Transparency has become the constant refrain of democratic politics. However, executive branch officials consistently seek to insulate their activities from public scrutiny. A recurrent rationale presents secrecy as a necessary measure called for in circumstances in which the basic interests of the state are at stake. The purpose of this paper is to normatively assess the appeals to the necessity of executive secrecy in democratic governance. The paper fleshes out two ways in which the necessity argument has been framed. It argues that an appeal to necessity fails to confer political and/or legal authority on the state's resort to secrecy because necessity escapes normative codification both in the moral and legal domain (“necessity knows no law”). Drawing a distinction between legitimacy and vindication, it argues, however, that even though a state resorting to secrecy acts beyond its democratic authority, this action may be vindicated.

Popular-vote processes — such as plebiscites, referendums, and initiatives — are frequently understood as Rousseauian instruments of popular sovereignty. Yet, Rousseau did not theorize these devices himself. As a result, he has been claimed by proponents of competing theories of popular-vote processes. Theorists of sleeping sovereignty have claimed Rousseau's distinction between sovereignty and government in support of rare, constitutional referendums. Theorists of direct democracy invoke Rousseau's criticism of representation to demand frequent referendums. Plebiscitarianism casts Rousseau's general will as demanding the unification of the nation in one popularly legitimated leader through top-down plebiscites. Lastly, Condorcet's proposal for the “censure of the people” outlines how the sovereign could initiate popular votes itself in order to check the power of the government. I contend that Condorcet's account provides the most compelling link between Rousseau's account of popular sovereignty and the institutional design of popular-vote processes.

This article interprets Michel Foucault as a thinker of political coalition. While Foucault is often associated with a localist “micro-politics,” he also sought to help dispersed struggles “generalize” themselves into bigger, cohesive movements. Foucault gave his fullest account of the politics of generalization in manuscripts and drafts associated with two courses at the Collège de France, entitled Security, Territory, Population (1978) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1979), which are well known to political theorists for their discussions of “governmentality.” Intellectual historians have recently generated controversy by proposing that Foucault used his governmentality lectures to flirt with neoliberal positions. By reconstructing Foucault's coalitional project in the late 1970s, this article offers an alternative contextualist account of his purposes, while encouraging political theorists to reappraise the lectures as the basis for a Foucauldian theory of large-scale alliance politics.

In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians. Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previous History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The utilitarians, Stephen was confident, could serve as a kind of synecdoche for a whole age. Further, if the utilitarians did not grasp the whole truth, there was no doubt that their “creed” would make up part of the “definitive system” that would arrive in due time.

In 330 BCE, before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens, the statesman Demosthenes delivered what would become his most famous court speech, On the Crown. Commentators have called the speech “tragic” owing to the litigant's unusual appropriation of tropes from Attic tragedy to make his case. I offer an alternative reading of Demosthenes's speech that rests upon an alternative approach to theorizing democratic judgment. I argue that the rhetorical force and political significance of Demosthenes's metaphors, linguistic expressions and ideas depend upon the institutional setting in which they were delivered. This is because within each institutional site, a specific political practice of judgment is taking place that structures the reception of and response to ideas and images. Demosthenes's speech is in fact “anti-tragic” and reflects the democratic practice for which it was created.

The denial of Locke's debt to Hobbes has long been characteristic of many scholars of Locke influenced by the Cambridge School. Peter Laslett was the first to argue for this view, and he did so in conscious opposition to Leo Strauss and his interpretation of Locke. The recent discovery by Felix Waldmann of a memoir that confirms Locke's deep interest in Hobbes as well as his prudent concealment of that interest has undermined Laslett's case against Strauss. Waldmann's discovery, moreover, comes in the wake of other historical work, by Jeffrey Collins and others, that has provided further grounds for abandoning the Cambridge view of Locke. These developments have yet to lead to a serious reengagement with Strauss's interpretation of Locke, but they should, because his controversial claim about Locke's debt to Hobbes has been vindicated.

Gandhi famously shook the foundations of the British Empire and sparked the beginning of a new anti-imperial era. But his critique of empire does not quite fit the familiar script of twentieth-century anti-imperialism. Gandhi's positions ranged from sincere expressions of imperial loyalty to a condemnation of English civilization while endorsing its moral empire, to an unqualified disavowal of the Britsh Empire without necessarily claiming independence. Reconstructing the long arc of his (anti-)imperial thought, this article shows that the idea of empire operated in the early Gandhi's thought in two ways: as the authorizing source of the rights of Indians and as the addressee of political claims. This genealogy helps explain the complex trajectory of his two separate breaks from empire. The article ultimately suggests that the key to understanding the global resonance of Gandhi's ideas lies in his transformation of the imperial adversary into a universal addressee of action.

Building on studies by Thomas L. Pangle and Robert C. Bartlett, this article contends that Montesquieu's rhetorical moderation with respect to religion in The Spirit of the Laws serves a substantively radical project, that is, the gradual diminution of religious devotion through the spread of liberal-commercial civilization. Taking up the major passages of praise for religion in general and for Christianity in particular, I examine the strategy that allows Montesquieu to claim the mantle of moderation in spite of his radicalism on this crucial issue: allowing his prominently advertised positions to be undercut by his own historical observations and comparisons, and thus teaching by contradictions. I also argue that, notwithstanding his claim to be treating faith merely from a practical point of view, Montesquieu offers a theoretical challenge to revealed religion.

Xenophon's reputation as a thinker of the highest order has been rehabilitated thanks principally to the work of Leo Strauss, his students, and his students’ students in political theory. Evidence of Xenophon's rehabilitated reputation is also the recent growth in Xenophon studies in academic fields outside political theory—classics, history, and philosophy—by scholars who are unaffiliated with Strauss, some of whom are even deeply critical of him, among them Paul Cartledge, Louis-André Dorion, Vivienne Gray, and Christopher Tuplin. There is also the success of the Landmark editions of Xenophon's Hellenika and Anabasis. To this growing body of scholarly literature, three monographs devoted to Xenophon's Socratic writings are now added. Thomas Pangle has written two excellent books, The Socratic Way of Life: Xenophon's “Memorabilia” and Socrates Founding Political Philosophy in Xenophon's “Economist,” “Symposium,” and “Apology.” Additionally, Dustin Sebell has written a penetrating analysis of Book IV of Xenophon's Memorabilia, titled Xenophon's Socratic Education: Reason, Religion, and the Limits of Politics.

Through a new argumentative strategy, this article shows that the claims offered by some contemporary Confucian scholars in support of hierarchical social relations do not hold in contemporary societies. Exegetical disagreements that are arguably difficult to overcome are sidestepped and empirical claims in support of hierarchical Confucianism are assessed. Empirical evidence and recent developments in Western philosophy suggest that social hierarchies are detrimental to key factors for people's material well-being, ethical development, and the political order. Egalitarian social relations organized in a representative democratic system appear to be more suitable for the pursuit of the fundamental aims of a Confucian government which are accepted by the proponents of hierarchical Confucianism.