The collision between the philosopher and his fellow citizens is the central dramatic event that ties together all three of our primary sources on Socrates. According to the literary, or Straussian, approach to the Socratic problem this collision was paradigmatic of a permanent tension between political life—which is founded on cherished opinions, and philosophy—which tries to replace opinions with knowledge. Socrates dies because he arouses pious indignation. This article concurs in part and dissents in part. Political life is represented not by one but two speeches—the Just and the Unjust. And while the tension between philosophy and the piety that sustains cities and families is quite real, it is not this tension that kills Socrates. He offends not the piety of the Athenians, but their sophism.

Plato's Crito articulates the problem of political obligation by clarifying the paradoxical relation between Socratic philosophy and citizenship embodied in the relationship between Socrates and Crito. Scholars obscure the dialogue either by taking the arguments Socrates gives to the laws of Athens as his own reasons for obeying the law rather than as agents of Crito's edification or by severing Socrates from the laws while misunderstanding Crito's significance to political obligation. Socrates bolsters Crito's commitment to civic virtue and the rule of law while revealing their parameters and the self-sufficiency of Socratic philosophy by implicitly raising the issue of voluntary injustice. The tension between Socratic philosophy and citizenship shows the need to view Socrates' defense of citizenship in the light of his defense of philosophy.

In the Cleitophon, Cleitophon abandons Socrates because he could not provide an art of justice that would bring an end to strife by eliminating cities, families, and the love of one's own on which they depend. Cleitophon's disappointment in reason prepares us for the misology of his legal positivism in the Republic. Although Socrates does not refute Cleitophon, Plato points to the deficiencies of art and legal positivism by pointing to poetic foils. By pointing to the poetic, Plato shows what is sound in poetry and the city informed by it, and, therewith, what they share with Socrates despite their ultimate differences. By not having his Socrates succumb to the promises of art and the irrational conformism of legal positivism, and by pointing to the humane learning of the poets, Plato opens a window on to the meaning of Socratic wisdom and the Socratic life.

Liberalism has always had a powerful concern with the education of its citizens. But who should exercise final authority over the education—parents or the state? The answer rests, in large part, on our understanding of the character of the self-rule or autonomy to be taught. For as “autonomy” comes to mean unpredetermined “choice,” it becomes ever more difficult to justify parental control of education. In fact, parental control, supported by the earliest liberals, is now thought to produce “ethical servility.” Liberal theorists—such as John Dewey, Amy Gutmann, and Eamonn Callan—break with thinkers like Locke and Mill in allowing the state to override parental preferences in the name of greater equality, preparation for autonomy, and democratic deliberation. We argue that taking educational authority away from parents and giving it to the state is an illiberal policy, meaning one that fails to abide by Locke's central distinction of political and parental power. This failure will lead both to greater ethical servility and to fewer reasonable alternatives from which autonomous individuals can choose.

Quentin Skinner's method for studying the history of political thought has been widely and heatedly debated for decades. This article takes a new tack, offering a critique of Skinner's approach on the grounds he has himself established: consideration of his historical work as exemplifying the theory in practice. Three central assumptions of Skinner's method are briefly reviewed; each is then evaluated in the context of his writings on Hobbes. The analysis reveals problems and ambiguities in the specification and implementation of the method and in its underlying philosophy. The essay concludes by examining the broader practical and philosophical implications of adopting this approach to the study of political ideas: the method operationalizes a set of philosophical commitments that transforms ideological choices into questions of proper method.

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a Confucian revival. Beginning in the 1980s, we had, among those who would speak in behalf of the Chinese, advocates like Tu Wei-ming who predicted a “third wave” of Confucianism that—with the gradual waning of Marx-Leninism's star—would provide a new ideological foundation to undergird the economic boom on Asia's Pacific Rim. In the West, the years preceding the fin de siècle produced a bumper crop of scholarly works on Confucian thought and—more to the general public's benefit and interest—numerous translations of the Lunyu, the collection of sayings which (according to tradition) contain all that we have of Confucius's teachings, as directly transmitted to his disciples. This essay reviews four of these translations, those by (in alphabetical order) Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., E. Bruce and A. Taeko Brooks, Chichung Huang, and Pierre Ryckmans (writing under the pseudonym Simon Leys). All use “theAnalects” as their title, after the nineteenth-century missionary-scholar James Legge. The four are by no means the only recent translations of the book, although two are among the very best, but they represent something of the broad spectrum of styles and approaches to interpreting Confucius. I would like first, however, to describe my own approach to reading the Analects—not my interpretation of its contents but my understanding of how the text works on me as one of its many readers—by way of outlining a general framework for my review.