Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence defends an inherent and individual right to the pursuit of happiness. For Jefferson, this right dramatically limited Christianity's role in politics. In any case, when drafting the Declaration, Jefferson thought Christianity largely irrelevant, if not inimical, to America's well-being. However, shortly before becoming president, several events transformed Jefferson's private thoughts about Christianity and its public utility. Careful attention to both the text and context of Jefferson's First Inaugural (a significant Jeffersonian document, but one that has never been examined in great detail by political theorists and intellectual historians) reveals that Jefferson came to embrace the teachings of a rationalized version of the New Testament in a way that lightly amends the liberal paradigm of his Declaration. Without significantly altering his commitment to a rights-based government of limited proportions, Jefferson's First Inaugural bespeaks the new political importance he placed on widely cultivating a largely demystified sense of Christian charity.

Was Leo Strauss wrong about John Locke? Surely that he was has been the consensus among historians of political thought, though their reasons are sometimes at variance. The Cambridge school, influenced by the work of John Dunn, interprets Locke's work in the light of the Calvinism in his family background. Though attacked by spokesmen for the Church of England, Locke quickly gained admirers among dissenting clergy, for his psychology, his politics, and of course his program for religious toleration, and the proponents of the Calvinist interpreta tion explain why: His discourse closely tracks the theological language of his Calvinist contemporaries. Richard Ashcraft, meanwhile, sought to restore Locke's reputation as a revolutionary by investigating his role in English politics under the Restoration, albeit at the price of reducing the Two Treatises to a tract for the moment. James Tully would likewise save him from the charge of being a capitalist apologist, insisting Locke merely offered a defense of Whig landholding, with the responsibilities as well as the privileges embedded in the English law of estate. All these interpretations dismiss or disregard Strauss's account of Locke as an atheist in the mold of Hobbes and Spinoza who succeeded by his mastery of the art of esoteric writing in concealing his unbelief; as the most successful, because most prudent, proponent of the modern doctrine of natural rights, which revolutionized politics around the world; and as the theorist who prepared the way for modern capitalism by his vigorous defense of unlimited acquisition.

In recent years, Alasdair MacIntyre has supplemented his longstanding critique of the liberal nation-state with a defense, grounded largely in an interpretation of the writings of Aquinas, of the politics of the common good as embodied exclusively in local communities. Even after MacIntyre's account of local politics has been clarified and distinguished from the distortions of some of his critics, there remain weaknesses, chief among which are that the local communities he promotes are pre- or subpolitical and that his hasty dismissal of modern politics involves the sort of caricature of existing political realities alien to Aquinas's prudential assessment of regimes.

James Stoner locates my work on Locke as part of a somewhat broader current we might call “Straussian revisionism.” A group of us who were students of, or influenced by Leo Strauss seek “to return to the early moderns” like Locke “for adequate guidance.” He notes that this “return” has something to do with America, for all of us, in one way or another, look to Locke in the old-fashioned way, as “America's philosopher.” I will not presume to speak here for the others he identifies as part of this current, but I believe he speaks correctly for the most part of my own work. My one reservation concerns his attribution of motive: I came to differ with Strauss on the meaning of Locke not because I sought to find “adequate guidance” in Locke, but because over time parts of Strauss's reading of Locke did not seem adequate to me. A consequence of understanding Locke differently is that he has come to look capable of supplying more “adequate guidance” than Strauss thought he could.

I believe there are three main matters on which Stoner disagrees with my “Straussian revisionism.” First, is Locke rather than Hobbes the founder of liberalism? Second, am I correct to argue that Locke grounds natural right differently than Hobbes? And third, can Locke, as I read him, supply us “guidance”? Does he respond to certain deficiencies Stoner identifies?

This essay begins with the assumption that Richard Rorty means everything he says; its question, however, is ultimately why he says everything he means. Politically speaking, for someone who is unconstrained by metaphysical concerns about the “right” or the “good,” what counts is not being right, but being successful. Hence my question for Rorty is simply this: why be honest when deception might be more effective? I contend that in the context of American political culture that his honest practice of his philosophy undermines his politics. Unlike other critical accounts, mine focuses on his tactics and Rorty's own failure to accept the burdens and possibilities of his own theoretical work. I then offer Rorty a model of deception for his consideration from Miguel de Unamuno's short story “St. Emmanuel the Good, Martyr,” that he might have made use of had he been more interested in political results than in being thought honest.

This article seeks to refute the prevailing scholarly view that Hamilton, like the Founders generally, lacked a deep concern about slavery. The first part examines Hamilton's political principles and shows that they were not Hobbesian but consistent with the views of more traditional natural law theorists. Accordingly, Hamilton understood that the natural rights of man imposed a corresponding duty to end slavery. The second part examines Hamilton's endorsement of a compensated emancipation, his opinions of the Constitution, his conduct of American foreign policy, his involvement in the state abolition societies, and his economic policies to demonstrate that ending slavery was in fact one of his abiding concerns.

In ancient Greece and ancient China, small states engaged in intense military competition and incessant warfare. In such contexts, there was naturally much emphasis on the training of soldiers. One might have expected state-sponsored physical education to develop as a by-product of the need to train soldiers, but the historical record shows that ancient Greek states placed far more emphasis on physical education compared to their counterparts in ancient China. This essay attempts to (partly) explain the divergent outcomes with reference to the idea of citizenship. The first part outlines the practice and philosophy of state-sponsored physical education in ancient Greece and ancient China and addresses the question of why the two ancient civilizations should be compared in this respect. The main body of the article discusses the political differences between ancient Greece and ancient China that help to explain the different outcomes regarding state-sponsored physical education. The last part ends with some normative reflections that may be relevant for present-day societies.

Constitutional theory has recently turned to the importance of extrajudicial constitutional interpretation. Yet much of the scholarly debate remains rooted in “legal” views of the Constitution, which continue to give primacy to the Court. This article seeks to go further by articulating a Madisonian view of the Constitution, which resituates questions of interpretation within a larger institutional framework. This Madisonian view suggests that the Constitution calls forth continual debate about constitutional meaning. The “settlement” of constitutional issues is not an essential feature of our constitutional system and, thus, constitutional politics with overlapping views, discontinuities, and essentially unsettled meanings are inherent features of the Madisonian Constitution. Recovering the Madisonian vision is an essential step in restoring both the political branches and the Court to the proper place in the constitutional scheme and, in doing so, overcoming the deeply ingrained myth of judicial supremacy.

Eric Voegelin's genius shines in his insight that the crisis of Modernity sprang less from naturalistic relativism than from unrestrained religious absolutism. Voegelin saw two sides to this genesis: first, the growing millennial speculation fueled in the late medieval period engendered apocalyptic claims by political leaders; second, the civilizational instability in the West tempted political followers to grasp the straws of apocalyptic claims. Yet Voegelin made two questionable claims here: that the “Gnosticism” of the Modern age had its roots in the Christian experience, and that the Protestant Reformation most explicitly nourished its growth. While the Christian faith appears to present a temptation to millennial claims, Voegelin's argument regarding the required civilizational accommodation of the church and the prior “spiritual stamina” of the faithful is problematic. Moreover, Voegelin's characterizing John Calvin's project in particular as Gnostic anti-intellectualism manifesting an obvious will to power has no sound basis in Calvin's writings.

It was not the exquisite self-consciousness of a Henry James that I had in mind when I wondered about equality and hierarchy in Locke, but the assertive self-consciousness or—what is for Locke ultimately the same—self-interestedness of an Andrew Carnegie, as exemplified both in the acquisition and the dispersion of his fortune. After all, it was Locke's genius in chapter five of the Second Treatise to make the case for private property on different grounds than had Aristotle because he conceived of property in a different way: as the fruit, not of nature, but of human creativity, less interesting for its use in leisure than for its origin in labor. As Strauss and even Zuckert have suggested, the brilliance of Locke's argument does not eclipse its underlying contradiction, that on the one hand the initial right to acquire seems to depend on there being “enough and as good” left for others, as though man lived amidst natural plenty, while on the other hand the account of the progressive rise in value consequent to enclosure (and the post hoc justification for property rights that it implies) describes natural scarcity. Holding that “a man may deliberately contradict himself in order to indicate his thought rather than to reveal it,” Strauss takes Locke's “revolutionary” teaching about “‘dynamic’ property” to indicate his true intention:

The facts about friendship (objections a-d) used to support the view that the circumstances of justice are displaced by the circumstances of friendship (the Inverse Proportionality thesis) are, in Aquinas's own understanding of friendship, either not true —(a), (b), (d)—or (in my own view) irrelevant to the Inverse Proportionality thesis—(c).

Aquinas's theological view that there is no merit without (or “outside”) charity can also be expressed non-theologically: when two persons are separated by a wide gap, the actions of the inferior do not lay just claims on the superior unless the inferior is a friend. The inferior's actions become effective in entitling him to just deserts only when proportional equivalence between the superior's and the inferior's actions becomes possible. Proportional equivalence obtains only when the inferior's actions are seen as the common actions of both friends. An action is common to two persons when neither of the persons is merely a part or tool of the other, both cooperate freely, and both share reasons. Friends' actions are common actions.

It must be stressed that this reading of Aquinas's view does not lend support to the notion that friendship takes precedence over justice (“you only have justice if you have friendship first”). In this reading, Aquinas believes that, in the transition from a superiorinferior relationship to a relationship between partners, friendship and the possibility of just interaction arise concomitantly.

This essay examines various intellectual challenges posed by John Rawls's conception of an overlapping consensus, both in terms of his own approach and also that of Charles Taylor. Two questions are entertained: (1) whether various criticisms of Rawls's view are indeed justified and (2) if they are, whether Taylor puts them to rest. Though the latter question is answered somewhat in the negative, Taylor's version of overlapping consensus is interestingly different from that of Rawls in that Taylor introduces an important distinction between a tradition on the one hand and what Rawls terms a “comprehensive doctrine” on the other. The advantage of this distinction, among other things, is that it clarifies what is at stake in moving to any sort of overlapping consensus.

Locke can speak interestingly to the problem of transitional justice, that is, how to deal withthose who committed human rights abuses under authoritarian regimes once those regimes democratize. The essay focuses mainly on the “hard case” of transitional justice, in which former members of an authoritarian regime retain significant capacity for violence, and so the ability to threaten the new polity if attempts are made to punish them. Locke's law of nature suggests that human rights abusers should be punished, although not at the expense of social stability.But it also grounds the apparently un-Lockean claims, consistent with some of Locke's occasional writings, that abusers qua eschewers of reason may be treated as beasts that do not enjoy natural rights, and that little account need be taken of the victims of such abusers. Using Locke's thought in this way both illuminates it and clarifies what is at stake in the debate about transitional justice.

F. A. Hayek's theory of spontaneous order applies to more than the market. One implication is that different systems of rules generating different spontaneous orders are biased in favor of different values. Markets serve the values of consumers; democracies serve the values of citizens. No spontaneous order perfectly reflects human values because they simplify the context of choice in favor of core systemic values. This insight enables us to distinguish between systemic and individual resources, and tensions between them. It also enables us to develop models of systemic conflict. Of particular interest are interactions between democracies and markets whose rules reflect different values but influence one another. The increasing commodification of the press shifts this institution from reflecting both democratic and economic values more and more to purely economic values, undermining its capacity to serve citizens. Examples illustrating this argument are explored.

This article argues that Nietzsche uses a rhetorically modern appeal to enact the self-overcoming of modernity and the aim of enlightenment. It demonstrates how Nietzsche aims to move his readers from a prejudice in favor of truthfulness, by appearing to radicalize that aim, to a new measure of nobility. In contrast to some who present Nietzsche's styles as the means to convey a dispersion of meanings, this article argues that, designs his writing to move his age. He adopts the prejudices of his time in Beyond Good and Evil, his mature “critique of modernity” in order to demonstrate the self-overcoming of those prejudices. Beyond merely questioning the value of truth, Nietzsche evaluates by the measure of psychological strength, and describes the character of nobility beyond good and evil and beyond truth and falsity.

Richard Rorty makes the case that Friedrich Nietzsche shared a common pragmatism with William James in order to incorporate certain Nietzschean themes into neo-pragmatism and to give his philosophy stronger pragmatic credentials. In making this connection, he establishes a version of pragmatism that rejects both epistemology and metaphysics, reduces the pragmatic theory of truth to “truth is what works,” places the Darwinian account of man at the center of the human narrative, and makes Nietzschean “self-creation” the chief end of a postmodern, post-religious liberal society. But if one reads James more faithfully (a task that Rorty rejects), it is clear that James does not succumb to the nihilism, perspectivalism, and atheism characteristic of Rorty's Nietzschean pragmatism. A more comprehensive reading of James's philosophy brings together James's pragmatism, his pluralism, and his radical empiricism. And this more complete interpretation of James's pragmatism offers a pluralistic and hopeful approach to politics that does not suffer from Nietzsche's and Rorty's nihilistic, relativistic, and antipolitical tendencies.

In recent years, a number of political thinkers in philosophy, political theory and law have defended political theories which are deeply indebted to classical republicanism. Like classical republicans, these thinkers have claimed that a flourishing polity depends upon citizens' exercise of the civic virtues. Unlike classical republicans, some of these thinkers have defended what might be called “political republicanisms”—republicanisms which are also indebted to the methodological restraint of Rawls's political liberalism. The article argues that political republicanism suffers from a viability problem. Its list of civic virtues is too short. More worrisome, the public justifications that would be available to a political republican regime are not sufficient to motivate the development of the civic virtues. Therefore, if we are to be republicans, we should be “perfectionist republicans” instead.

Scholars have long been under the impression that the doctrines enunciated in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 and the Virginia Report of 1800 originated with the authors of those documents, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Yet this article demonstrates that it was not either of those two future presidents who concocted what Andrew Jackson would dub “the Virginia Doctrine.” That distinction belongs to Governor Edmund Randolph, a non-signer of the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention who became a leading voice for ratification in the Virginia Ratification Convention of 1788. The trajectory of Randolph's thinking regarding federalism and the story of his doctrine's effect in 1788 are recounted here. Ironically, the reading of the Constitution that would underpin various outbreaks of sectionalism in the antebellum period and later originated with a Federalist of 1788, not with an opponent of ratification.

Leo Strauss's “political” interpretation of Maimonides′ doctrine of prophecy is well known, as is his claim that the Guide of the Perplexed has two fundamentally different teachings: a literal teaching, and a more radical philosophic teaching. This essay attempts to show that, in Strauss's view, Maimonides′ doctrine of the prophet as philosopher-statesman belongs to the former only, while according to the latter, prophecy (revelation) simply does not exist. It does so by showing that, in Strauss's view, Maimonides indicates that the preconditions he lays down for the existence of prophecy—in particular, the combination of intellectual perfection with extreme asceticism—cannot possibly be met. It attempts to explain, moreover, why in Strauss's view Maimonides denies the existence of prophecy: namely, because irrational moral opinions are an essential cause of all so-called prophecy.