Living in the post-9/11 world that we do, it is evident that the contemporary world continues to be very much vulnerable to political disruptions emanating from theocratic politics; and in that sense, any secularist hopes that may have been entertained for a political domestication of religion are far from having been fulfilled. That in turn suggests to us that the concerns that animated the great seventeenth-century struggle against clerical power and theocratic authority are enduring ones, and that we have reason to continue to engage intellectually with critics of priestcraft like Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. Within that broader context, this article concerns itself with Harrington in particular, focusing on his efforts in his polemical writings of the late 1650s to draw resources for Erastian politics from a Hobbes-inspired account of the Hebrew republic.

The Book of Jonah depicts the tension between justice and mercy. Jonah's peculiar community, the “chosen” people, does not merely provide security and prosperity, but aims to shape the souls of its own members, and, eventually, of all human beings. The parable is optimistic about the possibility of justice in a world of distinct peoples. But on an individual level it is tragic, because Jonah himself fails to reach a practicable view of justice for imperfect but educable fellows and foreigners. He himself remains a distorted human being, deficient especially in his use of language, neither beast nor god, but, in the end, outside any community. As a reading on the highest holiday of the Jewish year, the story has a special place among Jonah's people. Neither homily nor sermon, it is an example of public storytelling as an instrument of education.

In Henry VIII, Shakespeare looks beyond religious conflict to express a larger moral—and Christian—vision. He offers a panorama of Christian virtues and characters who manifest them, indicating by their actions and sufferings the role their virtues might play in supporting nobility and justice. He also finds support in Christianity for deriving noble and base from the character of one's soul rather than from birth and for a reliance on fair judicial procedure rather than on the sword for the protection of justice. Finally, in the relation between Henry VIII and Archbishop Cranmer, Shakespeare illustrates a politics that protects religious belief from persecution. Henry VIII offers a vision of the virtues of Christianity that could contribute to a good political community, or at least to understanding what such a community entails.

Hugo Grotius is often seen as reducing justice to the systematic protection of individual rights. However, this reading struggles to account for the surprisingly robust place he accords to punishment. An offender cannot plausibly claim punishment as a right, and the right to punish gives little direction about how best to carry out punishment. These difficulties point toward Grotius's little-noticed bifurcation of justice into “expletive” and “attributive” categories. While expletive (or “strict”) justice provides a grounding for the right to punish, its subsequent exercise must be governed by attributive justice. This higher justice considers persons and situations; requires imagination and prudential judgment; looks to the future; aims for the common good; acknowledges the importance of virtue; and never claims perfect solutions. Thus, Grotius's supposedly modern understanding of natural rights is best understood within an account of his specifically political thought—one that acknowledges an overarching framework of classical natural Right.

Contemporary American discourse is saturated with worries about, or hopes for, America's decline. However, fears of America's decline have been a persistent theme of American writing since the second generation of New England Puritans, worries contained in the genre of the Americanized jeremiad. I will argue that Arendt's On Revolution should be read as a jeremiad that both repeats and problematizes the spiritual/material opposition of the classic American decline narrative. Seeing On Revolution as a jeremiad—a literary form central to American writing and dominated by a mood of despair and lamentation over decline that also issues in a positive call to remembrance and action—enables us to better account for a persistently misunderstood feature of Arendt's argument and to use the text as a political and theoretical resource for responding to powerful and unsettling political movements dominating American politics.

This paper sets out to criticize Thomas Pangle's and Paul Rahe's reading of The Spirit of the Laws as a contribution to liberal republicanism, arguing instead that Montesquieu's text is better understood as a defense of liberal monarchism. Pangle's and Rahe's interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws as an unequivocal defense of the English modern republic is wrongheaded. Montesquieu in fact spent much more of his time and energy outlining another and very different political model, moderate monarchy, embodied not by England but by the government under which he lived—France. This conclusion has profound implications for our understanding not just of The Spirit of the Laws but also of the history of early modern political thought more generally speaking, showing that the political debate of this period cannot be reduced to a struggle between classical and modern republicans.

This essay argues that Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity provides a morally robust argument for religious pluralism—one which avoids the pitfalls of relativism and official neutrality by elucidating the need for a civil religion of toleration. The work thus contains Locke's friendly critique of his more radical Enlightenment contemporaries who had openly debunked the Bible. This critique is friendly, I argue, because Locke ultimately agrees with Spinoza and Hobbes about revelation, miracles, and religion's psychological causes. While Locke joined these thinkers in a common project to make Christianity less sacrificial and friendlier to enlightened selfishness, his analysis also reveals the need to retain some of its self-abnegating spirit in liberalism's service. But Locke has difficulty accounting for that spirit itself, and this problem in one of liberalism's original theorists may help explain the dissatisfactions and anxieties troubling tolerant societies today.

Joseph Addison's 1713 play, Cato: A Tragedy, dramatizes the final days of Cato the Younger's resistance to Julius Caesar before his eventual suicide at Utica in 46 BC. Although Addison initially seems to present Cato as a model for emulation, we argue that Addison is ultimately critical of both Cato and the Stoicism he embodies. Via the play's romantic subplot and via his work as an essayist, Addison offers a revision of the Catonic model, reworking it into a gentler model that elevates qualities such as love, friendship, and sympathy and that is more appropriate to the type of peaceful civil and commercial society he wishes to promote.

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is most famous and controversial for Burke's opposition to the philosophy behind the Revolution. This essay examines Burke's more practical criticisms of the French National Assembly which pervade the pamphlet, and shows their connection to his earlier arguments about corruption in the House of Commons. Burke's insight into the future course of the French Revolution is based in his distinctive approach to thinking about the pathologies of legislative assemblies, which he initially developed in the House of Commons, and later applied to the French National Assembly.

In opposing foundationalism to antifoundationalism, recent political theory betrays its blindness to a third alternative. As suggested by the most influential critics of Kant, the ground of meaning and normativity is neither the human mind—or autonomous constructions of reason—nor historically given forms of life, but the interaction between them, that is, the human openness to the intelligibility granted us by “the things themselves.” This paper articulates that ground in its historical genesis, as it arises in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's defense of a classical conception of reason against modern rationalism, and further developed by Edmund Husserl and the young Leo Strauss. I argue that critics and followers of Strauss have forgotten the phenomenological grounds of his thought in the “fundamental problems” arising from the structure of human experience.

Collective memory is an important source of social stability, allowing human beings and political communities to integrate new experiences into existing narrative frameworks. In addition to sustaining individual and group identities, remembrance can also maintain cycles of hatred. Building on Arendt's political theory, I present an alternative interpretation of memory as a resource for political change following historical ruptures. This constructive reading focuses on the ability of communities to create new futures out of the shattered pieces of the past. For Arendt, the experience of totalitarianism was a caesura that made nationalist histories, and the nation-state that came with these interpretations of the past, untenable. Following such breaks, communities must reconstruct the past into new narratives. Arendt's unexpected early support for European integration—despite its supranational, technocratic, and economistic qualities—is an example of how memory can function as a resource for political transformation in the aftermath of historical ruptures.

Hannah Arendt argued that the American Revolution revealed for the first time that all regimes require a reference to an absolute, while the French Revolution revealed that not all absolutes are equal. The American Revolution took as its absolute the act of founding itself, upon which the authority of the constitution could be grounded. By contrast, the failure of the French Revolution to establish an authority stemmed from its reference to the transcendental absolute of the nation. Beginnings, for Arendt, are historically determining. How then are we to explain the present view of authority in Germany which takes as its absolute referent the Holocaust? And how does this inform our understanding of the relationship between absolutes and new foundations? We argue that the key to understanding the German case is found in the particular nature of postwar German memory politics and that authority is not statically related to positive foundations.

Benjamin Franklin divides the mistakes he lists in the Autobiography into “errata” and “great errata.” He derived no benefit from the latter, but some benefit from the former. Examining Franklin's regret, or lack of regret, at these errata opens a window onto Franklin's understanding of morality. The laxity in his list of virtues and his flexibility with regard to conventional morals stem from the insight Franklin tells us he gained from these errata. For Franklin, or at least his persona in the Autobiography, there was no conflict between egoism and altruism, and he is therefore the embodiment of a type of self-interest well understood. Tracing the story of the errata, which Franklin inserted into an earlier draft of the work's first part, and Franklin's later actions provides the key to understanding the rhetorical strategy of the Autobiography, and the reason he never wrote his proposed Art of Virtue.

The two papers published here for the first time were written by Leo Strauss (1899–1973) in or around 1945, when he was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City. One of Strauss's colleagues at the New School was Kurt Riezler (1882–1955). Riezler had earned a PhD in classics, but had an even more distinguished career as a practical politician; he had been a high-ranking cabinet member in both Imperial and Weimar Germany and a drafter of the Weimar constitution. He had wide-ranging scholarly interests, having written books on the theoretical foundations of politics, art, ancient philosophy, and the fundamental structure of social life. Because they shared an interest in the foundations of social science, he and Strauss co-taught a couple of courses in the mid-1940s (on Aristotle's De anima and Descartes's Passions of the Soul [along with Solomon Asch], and on Plato's Theaetetus [along with Alexandre Koyré]). Strauss indicated the enduring respect he had for Riezler in a eulogy he wrote for him in 1955 and republished as the concluding essay in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies in 1959.

Despite a recent resurgence of interest in friendship and a seemingly inexhaustible fascination with Rousseau, scholars have neglected Rousseau's conception of friendship. The work that does exist emphasizes friendship's ability to inculcate virtue, and moors Rousseau to the classical notion that friendship catalyzes ethical improvement. However, Rousseau lowers the aim of friendship by decoupling it from the process of moral learning and putting limits on the degree of intimacy between friends. The argument is made in four steps. First, Rousseau's theory of friendship differs from its relevant predecessors in both origin and end. Second, the effort to ground friendship in pity bounds emotional intimacy, since pity introduces elements of character difference as well as sameness. Third, Rousseauan friendship fails to catalyze virtue and is successful instead in providing consolation. Finally, the essay considers the function of friendship in a Rousseauan polity.

Advocates for the equality and dignity of LGBT persons often suggest that the immutability of sexual orientation is their strongest argument. I believe that it is a weak one. First, the individual freedom that liberalism accords to people, absent harm to others, as necessary for human flourishing applies to sexuality as well as to other areas of existence. Second, the distinction often made between status and conduct is a false one, and the argument from immutability effectively protects neither. Third, I examine the notion of constitutive choice, arguing that the line between immutability and choice is more complex than many realize. Finally, greater attention to the notion of constitutive choice may broaden liberalism's hospitality to conceptions of the good in ways that better respect human moral agency and autonomy.

Nietzsche and Tocqueville share a common concern with the tendency to mediocrity and loss of human greatness in democratic life. This essay explores the many similarities in their diagnoses of this problem, which they both view from the distinctive standpoint of aristocracy. Both thinkers focus on the way in which the individualism, preoccupation with material comfort, restlessness, and valorization of compassion that belong to democracy undermine human aspiration, intellectual excellence, and spiritual depth. Nevertheless, they differ sharply in their responses to the problem of human greatness in democracy. Tocqueville calls chiefly upon religion to elevate democratic citizens but otherwise resigns himself to the mediocrity that comes with democratic life. Nietzsche starts from the pessimistic premise that God is dead but more optimistically affirms the possibility of reestablishing aristocracy and finding a new greatness for human beings. The essay ultimately finds Nietzsche's solution more convincing but not without difficulties.

Berlin is often taken to have exaggerated his case against positive liberty, since contrary to what he seems to argue, several versions of it do not logically justify coercion. A more historical interpretation of his warnings may save him from this accusation, yet on the other hand suggests his message is of little relevance for contemporary liberalism. In contrast to both these approaches, this essay considers a third and largely neglected aspect of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” that speaks more directly to the challenges facing liberalism today: Berlin's warning that positive liberty invites the specific kind of coercion that parades as liberation, and that it does so according to a psychologically predictable pattern. After reconstructing this undercurrent in Berlin's critique of positive liberty, this essay also considers the relevance of Berlin's warnings to contemporary European debates on banning the Muslim veil in the name of liberation.

With a view to elaborating a developmental theory of constitutionalism in the United States, this essay explores the relationship among constitutional, criminal, and civil law. It supports, with relevant case materials, a single proposition: civil litigants are afforded contested constitutional protections in federal court to the extent that the judges attribute an aspect of criminality to the underlying facts or issues in question. The essay tests this proposition in the areas of punitive damages, double jeopardy, and constitutional torts; discusses the mirroring of the stipulated pattern in legal maneuvering on constitutional issues; and briefly spells out its implications for the larger theory.