It is widely claimed that Mencius's account of punitive expedition can be understood as a Confucian justification of humanitarian intervention and thus has the potential to play the role of constraining China's imperial ventures abroad. This paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external obstacles—the problem of virtue's self-indulgence and the problem of justification to non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius's virtue-based political theory of punitive expedition from developing into a modern theory of humanitarian intervention. It argues that for the Mencian theory to be relevant in the modern world marked most notably by moral pluralism, it must be transformed into a democratic theory, at the center of which is the stipulation that humanitarian intervention be morally justified internally, that is, to the people of the intervening state, as well as externally, first to the people to be intervened state, and second to international society.

This paper contends that Locke's educational writings are more robust in their commitment to autonomy than recent assessments of Locke as a theorist of “disciplinary liberalism” suggest. While Locke's account of parental power is conflicted, it is mostly compatible with a liberal, child-responsive approach to education. Insofar as Locke develops a pedagogy sensitive to the pupil's temperament and his rights as a child, he articulates a nuanced understanding of autonomy, shown to be a product of the individual's participation in a community of rational beings. Complicating both received understandings of Lockean liberalism as atomistic and newer claims about the dark forces of socialization it unleashes, this paper gleans from Lockean education the potential of a socially embedded subject, who looks both within and without himself to cultivate a posture of considerable critical independence.

Johann Gottfried Herder was both a philosopher and an active Lutheran minister, who constantly faced the difficult task of negotiating in his own work and life, in his public speeches and activities, the relationship to be established between reason and religion, both their limits and the promises they carry for each other. This article examines Herder's writings on language and reason, religion, myth, and history with the intention of putting together an account of religion and reason along lines that emphasize their continuity with each other. I argue that, in Herder's view, religion and religious education can play an active role in forming the disposition of individuals to humanity, in cultivating both their freedom and their capacity to empathize with others and love them, thus helping to materialize the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment.

Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America is a fictionalized version of Tocqueville's travels through the young United States. Unlike Tocqueville, Olivier de Garmont is accompanied by Parrot Larrit, an English servant who offers a bold egalitarian counterpoint to Olivier's aristocratic liberalism. This article compares Carey's work with Tocqueville's on the consequences of democracy for political institutions, education, and art; discusses Carey's technique of using alternating narration between Olivier and Parrot to capture the complexities of American democracy; and concludes with thoughts about being a friendly critic of democracy in the twenty-first century. Although Parrot and Olivier is no substitute for Democracy in America, it addresses Tocqueville's concerns in a creative and subtle manner, prompting reflection on whether—to use Olivier's terms—democracy has “ripened well.”

Some arguments against the law’s special treatment of religion are adapted from Rawls. These overlook the ways in which the abstract rights agreed to in the original position are given specific institutional form at the constitutional stage. Because the rights established in the original position are vaguely specified, liberty of conscience can’t be implemented without reliance on contestable values such as religion. Public reason, when refracted through the four-stage sequence (where it becomes less constraining at each stage of the sequence), is far less constraining than the proponents of liberal neutrality hope. Fulfilling the commitments made in the original position, for people in the world here and now, requires taking account of the values that those people hold. A Rawlsian position thus can support the American regime of religious accommodation.