Homer by hiding his own philosophic life under the guise of one who exclusively leads and admires the active political life. Machiavelli, however, responding to the Platonic and also Christian legacy of radically depreciating the political life during his own times, departs from Homer’s portrayal of the political life of virtue as tragic and therefore pointing beyond itself to the contemplative philosophic life, by portraying the political life of virtue, if properly understood, as one that leads to happiness and therefore does not so clearly point beyond itself to the contemplative philosophic life.

A study of Homer in conjunction with Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche confirms that Homer was a philosophic thinker and that he plays an illuminating role in the thought of each of the three political philosophers. This study also shows that there are many ways of living a philosophic life; that philosophers may present themselves in different guises depending on the political, religious, and intellectual circumstances they may find themselves in; that their most fundamental choice is whether or not to present themselves explicitly as philosophers; and that therefore we must broaden our understanding of who a philosopher is beyond those who explicitly present themselves as philosophers and consider the possibility that a number of poets, statesmen, historians, and even theologians of the past may also be philosophers in their own right.

Homer plays an important but overlooked role in the history of political philosophy. Plato criticizes the philosophic tradition founded by Homer and establishes a new one in its place; Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two leading philosophic critics of Plato, invoke Homer in their arguments against Plato and his legacy.

The first Introduction to Part I defines the book’s three central concepts of the political, the aesthetic, and the utopian and shows a Shakespearean trajectory within the sequence of plays about power that grows more and critical before turning to utopian alternatives to power politics. It then reviews the history of how Shakespearean critics have framed and conceptualized the theme of power in Shakespeare, with emphasis on the second half of the twentieth century up to recent decades to provide context for what follows. Finally, the last section takes up the issue of how Shakespeare’s approach to politics evolves and changes over the approximately twenty years of his writing career, from an initial period of political eclecticism in the early histories and Titus, to a period of the acceptance of amoral power in the second Henriad and Julius Caesar, to the tragic period, which turns to indictments of political cruelty and immorality, and finally to a late period of utopian alternatives to politics.

Chapter 4 on Antony and Cleopatra again investigates the dynamics of power, but this time in a dialectic with erotic pleasure as well as with nature. The play’s paradoxically triumphant suicides at the end contain strong utopian resonances affirmative of eros and its links with death and the aesthetic. This play represents the turning point in the development this book is charting, as Shakespeare’s works take on new forms and themes that emphasize the utopian overcoming power in plays that are tragicomic and synthetic of his career. The chapter also analyzes Egypt as containing, along with its political practices, a Shakespearean green world quality, linking the play to earlier green world comedies. Egypt is especially an erotic, feminized, and feminist utopian space housing the play’s counter-political values. Cleopatra emerges as both a political and a utopian character and one who becomes at the very end the play’s dominant figure. Her partner Antony, of course, is essential to the play as well and eventually develops his own utopian qualities after seeming at first a love-sick buffoon, then an instrumental, ruthless politician. The play is formally a tragedy but has a strong tragicomic feeling as well.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, after Mark Antony’s wildly successful speech to the multitudes at Caesar’s funeral, he watches the resulting uprising with satisfaction and remarks, “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. / Take thou what course thou wilt!”1

Chapter 2 investigates Macbeth as representative of the next stage of Shakespeare’s political thinking in the tragic period, focusing on issues of power specifically to reveal the version of instrumental reason (or power for power’s sake) Shakespeare explores in this dark play. This includes the play’s implied conception of the political and its relation to dramatic structure. In the specific case of Macbeth, the form of politics is best described using Simone Weil’s 1940s anti-war essay “The lliad, or the Poem of Force” to define the issues involved, seeing the play as an anatomy of political force manifesting like The Iliad the destructive effects on both its agents and its victims of the deadly instrumental politics of warfare. In this analysis, Macbeth emerges as a consummate man of force parallel to Homer’s Achilles as described by Weil, while Lady Macbeth is a figure sharing his commitment to force but constrained by her society’s patriarchal structure and values to a publicly subordinate (though privately powerful) role. The Macbeths’ political actions enable the introduction of modern autotelic instrumental power to a fictional and temporally complex Scotland.

Although the heterogeneity of topics in Natures Pictures has discouraged discussion of the volume as a whole, one salient topic throughout is Cavendish’s experience of the English Civil Wars – explicitly treated in her poem, “A Description of the Civil Warrs,” and recounted in “A True Relation” – as it relates to her interest in political theory in the tales. Despite the prevailing assumption that Cavendish was an unequivocal royalist, her explicit statements of royalism in “The She-Anchoret” and “A True Relation” coexist with – but also place under erasure – the more veiled critique of Charles I in “The Moral Fable of the Ant and the Bee” and the complex political analysis concerning the monarch’s relationship to the subject in “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” The contrast between the discursive on the one hand, and the literary or fictive on the other, enables Cavendish to hew to her expected royalist position in the former while exploring oppositional political perspectives in the latter.

The close of the book offers a brief overview of its arguments and revisits the parable that opens the study. It also considers a parable from the apocalyptic tradition, the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31–46, and offers an interpretation to highlight its potential wisdom for ideal theory. On this interpretation, the parable serves as a subtle reminder of the virtue found in pairing utopian hope with epistemic humility.

The book opens with a parable to introduce three central figures in the chapters to come – Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Engels – and their approaches to apocalyptic thought. It then defines key concepts and gives an overview of the three main arguments advanced in Apocalypse without God. The first argument is methodological: the study of secular apocalyptic thought would place itself on firmer ground by focusing on cases where secular thinkers explicitly reference religious apocalyptic texts, figures, and concepts. The second argument is interpretive: apocalyptic thought’s political appeal partly lies in offering resources to navigate persistent challenges that arise in ideal theory, which tries to imagine the best and most just society. And the third argument is normative: ideal theory and apocalyptic thought both rest on faith and are best suited to be sources of utopian hope, but not guides for collective action by a society.

This chapter examines Machiavelli’s view of Girolamo Savonarola – an apocalyptic figure in fifteenth-century Florence – and apocalyptic thought more generally. Though the standard understanding of Machiavelli is that he dismisses Savonarola, a close reading of his writings reveals a respect for Savonarola and his apocalyptic message. Savonarola used his apocalyptic message to help found new orders – the highest human achievement according to Machiavelli. By drawing on the Christian idea of the new Jerusalem and Roman idea of the Eternal City, Savonarola instilled the republican government of Florence with deep religious meaning and political promise. Though Machiavelli sees Savonarola as a failed founder, his failure is not due to his apocalyptic message. Machiavelli recognizes the power of this message, but ultimately rejects apocalyptic hope because he cannot fathom achieving a lasting utopia in a world marked by decay and continual change.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza portrays the social order as arising out of a state of nature in which people aren’t constrained by laws, in which we may do whatever we can do, and in which our natural egoism makes life insecure and wretched. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza thinks right is coextensive with power even in civil society, not only in the state of nature. Spinoza’s best argument for this arguably relies on two assumptions: if there were a natural law constraining our behavior, it would have to be based on a divine command; but God cannot be a lawgiver; prescriptive laws assume that the commanded can disobey; and no one can disobey an omnipotent being. Although Spinoza takes right to be based on power, he denies that sovereigns have a right to rule just as they please. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes, he is conscious of the fragility of political power. Even if the sovereign’s right is theoretically absolute, individuals are roughly equal in power; so any sovereign must depend on having at his command a group of people who will obey his enforcement commands without being coerced. Like Machiavelli, he prefers forms of government in which this de facto constraint is institutionalized.