Goodman's is a thoughtful discussion of the importance of eloquence, or “skilled speech” (10), for politics. He offers nuanced portrayals of Cicero, Burke, Macaulay, and others wrestling with the possibilities of eloquence under changing circumstances. Most of the subjects of these chapters were themselves involved in politics—and hence were reflecting on and honing their own rhetorical practice as much as contributing to rhetorical theory. Goodman insists on the importance of rhetoric's “stylistic abundance”—“a quality of language in excess of argument” (13).

Referendums are usually conceptualized as expressing “constituent power” in obvious settings of constitutional foundation and rupture. However, I argue that if constituent power can be understood as “active” and relational within a political order—and not merely present in political foundings—then it is arguably present in “routine” referendums that have a function neither of foundation nor rupture, but rather of integration, and particularly in the sense of identity formation or consolidation.

Carl Schmitt's constant denunciation of political compromises has received little attention. This omission is damaging in two ways. On the one hand, it misses a central aspect of Schmitt's political thought. On the other, it deprives those interested in discourses challenging the legitimacy of compromise in democracy of a valuable source. In this article, I systematize Schmitt's multifaceted grievances to compromises, especially as expressed in the 1920s and early 1930s. If the Weimar Constitution is fertile soil for observing and contesting compromises, the Third Reich constituted, for Schmitt, a paradigm reversal on this subject, as it managed to rid itself of pluralism and compromises. Schmitt has been portrayed as an authoritarian populist: the systematic reconstruction of his critique of compromise allows for a finer elaboration of the points of convergence and divergence between his democratic theory and populist views of democracy.

Political theory scholarship tends to resist guilt, and especially collective guilt, as a framework for thinking about wrongs committed in the past or still enduring. The voices and experiences of those wronged, however, often imply that they are attributing guilt, and they are attributing it to a collectivity. I follow their lead and think through the potential of political guilt in motivating reparation and redress. Drawing on insights that Karl Jaspers fails to fully develop, I appropriate his notion of political guilt as situation, and read it as something that is contested among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Through contestation political guilt creates political spaces for reckoning with the past, and can be instrumental in making space for marginalized voices. I apply my framework to race relations in the contemporary United States, but guilt could be a catalyst to rethink postcolonial relations as well.

The article offers a reconstruction of Donoso's idea of political theology by analyzing his main work, the 1851 Essay on Catholicism, Socialism, and Liberalism. Commentators have often confined the role of Donoso to a footnote in the literature on Carl Schmitt. To better appreciate his original thought, this article analyzes his account of the secularization of theological ideas. Donoso understands modern politics as a confrontation between the philosophies of socialism, liberalism, and Catholicism, which diverge on questions about the nature of man, of evil, and of society. Modern worldviews are thus read through simplified Catholic dogma. Donoso's vision of politics as secularized theology develops in dialogue with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The Donoso-Proudhon-Schmitt rapport allows a consideration of political theology in terms of metaphor and literary device. Within this larger story, Donoso represents the moment when a traditionalist figure of thought slowly detaches itself from its historical foundations.

Nearly all twenty-first-century readers of St. Augustine of Hippo become interested in him after reading the story of his Confessions. Yet when nonspecialists want to read more of him, they are directed to the later and more magisterial writings whose author is not immediately recognizable as the young searcher from the Confessions: City of God, On The Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, the scriptural commentaries, the anti-Pelagian tracts. The bishop of Hippo, unlike his younger self—and also unlike his philosophic predecessors, as he well knew—was obligated not to let so much as his word choice cause scandal to pious and uneducated ears.1

John Stuart Mill's account of his education in Autobiography (1873) is typically sifted through three interrelated sets of polarities: nurture/nature; reason/emotion; authority/autonomy. First, the father tried to mold the son's development towards a specific ideal, curbing his spontaneous growth. Second, James relentlessly sharpened John Stuart's analytical prowess to the almost total neglect of his emotional needs. Third, the authoritarianism involved in the design and execution of James Mill's curriculum rendered John Stuart Mill incapable of autonomy. This article argues that the dualities of nurture/nature and reason/emotion are not unambiguous, though ever-present in the reception of the younger Mill's education. Widening our perspective in their examination opens the possibility of a different assessment of that famous education being no education for autonomy.

One of the things Rosen's very interesting and wide-ranging book shows is why history and the goal of moral advance in history have become so important. We want to believe in moral advance (I am shunning the word “progress” with its resonance of steady uninterrupted forward movement), but we feel incapable of affirming this. What the Lisbon earthquake did to the eighteenth-century versions of Providence, Auschwitz has done for us. Rosen cites Adorno to good effect.

The Shadow of God is a magisterial achievement. In that vein, readers may find it especially opportune that this is a book about the concept of immortality—though, in line with the more dynamic picture it presents of our ideas about immortality in shifting cultural landscapes, I make the more modest, though no less impressive, suggestion that this book will stay with students of German Idealism and of political theory at large for a very long time to come.

This article reconstructs Hannah Arendt's theoretical arguments in relation to current authoritarian-populist crowds, which can be understood as organized mobs of the twenty-first century. Drawn from all classes and originating in societal and political disenfranchisement, in Arendt's understanding they are rebellious nihilists who falsely believe they represent the people as a whole while they exclude any citizens who do not share their tribal nationalism and leader worshiping. Illuminating conditions of their emergence, Arendt also helps to elucidate what drives the populist crowds’ illusions about an uncompromising “sovereign will” they and their leaders claim to embody. Such illusions benefit from broader modern trends eroding differences between facts, opinion, truth, and lies. In public environments suffering from destabilized factual truths, organized lies can easily fill a political vacuum generated by crises of political modernity. Unpacking interrelated theoretical trajectories, it is argued that an Arendtian framework can significantly contribute to the study of present-day authoritarian populism.

In this article I try to identify the nature of the Hobbesian Crowd Problem as a problem depending on the nature of the connection, or absence of connection, between the notions of “crowd” and “people.” When a crowd is considered as a “subjected crowd” it is but the flip side of a people, which is itself the other name of the sovereign. When considered as a gathering of people, the crowd's status depends on the intention of its members as well as the number of its participants, but also on whether it is authorized by the sovereign. Within the framework of his complex theory of associations (or “system subjects”), Hobbes's theory of crowds is a useful instrument for assessing what we now call “populism,” the claim by some citizens to speak for the whole political community.

This article argues that through the reinterpretation of the old theory of pouvoir constituant proposed by Sieyès, Carl Schmitt shows the impossibility of political modernity being anything other than authoritarian populism, whether by means of democratic or autocratic procedures. It is not that Schmitt's theory is authoritarian populism, but that modern politics, born out of the French Revolution, cannot be anything else. Schmitt's analyses of the idea of the people in political modernity in Dictatorship (1921), The Crises of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), Volksentscheid und Volksbegehren (1927), Constitutional Theory (1928), and State, Movement, People (1933) provide a fine analysis of the populist character of modernity. Something that those alive in the twenty-first century have been able to experience was theorized by Schmitt in an oracular way. Because of his keen insight he is still worth reading.

Recent studies have argued that Herder supported cultural, rather than national, self-determination. While Herder did not argue that all nations should become states, using the term “cultural” as the defining element of his conception of self-determination risks the false impression that political self-determination is not part of it. Focusing on Herder's discussion of the relationship between the people and the state in modern European “state-machines” and his comments on the French revolution, this article shows that Herder encouraged the national “self-constitution” of both subjugated and dominant peoples, thus contributing to the rise of the concept of self-determination of peoples. Rejecting direct popular rule as a “phantom of liberty,” he envisioned modern self-determination to be a continuous process of free public deliberation in print media and representative institutions on the possible reform of the constitution of one's political community, as guided by the public's evolving understanding of the principles of Humanität.

The article analyzes the relationship in Spinoza's thought between the figures of the philosopher, the people, and the crowd. This distinction is anchored in his theory of knowledge, of the passions, and of natural right and plays a fundamental role in his conception of political philosophy. Spinoza establishes a direct connection between these three figures and the forms of political regimes: while in democracy human beings who are completely rational (the philosophers) can fully deploy their theoretical passions and the people can develop their desire for freedom, in theocracy and tyranny the crowd's superstition dominates. These aspects of Spinoza's thought allow us to interpret the relationships between the contemplative and the active life, and to rethink the relationship between the philosopher and the city, in the early modern age as well as in our contemporary one.

The first book of Agamben's Homo Sacer series contains very few references to Heidegger. Even so, the pages that Agamben devotes to Heidegger in the third part of the book are far from a digression. They touch on a number of crucial topics that are vital to both Heidegger and Agamben, such as the relationship between philosophy and politics, the specific philosophical motivations behind Heidegger's political commitment, and life as a central philosophical theme. This article evaluates Agamben's interpretation of Heidegger in those pages by concentrating on two interrelated questions: (1) whether and to what extent Agamben's biopolitical reading of Heidegger is plausible and persuasive, and (2) how to judge the relationship between their respective accounts of life, which center around the two seminal concepts of “bare life” and “facticity.”

I begin by congratulating the Storeys on their splendid achievement. They have managed to write an eminently readable account of a “conversation” among four complex French thinkers. As a reader learns from the footnotes, their presentation of the unfolding argument is based on an enormous amount of scholarly research, but they never let the scholarship interfere with the smooth flow of their prose.

Why We Are Restless is informed by a certain Tocquevillean urgency. As the Storeys tell us in their introduction, their students, among the most privileged young people in America, are profoundly uneasy, their souls agitated and restless as they ponder questions about how they should live and what will make them happy. The Storeys attempt to make sense of this by examining the thought of what they call four “old French philosophers” (xii). They acknowledge that such an approach, focusing on the writings of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville as a way of understanding this contemporary American unease, might seem “counterintuitive” (xii) and they are not wrong. The French moralistes are by no means the only thinkers who can shed light on what the authors argue is a distinctively modern form of restlessness. But they convincingly show that these thinkers offer a good, if for Americans somewhat novel, starting point to help our anxious young understand what is troubling them. In brief, the Storeys argue, it is the modern turn away from the transcendent in all its forms (philosophic, religious, and heroic) that explains the restlessness of their souls. As Tocqueville sagely observed, “the soul has needs that must be satisfied,” needs that we moderns have for too long ignored.

Renowned as a historian, Flavius Josephus enjoys little reputation as a political thinker. As heir to the classical historical tradition of Thucydides, however, considerations of the regime remained primary for him. All the more so given his most important task not inherited from them: the defense of the Jewish law and people against their pagan detractors. Josephus defended the law as having specified the best political regime (which he called “theocracy” but by which he meant a rigorous natural aristocracy). He defended the people as faithful to that law and as innocent of the terrible excesses of the great uprising of 66 CE. In so doing he was compelled to confront a phenomenon unknown to his classical predecessors: a politics not of class divisions but of sectarian ones. His response to it uncannily anticipated features of the modern (post-Machiavellian) reinterpretation of politics in terms of “peoples” and “elites.”