The Book of Jonah depicts the tension between justice and mercy. Jonah's peculiar community, the “chosen” people, does not merely provide security and prosperity, but aims to shape the souls of its own members, and, eventually, of all human beings. The parable is optimistic about the possibility of justice in a world of distinct peoples. But on an individual level it is tragic, because Jonah himself fails to reach a practicable view of justice for imperfect but educable fellows and foreigners. He himself remains a distorted human being, deficient especially in his use of language, neither beast nor god, but, in the end, outside any community. As a reading on the highest holiday of the Jewish year, the story has a special place among Jonah's people. Neither homily nor sermon, it is an example of public storytelling as an instrument of education.

This paper sets out to criticize Thomas Pangle's and Paul Rahe's reading of The Spirit of the Laws as a contribution to liberal republicanism, arguing instead that Montesquieu's text is better understood as a defense of liberal monarchism. Pangle's and Rahe's interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws as an unequivocal defense of the English modern republic is wrongheaded. Montesquieu in fact spent much more of his time and energy outlining another and very different political model, moderate monarchy, embodied not by England but by the government under which he lived—France. This conclusion has profound implications for our understanding not just of The Spirit of the Laws but also of the history of early modern political thought more generally speaking, showing that the political debate of this period cannot be reduced to a struggle between classical and modern republicans.

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is most famous and controversial for Burke's opposition to the philosophy behind the Revolution. This essay examines Burke's more practical criticisms of the French National Assembly which pervade the pamphlet, and shows their connection to his earlier arguments about corruption in the House of Commons. Burke's insight into the future course of the French Revolution is based in his distinctive approach to thinking about the pathologies of legislative assemblies, which he initially developed in the House of Commons, and later applied to the French National Assembly.

Benjamin Franklin divides the mistakes he lists in the Autobiography into “errata” and “great errata.” He derived no benefit from the latter, but some benefit from the former. Examining Franklin's regret, or lack of regret, at these errata opens a window onto Franklin's understanding of morality. The laxity in his list of virtues and his flexibility with regard to conventional morals stem from the insight Franklin tells us he gained from these errata. For Franklin, or at least his persona in the Autobiography, there was no conflict between egoism and altruism, and he is therefore the embodiment of a type of self-interest well understood. Tracing the story of the errata, which Franklin inserted into an earlier draft of the work's first part, and Franklin's later actions provides the key to understanding the rhetorical strategy of the Autobiography, and the reason he never wrote his proposed Art of Virtue.

Advocates for the equality and dignity of LGBT persons often suggest that the immutability of sexual orientation is their strongest argument. I believe that it is a weak one. First, the individual freedom that liberalism accords to people, absent harm to others, as necessary for human flourishing applies to sexuality as well as to other areas of existence. Second, the distinction often made between status and conduct is a false one, and the argument from immutability effectively protects neither. Third, I examine the notion of constitutive choice, arguing that the line between immutability and choice is more complex than many realize. Finally, greater attention to the notion of constitutive choice may broaden liberalism's hospitality to conceptions of the good in ways that better respect human moral agency and autonomy.