This paper seeks to clarify the long-standing controversy over Aristotle's relationship to the natural law tradition. The paper argues that a precondition for any adequate assessment of Aristotle's natural law credentials is a close analysis of the Nicomachean Ethics V.7 discussion of the just by nature. Such an investigation, the primary concern of section 1, reveals that Aristotle's characterization of the politically just as partly natural and partly conventional does entail that nature serves as a normative ground for just law. With this conclusion in place, section 2 then turns more directly to Aristotle's relation to the natural law tradition. Despite important differences between Aristotle's account of the normative foundations of law and those found in the paradigmatic natural law teachings of the Stoics and Aquinas, I argue, there are nonetheless features of later natural law thought on the purpose and evaluation of law which are genuinely Aristotelian in orientation.

In actual regimes as described by Aristotle, authoritative civic choices were not the outcome of speech among citizens about the noble things and the just things. Rather, he saw them as products of the flawed presuppositions and misperceptions of dominant factions. Since he held that the human good was dependent on the persistence of lawful systems of rule, no matter how flawed, he viewed the tendency of dominant factions toward regime-destructive extremism as the fundamental political problem. His short-term response was to teach manipulative rhetoric and the outline of a strategy for regime preservation to his students. This equipped his students to prevail against the speech of the ignorant and malevolent and impressed those students with the need to acquire political knowledge. His long-term response was the initiation of a system of education that would turn citizens away from regime-destructive predilections.

Although Machiavelli argues that “return to first principles” is a necessary and perhaps even sufficient condition for counteracting political corruption, few scholars have engaged in a sustained textual analysis of Discourses III.1, the chapter in which he outlines the meaning of this enigmatic concept. Reassessing Machiavelli's exempla in this chapter will reveal that return to first principles consists in the revival of the ethos of innovation and public-spiritedness that accompanies every successful political founding. This process of renewal entails reviving the psychological forces that initially guide human beings to establish new political orders, including fear of violent death and longing for glory. Existing interpretations of D III.1 have tended to emphasize renewal through fear-invoking punishment, neglecting Machiavelli's examples of renewal through exemplary acts of civic virtue. A careful analysis of instruments and agents of return to first principles will illustrate how both spectacular punishment and virtuous acts of self-sacrifice converge to counteract corruption and foster political innovation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is well known for his love of the ancients. His use of examples from Sparta and republican Rome emphasized what he found lacking in modern times. This article attempts to establish how Rousseau's views on the ancients are related to his religious-political thought, particularly as it relates to his description of citizen religion in the last chapter of the Social Contract. While Rousseau admired many aspects of citizen religion, he rejects it for two reasons: reasons of humanity in the Geneva Manuscript and reasons of self-interest in the Social Contract. This article attempts to understand how the two can be reconciled through the view of citizen religion's contribution to patriotism and fanaticism.

This paper takes up a deep objection to liberalism associated most clearly with Edmund Burke, that liberalism's tendency to rapid change from generation to generation frustrates a fundamental human desire to participate in what is unchanging. To address this criticism, I examine Kant's political theory from the 1780s and 1790s, focusing on the themes of perpetual peace, revolution, and punishment. I argue that for Kant, the liberal community is best understood as an enduring partnership for the liberation of humanity, rather than as a partnership to protect material interests or rights. Understanding Kant's liberalism in this way confronts Burke's challenge and also helps solve some difficult puzzles in Kant scholarship.

This paper separates Wollstonecraft's critical concept of “machiavelian” power and the capacity for domination, from a neutral concept of politics as the complex processes surrounding the power to govern, from her normative account of popular sovereignty which emphasizes collective political power to ensure the discharge of natural duty by way of civil and political rights and duties. Wollstonecraft's voice as political judge—which is audible throughout her work, but particularly clearly in her book on the French Revolution—articulates the ways that political power can be abused and misused, and can also be effective. Her theory is political in several ways: she interrogates the nature of political power and its explanatory importance; she consistently articulates political judgment about matters both conventionally political and social; she offers a theoretical justification for the expansion of the scope of politics to cover relations that hitherto were thought to be outside its domain; and finally her work itself constitutes a political intervention.

This article provides a reinterpretation of Kantian honor to resolve an ongoing debate concerning Kant's mixed attitude toward honor and to clarify the political implications of honor. Kant develops two distinct types of honor in his practical philosophy: natural honor as a human desire and ethical honor as a transcendental virtue. The conflict between these two types of honor can be resolved not in Kant's ethics but in his political theory, which tolerates nonmoral motivations owing to their positive impact on politics and which presumes an imperfect world where political authority has difficulties in properly punishing disrespect. As a viable motivation for citizens to fight disrespect in a principled way, a reformed Kantian honor that combines the normative content of ethical honor and the motivating power of natural honor into a single whole can be conducive to the politics of mutual respect.

This essay reads Euripides's Medea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the making of a refugee. Alongside the common claim that the drama depicting a wife murdering her children to punish an unfaithful husband is about gender inequity, I draw out another dimension: that the text's exploration of women's subordination doubles as a rendering of refuge seeking. Euripides introduces Medea as a phugas, the term for a person exiled, on the run, displaced, vulnerable, and in need of refuge. I adopt the phugas as a lens for interpreting the tragedy and generating enduring insights into dynamics of “forced” migration. Taking this political predicament as the organizing question of the text enables us to understand how dislocation from the gender-structured family can produce physical displacement and a need for asylum while casting the political meaning of Medea's kin violence in a new light.

This paper offers a new account of Nietzsche's critique of morality in the first treatise of his On the Genealogy of Morality. According to the general view, Nietzsche places political revenge at the center of slave morality: the priest invents slave morality in order to rule the noble. I argue that this view is incomplete, for Nietzsche's deeper critique reveals that the priest's revenge is not purely political but also radically ontological. Ultimately, the priest aims at supplanting not just the noble but also the rule of nature. This reading reveals the priest's attempt to transform the natural order of rank through imagining the human being as subject to the omnipotent God of monotheism, i.e., the “just God.” This interpretation not only broadens our understanding of Nietzsche's critique of morality but also clarifies its purpose, namely, to show us how the demand for morality can blind us to the world's truths.

Some contend that politics functions best when deference is given to tradition and authoritative community norms, while others argue for the importance of independent thought and doubt about received sources of authority. Insight into this question can be found in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. While Tocqueville is often taken to regard the doubt characteristic of intellectual independence solely as a pathology, I show that he also saw it as a potential precursor to conversation, a stimulus to self-assured conviction, and a counter to distortionary abstractions. Nonetheless, Tocqueville also elaborates the destructive outcomes of too much doubt and intellectual independence. I identify the ways in which he seeks to discipline and educate the drive to independent thought so as to attain its benefits without falling victim to its pathologies. In doing so, I demonstrate the ways in which Tocqueville can be a guide to navigating the perennial tension between intellectual inquiry and authoritative community norms.

This paper examines the social contract theories of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke, highlighting the failure of their contractarian defenses of the military and military service. In order to ground the duties of military service, each theorist presumes a chivalric gender order wherein men as men are expected to be willing to sacrifice themselves as violent instruments for the sake of their families and communities. While Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf use the contract method to defend absolute, or near absolute, political authority wherein subject's primary political obligation is to serve the sovereign in war upon command, Locke uses the contract method to create a liberal political order that preserves the natural rights of subjects. Nevertheless, Locke maintains the commitment to self-sacrificial military service. In Locke, then, the military is peeled away from liberal civil society and we see the first statement of the civil-military distinction that persists today.

Political theorists often interrogate the constitution of “the people” as a formal theoretical problem. They have paid less attention, however, to how this problem confronts actors directly engaged in political crises, not as a problem of formal theory, but as an urgent problem of practice. Between 1771 and 1783, prominent Bostonians delivered passionate orations to memorialize the Boston Massacre on the annual observance of “Massacre Day.” Rather than focusing abstractly on the people as a formal problem, I turn to this neglected political holiday, examining it through the lenses of affect, performance, and narrative, to demonstrate how orators confronted the pressing problem of making a people. Using public rituals and speech to promote an identity that united powerful emotions with political principles, orators negotiated the paradoxical nature of the people by constructing a model of subjectivity, the patriotic zealot, that intensified political differences and motivated extreme political action.

Seventeenth-century English common lawyer Sir John Davies sets forth, in his Irish Reports, a provocative and interesting argument on the nature of custom and its relation to the common law. This relatively unexplored argument shows how actions may emerge from conditions of liberty and slowly acquire qualities of social benefit and agreeability that are essential if the common law is to be identified with custom. Davies not only provides a coherent account of how custom might possess some reasonability, but he also seems to suggest that custom is unintended, thereby anticipating a theme found in eighteenth-century thinkers such as Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, and Burke. In addition, Davies's account has important implications for political theory: the priority of the social over the political and a notion of political consent that arises via custom itself.

A growing number of political activists and scholars defend the idea of state-based or political-institutional civil disobedience: they locate civil disobedience's agency in state rather than civil society–based actors. Diverging from older ideas of civil disobedience as directed against government, the concept of institutional disobedience raises tough questions its exponents have not yet fully answered. Civil disobedience has usually referred to politically motivated lawbreaking that is morally conscientious, nonviolent, and demonstrates basic respect for law. Because of the modern state's normatively ambivalent traits (e.g., its monopoly on legitimate coercion), political-institutional disobedience is incompatible with minimally acceptable interpretations of civil disobedience's core components. Political-institutional civil disobedience's advocates mischaracterize what they in fact are proposing, namely, disobedience to the law by individual state officials. Such offiical disobedience poses challenges distinct from and probably greater than civil society–based disobedience.

I argue that Nietzsche offers an account of how strong political states develop and how the highest forms of individuality emerge when the political will of these strong states weakens. Communities develop strength in proportion to the hostility of their environment. In order to flourish in a hostile environment, they must cultivate powerful and ambitious citizens by intensifying their most powerful drives, such as a lust for power. To control these citizens they must ruthlessly suppress individuality and allow these drives to be discharged in ways that do not threaten the community. This is achieved through an inflexible value system. When the political will of the state declines and this moral code weakens, the highest forms of individuality emerge. This account clarifies why Nietzsche tends to praise aristocratic states and brings into focus the obstacles to achieving the highest forms of human flourishing within a democratic state.

Abul Aʿla Maududi (1903–1979), the influential Indo-Pakistani Islamist thinker, proposed a detailed vision of what he called “theodemocracy.” This has been seen widely as a theocracy despite Maududi's explicit rejection of the term and its philosophical underpinnings. I suggest here that Maududi's vision of theodemocracy opens up a productive space for reflection on the relationship between popular and state sovereignty. Maududi saw popular sovereignty as an ethical problem; it corrupted the potential for individual moral development that the institutional mechanism of the state could otherwise allow for. Highlighting the complicated relationship of his ideas with colonial rule, and showing that he used the colonial liberal state as both a foil and model for his analysis, I argue here that “theodemocracy” was his attempt at divorcing sovereignty from the state. This endeavor generated creative tensions, and forms an important contribution to the global discussion about sovereignty and the state.

Edmund Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings for his conduct as governor-general in India represented the era's most serious internal challenge to British imperialism. But the impeachment's legal and institutional implications have been neglected. The central points of contention were the nature of impeachment in Britain and the nature of law in India. Burke insisted that impeachment must override the “low” and “mean” standards of the common law, yet he celebrated India for its dense judicial institutions. Hastings took the opposite position, demanding that the impeachment adhere strictly to the common law, yet defending his conduct in India by appeal to its political expediency, rather than its lawfulness. Each found himself in a “rhetorical contradiction,” alternately arguing in praise of, and in critique of, legal reasoning and procedures. While Hastings attempted to surmount the contradiction through the discourse of realism, Burke turned to the discourse of natural law—a language of lawfulness without legalism.

It would not be hard to write an essay that treats The Cat in the Hat as a fable for the United States in the age of President Donald Trump. An unpredictable and charismatic figure in a trademark red and white hat (the Cat) blasts onto the stage, upending the unwritten rules of decorum with his wild antics to the simultaneous delight and befuddlement of his constituency (“Sally and I”) all while hectoring nay-sayers (the fish) fret and declare that this is quite irregular and should not be tolerated until things get out of hand and order is reestablished, but not without a sneaking sense that allowing this to have happened at all is a frightening transgression (“Now, what should we do? What would you do if your mother asked you?”). Thankfully, one of America's most influential experimental writers already did it for us, in 1968, when Robert Coover published The Cat in the Hat for President: A Political Fable.

Followers of Leo Strauss have criticized Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the activity of philosophy as historicist. MacIntyre himself has been dismissive of Strauss. I argue that these apparent disagreements obscure their deeper agreements about the activity of philosophy. Rather than holding to historicism, MacIntyre's account of philosophy has a strong symmetry with Strauss's. To counter modern dogmatism, both Strauss and MacIntyre argue for a balanced mixture of history and philosophy to contend that philosophy's task is to gain knowledge of natural reality. Yet both place similar epistemic limits on philosophy, arguing that philosophy's gains are modest and always open to revision. Moreover, both hold that no authority other than human reason can direct the activity of philosophy. Putting MacIntyre and Strauss in a more careful conversation enriches the account of the fundamental philosophical problems that each addresses.