By examining Xunzi's and Mencius's contrary reactions toward royal transmission by individual merit or “abdication” (shanrang 禪讓), this article attempts to reveal the distinctive features of their respective political theories, which I reconstruct in terms of lizhi constitutionalism and dezhi constitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, this paper draws attention to the complex mixture of idealism and realism found in both thinkers' constitutional political theories and identifies such common ground in terms of “Confucian constitutionalism.” This paper presents Mencius's idealistic defense of abdication and his realistic resolution of the constitutional crisis latent in it, then it examines Xunzi's refutation of the three conventional rationalizations of abdication, and it concludes by recapitulating the common Confucian constitutionalist ground that Mencius and Xunzi shared and discussing its implications for the study of constitutional theory.

Alexander Hamilton's notes to his reading of two pairs of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Theseus-Romulus and Lycurgus-Numa, probably made in the winter of 1777–1778 at Valley Forge, reveal his early attention to the rewards of founding a new state, the natures and advantages of different political institutions, and economic, social, military, and cultural practices. They furnish a valuable testament to Hamilton's early intellectual development. He focuses on monarchy and the danger of tyranny and on the institutions by which states had limited the power of monarchs and of the popular will: the senate at Rome and the gerousia and later the ephors at Sparta. Hamilton admires Numa's use of religion to nourish civil society, while his interest in the Spartans' treatment of their helots is a testimony to his early concern about the problem of slavery.

Despite his statements that the fear of damnation is greater than the fear of violent death, scholars have generally overlooked Hobbes's vision of hell. Hobbes's reinterpretation of hell is meant to redirect peoples' anxiety about whether they will get into heaven or hell into anxiety about whether there is a hell and if so, what it will be like. He did not expect that citizens of his state would accept his theology or that they would become secularists or atheists. He hoped that they would be left with an indeterminate belief they would be averse to examining. This becomes clear when Hobbes's theology is seen in light of his epistemology and his complex rhetorical strategy. Hobbes's theology has been rejected, but there is an affinity between his hopes for indeterminate belief and the religious attitudes of many in the West.

Alexander the Great is often understood to be the first statesman to attempt a “universal state,” owing in large part to his philosophical education under Aristotle. This picture of Alexander informs many of his depictions in popular culture, and influences his appropriation in contemporary discourse on globalization. I argue here that Plutarch's Life of Alexander offers an alternative view of Alexander's political action, one that explains his imperial ambitions by focusing on his love of honor (philotimia) and the cultural indeterminacy of his native Macedon, rather than his exposure to philosophy. Plutarch's portrayal of Alexander provides a useful model for the study of globalization by showing how political expansion can arise from and give rise to indeterminate political identities.

John Locke's theory of property has been the subject of sustained contention between two major perspectives: a socioeconomic perspective, which conceives Locke's thought as an expression of the rising bourgeois sensibility and a defense of the nascent capitalist relations, and a theological perspective, which prioritizes his moral worldview grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. This essay argues that a closer analysis of Locke's theory of money in the Second Treatise can provide an alternative to this binary. It maintains that the notion of money comprises a conceptual area of indeterminacy in which the theological universals of the natural law and the historical fact of capital accumulation shade into each other. More specifically, the ambiguity of the status of money enables Locke to navigate an antinomy within the natural law such that he establishes a relation of necessity between the divine telos and accumulative practices.

This article engages the longstanding debate over Hobbes's use of rhetoric, with the aim of rethinking both the political logic of Leviathan and the way contemporary theorists approach rhetoric in relation to reason. Rhetoric was a particularly acute problem for Thomas Hobbes, whose pursuit of a stable political order may appear to require the absence of rhetoric and the presence of a purely rational order. This appearance is misleading, and it is suggested therefore that political theorists rethink how they understand rhetoric to grasp more fully Hobbes's understanding of political order. The common view that Hobbes resolves the problem of semantic indeterminacy must be questioned. Hobbes in effect understands that stable meaning structures are impossible to attain, even under Leviathan. This reworking suggests the need for refining our understanding of Hobbes, who envisions political order not by privileging reason over rhetoric, but by moving beyond engagements with language altogether.

Alexis de Tocqueville's account of the formation of the American regime identifies two constitutive moments: the Puritan colonization and the Revolution and the Constitution (1775–1789). Contrary to historians of the day, Tocqueville gave as much credit to the Puritans as to the Founders. Yet far from being a pure history, Tocqueville's narrative also had the purpose of promoting a new political foundation that replaced the philosophical doctrine of natural rights with an account based on “Customary History.” Tocqueville's approach was intended to further a great theoretical project inaugurated by Montesquieu that offered an alternative model to the mainstream Enlightenment position for how political philosophy should enter into and influence political life. This article analyzes the two-founding thesis, explores the underlying theoretical project on foundations of Tocqueville and Montesquieu, and presents and assesses the debate on the merits of attempting to change the political foundation of the American regime.

Most contemporary political theorists who have interpreted Sophocles' Antigone have focused on the fearsome clash between Antigone and Creon. The relationship between Antigone and her weaker, more cautious sister Ismene has not garnered similar attention. This essay addresses this gap by revisiting the tantalizing possibility that Ismene played a more significant role in resisting Creon than has often been assumed. The essay shifts the analysis of Antigone, first, by illuminating the complex and fraught relationship between two women and emphasizing the political and legal challenges that they face together as women. Second, the essay shifts focus from vertical power relations—that is, between the individual and government—to horizontal power relations between disempowered outsiders. On this reading, Antigone reveals less about the downfall of a character than it does about the political power of the weak and disadvantaged.

The moral theory of “mixed modes” John Locke presents in his Essay concerning Human Understanding is beset with paradoxes. On the one hand, he tells us that all mixed modes, including moral concepts, are “arbitrary” mental constructs. On the other hand, he speaks of an “eternal law” of right and wrong, and is well known as a champion of objective, universally valid natural law. This paradox stems from problems created by the new natural science. That science is predicated on the demolition of Aristotelian Scholasticism. Locke participates in that demolition on behalf of science, but it leaves him with limited options in building his own moral theory. Samuel Pufendorf responded to this situation by devising a theory of “moral modes,” and Locke follows Pufendorf's model. The essay concludes by noting some similarities and differences with the moral metaphysics of Immanuel Kant.

The goal of this essay is to offer an alternative account to the view that political freedom and philosophical freedom are consistent, harmonious, and mutually reinforcing. Certainly, freedom is central to Spinoza's political thought, but to understand it properly, we need to explain how it alleviates, rather than encourages, superstition among the nonrational multitude. In light of his belief in the permanency of irrationality and superstition, Spinoza does not hope to expunge illusions from political life. Advocating freedom is an attempt to adapt the facts of the imagination to the needs of our political order and create stability. The belief in freedom—that is, the belief that we are individual actors who decide our actions and determine our fate—is the most powerful and abiding illusion in politics.

Kant is regarded as one of the staunchest advocates of retributive punishment in the modern tradition. This essay makes the case that a careful reexamination of Kant's account of punishment is necessary, especially in light of liberalism's characteristic inability to give the powerful moral appeal of retribution its due. Kant attempted to provide a clear analysis of what we mean when we say that morality demands that punishment be “proportional” to the crime. According to Kant, punishment's retributive aspect—as distinguished from its deterrent or restorative effects—is primarily concerned with redeeming (negative) moral worth. This paper attempts to unpack this claim by examining Kant's discussions of judicial punishment, the conscience, and divine punishment, respectively. It concludes that as a result of serious unresolved difficulties in his arguments for retribution, Kant manages only to deepen the question of the morality of retribution rather than to give it a decisive answer.

This essay contends that we can better understand Andrew Jackson's distinctive account of federalism by looking outside the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian political traditions. More appropriate peers for Jackson, as a constitutional statesman, are John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln. Existing treatments of Jackson miss these connections because they focus primarily on his roles as party leader and reformer, to the neglect of his constitutional statesmanship. A major cause of this neglect is the apparent inconsistency between Jackson's “nationalist” account of the Union in the Nullification Proclamation and his advocacy of “states' rights” elsewhere, a tension that can be resolved by a closer reading of Jackson's rhetoric. Among other things, this redefinition of Jackson's legacy demonstrates that there is no necessary tension between a strong union and meaningful limits on federal power; nor is there a necessary affinity between narrow construction of federal power and state-compact theory.

Martin Luther argued that the Hebrew Bible's Song of Songs was “an encomium of the political order,” a praise and thanksgiving to God for the gift of temporal government. Luther's political interpretation of this book was unique in his age, and remains so in the history of biblical commentary. This paper offers an account of Luther's peculiar interpretation, as well as its place in his interpretation of the Bible and in the history of biblical commentary, by arguing that it exhibits the foundational idea of his political thought that secular authority is a precious gift from God, and that the Song of Songs, as a praise of conjugal love, provides for political authority a fitting biblical encomium.

The thinkers of the French Enlightenment are frequently depicted as political rationalists, meaning that they advocated subjecting all laws, institutions, and practices to the withering light of reason, and discarding those found wanting by its standards. However, two of the most prominent philosophes, Voltaire and Diderot, were in fact opponents of the kind of political rationalism that they are often thought to have embraced. Both of these thinkers rejected the idea of a single “rational” political order, advocated gradual reform rather than wholesale change, and denied that the steady application of reason could produce inevitable or endless progress. In effect the Enlightenment was a “revolt against rationalism” (as Peter Gay has called it) not only in the epistemological, psychological, and ethical spheres, but also in the political one.

Development approaches to the study of politics, precisely because they focus on movement through time, seem uniquely positioned to illuminate the logic and experience of the polity in a manner that cannot be captured by more conventional political science methods. And yet, political development has come to be seen as whatever historical change happens to a regime, neglecting the normative nature of the polity. The result is an “a-constitutional” approach to political development. This paper argues that political science can and should examine development in normative terms and that attempts to fit political development more securely within value-free social science threaten to rob it of its promise.

Edmund Burke's emphasis on emotional phenomena is often seen as a rejection of reason. The relationship between reason and the emotions in Burke's work is paralleled by the relationships between the individual and society and between rights and duties. Emotions support duties because they bind us to social life and a particular social location. Burke filters rights claims through our emotional attachment to specific circumstances, thus creating social rights of man in contrast to the individualistic, abstract rights of men of the social contract theorists. Prejudice is presented as an example of a Burkean filter for rights that moderates rights claims by binding individuals to society. Thus, Burke sees reason and emotion as interconnected phenomena that support the balancing of the claims of both individual and the community.

Although the concept of legitimacy is widely invoked in social science literature, political discourse, and common parlance, key empirical and normative questions about legitimacy are often left far from answered, especially “Legitimated by whom?” and “Legitimate by what criteria?” Recently these questions have been raised with particular acuteness with regard to the nascent international society, for instance, the standing of the International Criminal Court and the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition.

Defining terms is a serious undertaking and one bound to stir controversy. When we decided to devote a book to this task, we were under no illusion that everyone would readily sign on to our proposal. We thought, however, that it was worth calling attention to certain conceptual problems that currently beset the study of American political development (APD). We wanted to underscore the value of tractability in claims about change over time and to demonstrate the benefits of specificity in moving this venerable research tradition forward. We regret that Professor Thomas finds our proposal objectionable, but we are even more concerned that his alternative seems to do little to address the issues that prompted our effort.

In recent years a powerful body of literature has emerged that challenges contemporary liberal thought on a series of related fronts, which can usefully be described as “realist.” This article focuses on the realist criticism of the dominant liberal account of legitimacy and explores the possibility of developing a political theory that can overcome this challenge while remaining distinctively liberal (hence “liberal realism”). Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers who fall outside of the standard Rawlsian tradition in contemporary liberal thinking, the article pursues three different directions in which a theory of liberal realism might be developed—negative, minimal, and partisan—and explores the advantages and shortcomings of each. It attempts to further demonstrate the salience and force of the realist challenge to liberal legitimacy and the need for liberalism to develop an adequate response to it, and offers some proposals concerning the appropriate theoretical framework for doing so.

The recent US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have renewed the debate over whether military interventions intended to impose democracy in a foreign state are consistent with liberal principles. The liberal political tradition within the United States has often been divided over this question. At issue is what place, if any, military force should have in a foreign policy dedicated to promoting goals such as the spread of electoral democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law.