According to Hobbes, glory causes conflict in two ways: by causing competition over comparative recognition, and by making men violently sensitive to insult. Interpreters have generally depicted the sensitivity to insult as a manifestation of the desire for comparative recognition. This reading raises two problems. First, the two ways in which Hobbes uses glory are inconsistent. Second, if the problem with glory is comparison, then the law of nature enjoining the acknowledgment of equality should lead to war rather than peace. This paper illuminates these obscurities by placing Hobbes in the context of the contemporary literature on honor and civility. These sources reveal two concepts of honor which correspond to the two ways in which Hobbes writes about glory. Hobbes draws heavily from these sources, but intentionally elides the two concepts of honor in order to undermine an ideology of honor that was used to justify disobedience and unlawful violence.

Political theorists have relegated Rousseau's writings on Geneva to the category of historical accident, assuming that whatever he had to say about politics was said fully in works like the Social Contract. This has created a widespread impression that Rousseau had little to say about ordinary political practice. In this paper, I take up his dissection of the Genevan constitution in the Letters from the Mountain. A work which has attracted little attention even from historians, the Letters are in fact essential for understanding Rousseau's thoughts on the people's role in democratic government. His proposals for reform give clear content to the abstract arguments about popular sovereignty presented in the Social Contract. Against readings that emphasize Rousseau's distrust of the people, the Letters reveal that Rousseau expected popular sovereignty to take the form of active and routine participation in both legislation and government on the part of ordinary citizens.

In volume 1 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville argues that the energy unleashed by democracy is one of democracy's greatest benefits. In volume 2, his portrait of democracy turns darker, and he recasts the dynamism of American society as an expression of an underlying restlessness. In this paper, I argue that restlessness (inquiétude) is a key element of Tocqueville's mature view of democratic man. Whereas previous scholarship on Tocqueville's view of restlessness either treats the theme instrumentally, by subordinating it to other themes, or seeks to illuminate Tocqueville's debt to other thinkers, this paper examines Tocqueville's treatment of restlessness as an important theme in its own right. Treating this theme in full requires examining his discussions of materialism, envy, democratic morality, and democratic peoples’ experiences of literature and art. Through this examination we see how, in Tocqueville's view, democracy, for all its merits, obstructs the path to human happiness.

In an important 1984 paper, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” Jean Hampton argues that the practice of inflicting painful criminal punishments is justified only if punishment is morally educative. Hampton's suggestion forms the point of departure for this article on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I show that Dostoevsky agrees with Hampton that punishment should aim at moral reform; however, Dostoevsky presents no evidence that self-punishment or legal punishment reliably cultivates respect for law, legal authority, oneself, or others as moral agents. Instead, Dostoevsky's post-Siberian writings are highly critical of Russian criminal justice, and emphasize that moral education comes through dialogue, reflection, and criticism. This highly individualized treatment may be experienced as painful, but it does not have to result from, and it may even be impeded by, legal “hard treatment.”

There is a growing literature on the theological roots of Schmitt's theory, however, such interpretations depart from the same position as Schmitt: from the political into the theological. In this quarrel between politics and theology, there is a less known contender, the theologian Erik Peterson, who developed a theological critique of Schmitt and shows the impossibility of a Christian political theology. In Political Theology II (1970), Schmitt criticizes the apolitical nature of Peterson's theology, but he ignores Peterson's theology of martyrdom. This paper recovers the centrality of martyrdom in Peterson's theology and argues that the martyr represents a counter model to Schmitt's sovereign. For Peterson, martyrdom is not apolitical act, but a public claim in which the martyrs testify in the public sphere that the highest human good is not political but eschatological. By recovering this eschatological dimension, Peterson shows the limits of Schmitt's interpretation of the political.