Scholars disagree about the correct interpretation of Alfarabi's Political Regime and Virtuous City, treatises that have striking similarities, yet notable differences. For some, the treatises encapsulate Alfarabi's philosophy; for others, they express only politically salutary opinions. Both interpretations fail to explain why he wrote parallel works. If both reflect Alfarabi's genuine philosophic doctrines, why did he compose separate but parallel treatises, both written when his philosophy was mature? Alternatively, if the treatises are political or rhetorical, why did Alfarabi compose two versions, and why did he choose these two accounts rather than others? To answer these questions, I discuss several overarching differences between the treatises, concluding that each work has an inner coherence and develops a distinctive narrative. I offer suggestions to account for the works’ distinctive orientations, both to persuade doubtful readers of their philosophic significance and to suggest to both groups of scholars reasons for their systematic differences.

Both critics and defenders of the modern American administrative state have recognized the influence of Hegelian ideas upon the American progressives. But existing scholarship on this connection has not delved into the institutional details of Hegelian political theory and its transformation in progressivism. This article traces the continuities and adaptations between Hegelian and American progressive theories of the administrative state through three conceptual pairs: individual rights and social welfare, civil society and the state, and legislation and execution. For both German Hegelian legal scholars and the American Hegelian progressives, these conceptual pairs staked out the basic normative and institutional tensions underlying the modern state. The progressives, however, gave these concepts a democratic interpretation, and thus sought to involve the public at multiple levels of the policy-making process. This Hegelian progressive theory provides a compelling basis for a public philosophy of the contemporary American state.

This essay examines the role of “critical spectatorship” in the writings of two distinguished European intellectuals, José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) and Raymond Aron (1905–1983). We begin the paper by commenting on the struggle between civilization and barbarism, a fundamental topic in their works. We then examine the rhetoric of going beyond the political left and right, which both Ortega and Aron used in their writings. Next, we turn to the concept of “critical spectatorship” that is central to their thought and comment on the similarities and differences between their forms of social and political criticism. We conclude by drawing a few conclusions on the relevance of Ortega's and Aron's ideas for us today.

According to Isaiah Berlin's influential characterization, value monism holds that there are discoverable, axiomatic ethical principles from which all ethical knowledge may be derived, that ethical reasoning is algorithmic and mechanical, and that it seeks permanent, “final solutions” to all ethical conflicts. Berlin's account of monism oversimplifies and distorts the idea of monism and its relation to liberal values. There is a fundamentally distinct conception of monism, “asymptotic” monism, that is not only compatible with liberty and liberal toleration but is required by these values. I present this alternative through an exposition and defense of Immanuel Kant's monistic conception of ethics and public law, where it finds full expression. Berlin's warnings that monism tends to support political despotism ignore the distinctive character of Kant's asymptotic monism.

Redhead's admirable book addresses the questions, What cultural, religious, and other baggage do we bring with us to our political interactions with others, and how does it affect those interactions? I am grateful both for the way in which he has opened up those questions and for his generally accurate and always generous treatment of my views. If he has in some ways misunderstood them, this is the result only of an error of omission. For he has neglected to take adequate note both of my account of the distinctive characteristics of most political interactions in the liberal democracies of advanced modernity (except, oddly and briefly, in his footnote 208) and of the importance that I attach to the Thomistic conception of common goods. Yet, without reference to these, some of my central claims about what we bring to political conversations are apt to be misunderstood.

I think of reasoning (or deliberation), arts of the self, and micropolitics as inter-involved modalities of private and public life that are not entirely reducible to one another. You reason, alone or with others, when you ask how to realize a set of goals or to modify them in new circumstances. You practice arts of the self after, say, you have acknowledged that some element in your faith promotes unnecessary suffering for others and/or is inconsonant with other prized elements. That element clings to you or you to it even though another part of you would like it go. An Augustinian might call this a will divided against itself.

Charles Taylor opens the essay “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” with the stark claim: “Foucault disconcerts.” Foucault disconcerts, on Taylor's reading, because he appears to repudiate both freedom and truth. Where other Western thinkers have sought to “[make] ordinary life the significant locus of the issues that distinguish the good life,” the Foucault of Discipline and Punish seems to refuse this Enlightenment valuation. After puzzling alongside Foucault, and the implications of his thought for freedom and truth, Taylor finally queries what drives Foucault to adopt a Nietzschean model of truth and argues to the contrary that we can trust in progressive change from one form of life to another because its politics intuitively derive from our personal discovery of “our sense of ourselves, our identity, of what we are.” These changes entail that “we have already become something. Questions of freedom can arise for us in the transformations we undergo or project.” For Taylor, the link between personal and political discovery is so tight, so intuitive, and such a clear barometer for progress and change, that the insistence on incommensurability, let alone its use to challenge Enlightenment values, simply is perverse. And so Taylor concludes his essay by asking of the late Foucault two questions: “Can we really step outside the identity developed in Western civilization to such a degree that we can repudiate all that comes to us from the Christian understanding of the will?” and “Is the resulting ‘aesthetic of existence’ all that admirable?”

I begin with an observation of Hannah Arendt's about metaphor that bears significantly, I think, upon Redhead's endeavor to come to terms with her in chapter 3, “Hannah Arendt on Reasoning without Banisters.” “The metaphor,” writes Arendt, “bridging the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest gift language could bestow on thinking and hence on philosophy, but the metaphor itself is poetic rather than philosophic in origin.”

Mark Redhead's first book, Charles Taylor: Living and Thinking Deep Diversity, offers an in-depth study of Taylor's political thought which insists, rightly in my view, on the close connection between that political thought on the one hand and Taylor's political context and activism in his native Quebec on the other. In this new book, it is both reassuring and instructive to witness someone with Redhead's deep and long knowledge of Taylor incorporate his more recent work, A Secular Age, into a discussion of the themes of Taylor's corpus more generally.

Thanks to all the commentators for providing a series of well-reasoned and challenging comments. Many of these concerns are at once a product of stuff left on the cutting room floor, while others have been indirectly addressed in some recent publications. What I want to briefly do is highlight some of the criticisms that I agree with and engage a few salient points of contention.

It has been widely claimed that Foucault's 1980 lecture course at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living (GL), constituted an important turning point in his thinking. That course would begin a series of lecture courses at the Collège that would end in March 1984, just before his death, all devoted to core issues arising in Hellenistic philosophy and Christian theology. While Christian practices of penance and confession are a focus of GL, as Mark Jordan has claimed, throughout what has been termed his “Greco-Roman” trip Foucault always emphasized “the historical importance of pastoral power for modern subjectivity.” There is, then, a definite link between what is often described as the “final Foucault,” with his interest in Patristic Christianity and its own governmental practices, on one hand, and, on the other, the broader question of “government,” both of the self and of others, as well as the historical modes of subject formation, all concerns that characterized the whole of Foucault's oeuvre. Indeed, as Foucault says in his conclusion to GL, the obligation “to tell the truth about oneself” has shaped not just Christianity, but Western modernity too; indeed “the whole social system to which we belong” (312).