This paper examines problems of the liberal democratic order through an analysis of the political thought of a neglected American thinker, William Graham Sumner. Sumner argues that the liberal order is inextricably linked to laissez-faire, and is under siege from the closely interrelated threats of socialism, plutocracy, imperialism, and the degeneration of democracy. He recognizes that the liberal-democratic capitalist state has significant deficiencies, including atomization, “cold” economic relations, and a loss of “poetry.” It also seems to depend upon values which are not readily propagated by liberalism. But efforts to address deficiencies through government action amount to attempts to intermix philosophically incompatible elements and serve to hasten the system's collapse. Sumner's work unwittingly suggests that the usual “Lockean” liberal model may be so flawed that a revised public philosophy, with new language and paradigms, is needed for the effective pursuit of his goals of freedom, dignity, and human development.

The relationship between pluralism and liberalism has been at the center of recent considerations of Isaiah Berlin's thought. In particular, liberal theorists have asked whether the value pluralism Berlin endorses actually undermines his liberalism. A common interpretive approach resolves this problem by presenting Berlin's pluralism as “limited” rather than “radical,” and therefore capable of serving as a moral foundation authorizing liberalism. I challenge this re-construction of Berlin's work, arguing that such readings are premised on a conception of judgment Berlin does not share. While many of his readers believe that a judgment on behalf of liberalism requires the identification of a transcontextual ground, Berlin invites us to see human judgment as a meaningful practice that occurs in the absence of absolutes yet does not simply mirror local norms. Berlin's defense of liberalism models this kind of judgment—a judgment that is neither mandated, nor ruled out, by pluralism.

Communitarians are derided for their commitment to closed borders. According to their critics, if we balance the claims of cultural preservation (deployed primarily by wealthy countries) against the claims of economic betterment (deployed primarily by the very poor), the correct moral ordering will prioritize the claims of economic betterment, and thus support claims for open borders over closed borders. Yet, this standard way of framing the debate ignores the deep connection between cultural claims and freedom of movement. In the near-exclusive focus on the relationship between cultural preservation and the alleged importance of closed borders, free movement advocates have lost sight of how frequently culture bolsters claims in favor of freedom of movement. I argue that cultural claims should not be ignored in discussions of free movement. To do so fails to give a full account of the reasons we have to favor free movement, oftentimes across borders.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists such as Schlegel and Müller sought to broaden narrow European scholarly horizons by comparing ancient Indian ideas with those of classical Greece and Rome and modern Europe, and thus to transform the human sciences. These aims are similar to contemporary comparative political theory's concerns to remedy the Eurocentrism of the field of political theory and to identify valuable ideas in non-Western sources. These similarities suggest that we ought to revisit our understanding of Orientalism, reconsider how and when epistemological appropriation has political consequences, and recognize the limits of text-based approaches to political theory.

Michael Gillespie speaks of the “theological origins of modernity,” in order to describe both the profoundly religious character of the modern West, and tensions within the Enlightenment and within the progressive philosophies of history that it generated and that are instantiated in the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kojève, and the like.

Michael Gillespie's Theological Origins of Modernity provides a historically grounded and philosophically ambitious, at times even provocative, account of the deep unity of the modern tradition. The book is more historical than most works of political theory, and exhibits a healthy freedom from received wisdom about who the important thinkers are and about what they might have to say. Yet it would be quite wrong to read this book as a simple history: it is also—perhaps even primarily—a philosophical diagnosis of the present. Gillespie's thesis, stated far too crudely, is that the familiar Enlightenment story of an age of reason preceded by an age of darkness, superstition, and religion is far too simplistic. We late moderns, too, have thoughts about first things and divinity; but we hide the enduring presence of those thoughts and questions from ourselves by the pride we take in having overcome the atavisms of theology. Gillespie argues that, so far from being wholly novel, those thoughts are in fact the descendants of the theology of late medieval nominalism. Where others speak of the secularization of Christianity, Gillespie prefers to speak of the transference of divine attributes from God to man or nature.

In The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie has given us a big book. At once learned and lively, it enters the lists not simply of “origins of modernity” stories, but more particularly of those stories that engage the proudly secular and rational self-image of the age. Among the latter, its most explicit interlocutors are Hans Blumenberg and Martin Heidegger, but its effective resonances and dissonances extend, if more subtly, to Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Amos Funkenstein—and perhaps to the likes of Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, and others as well. Indeed, in its insistent probing of connections between modern science and late medieval theology, this book is arguably in dialogue not only with a range of continental thinkers, but also with such Anglophone philosophers as Whitehead, Collingwood, and E. A. Burtt.

Martin Heidegger observed in his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1929 that the profundity of all fundamental questions lies in the fact that they call into question not merely the subject of the inquiry but also both the questioner and the act of questioning itself. To put this another way, any comprehensive explanation must be able in principle to account for the one who is giving the explanation and for the explanation itself, and any account that cannot do this disproves itself in the very act of its narration. Thus, if any such account does not make clear the nature of the narrator and the narration, it is suspect on these grounds and readers may reasonably ask for an explanation. Since I did not discuss or try to justify the methodology or the nature of the narrative that I employ in my book, it is not surprising that all three of my critics either explicitly or implicitly raise this as a question. Kirstie McClure perhaps poses it in the most straightforward fashion by asking about the character of my narrative, suggesting quite plausibly that it might be read as an account of the adventures of the divine predicate. Less directly, Tim Fuller seems to make a similar claim with his characterization of my position as middle Hegelian. Since I argue that in modernity the divine, as Tim Fuller eloquently puts it, is “absorbed” by the individual, it is certainly reasonable to ask what kind of account I imagine I am giving. Or to put it a bit more maliciously than my three interlocutors do, one might reasonably ask who I think I am. It seems to me that this is not only a fair question, but also a very penetrating one, and one that I must try to answer. I imagined my own goals to accord more with Tom Merrill's characterization of my thought as an attempt to bring about an encounter with the fundamental questions that underlie the basic assumptions we make about ourselves and our world. But to give no more explanation than this would hardly be satisfying. Moreover, since I complain at the beginning and the end of the book that we moderns need to pay a great deal more attention to the example of Oedipus and not forget who we are and where we come from, it is incumbent on me to explain myself and what I think I am doing more fully. I will try to do this after first attempting to clarify my argument and responding to several other questions my critics raise.