This paper challenges the reading of Derridean deconstruction as a necessarily antiauthoritarian version of “hermeneutics as politics.” It does so by critically rereading Derrida's 1968 essay “Plato's Pharmacy.” Part 1 reconstructs Derrida's key claims in “Plato's Pharmacy,” turning on the ambiguous signifier “pharmakon” and the treatment of writing in the Phaedrus. Part 2 examines Derrida's three claims in “Plato's Pharmacy” concerning the political, putatively antiauthoritarian significance of his deconstruction of “platonism.” Part 3 contests these claims, arguing that Derrida cannot comprehend Socratic irony since he is blind to the political shaping of Plato's dialogic writing, as the artful attempt to present and inspire philosophical inquiry within the city, while avoiding the condemnation directed against Socrates by the men of Athens in 399 BCE. Finally, I argue that Derrida's indebtedness to Heidegger underlies these shortcomings in his reading of Plato.

Scholars of race in antiquity commonly claim that Aristotle holds protoracist views about barbaroi or non-Greeks. But a careful examination of Aristotle's remarks in his Politics about slavery, non-Greek political institutions, and Greek and non-Greek natural qualities calls into question such claims. No doubt, Aristotle held views at odds with modern liberalism, such as his views about gender subordination and the exploitation of slave and nonslave labor. But claims that Aristotle holds protoracist views are regularly but erroneously asserted without careful consideration of relevant textual evidence. I argue that Aristotle neither categorically distinguishes Greeks and non-Greeks nor does he endorse the claim that Greeks are categorically superior to non-Greeks. Indeed, Aristotle regularly draws upon non-Greek political institutions in his own formulation of the best constitution and he praises the non-Greek constitution of Carthage as superior to that of Greek constitutions such as Sparta and Crete.

Hobbes's preference for monarchical sovereign forms and his critique of democratic political organization are well known. In this article I suggest, however, that his opposition to democratic life constitutes the central frame through which we must understand some of the most important theoretical mutations that occur throughout the various stages of his civil science. Key alterations in the Hobbesian political theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan can be interpreted as efforts to retroactively foreclose the emergence of a substantive democratic normativity that the prior theoretical framework allowed for or suggested. Hobbes's opposition to democracy is ultimately so significant so as to fundamentally structure various key elements of his political philosophy.

There is a long-standing debate over which constitution Aristotle regards as best in the Politics. I attempt to clarify his view by reconstructing four principles he uses to assess constitutions, in both ideal and more ordinary circumstances: (i) the supremacy-of-virtue principle, (ii) the more-virtuous-citizens-are-better-than-fewer principle, (iii) the equality principle, and (iv) the stability principle. I apply these principles to defend a rank ordering of constitutions, which situates the ideal aristocracy of books 7 and 8 at the top, and tyranny, along with unmixed forms of democracy and oligarchy, at the bottom.

This essay offers an alternative to influential interpretations of elites, peoples, and senates in Niccolò Machiavelli's theory of mixed republics. It analyzes in greater depth both Machiavelli's ascription of the morally objectionable and politically dangerous trait of insolenzia to the nobles as a social class; and his justifications for the establishment of senates as institutions that partially remedy the problem of aristocratic insolence—justifications that depart from traditional Ciceronian and Polybian standards. Machiavelli demonstrates in The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories that republics with senates, such as ancient Rome, manage to mollify aristocratic insolence, while those lacking them, like modern Florence, permit such insolence to proliferate unchecked. Moreover, Machiavelli intimates, republics that collectively gather nobles within senate chambers are afforded the opportunity to entirely eliminate aristocratic insolence. The essay concludes with an analysis of senatorial institutions in Machiavelli's “Discursus on Florentine Matters.”

Scholars have emphasized Adam Smith's critique of the dangers of patriotism, but have not paid close attention to its potential value. This article recovers from Smith's work an attractive model of patriotism without nationalism. The potential value of patriotism lies in inspiring individuals to realize an ideal of impartial beneficence, which consists in overcoming selfishness and other subpolity partialities and in promoting the greater happiness of all fellow citizens. Smith defends virtuous patriotism against strong cosmopolitanism by arguing that a global division of labor, which directs individuals to benefit their compatriots, more effectively serves the interests of humanity than directly trying to promote global happiness. This article illuminates aspects of Smith's work that contrast with the “invisible hand” argument and favor the conscious pursuit of public interest in some contexts. It contributes to recent discussions of patriotism a distinctive way of understanding its relation to impartiality.

This essay explores Aristotle's treatment of the passion of nemesis or “righteous indignation” in his Rhetoric and its relevance to contemporary displays of passion in democratic political orders. It does so by considering Aristotle's perplexing definition of nemesis in relation to two other passions, pity and envy, as well as its significance to his discussion of common law (a transpolitical standard of justice according to nature), which he presents through allusions to Sophocles's Antigone. Aristotle's discussion sheds light on the way in which nemesis, which is aroused in relation to the concern for justice, necessarily takes into consideration questions of moral worth that liberal democratic regimes attempt to relegate to the private sphere.

Many readers of Alexis de Tocqueville have noted the ambiguity in his formulation of the term “democracy.” This essay suggests that this ambiguity can be clarified by considering what Tocqueville calls “democratic language”—i.e., the use of generalizations, abstractions, and personifications in writing and speech. Tocqueville investigates these novel linguistic devices to understand the transformation of language in democratic times. More importantly, he employs them to appropriate the Doctrinaires’ formulation of democracy and to criticize their legitimation of the July Monarchy's exclusive government. Yet Tocqueville's use of democratic language is a reluctant one. He finds that the tendency to use abstract and personified concepts obfuscates the political agency of citizens. Wary of the despotic effects of such obfuscation, Tocqueville argues that individuals must practice their concepts. In the context of the July Monarchy, this becomes a call for the extension of democratic rights and institutions.

This article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon's thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon's view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this “surcharge of people” is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon's thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon's political aims and thought more broadly.

This article inquires into the moral successes and failings of the superrich in America. To do this, we turn to Alexis de Tocqueville who outlines a set of expectations for any privileged elite. Drawing from his Old Regime, Memoir on Pauperism, and Democracy in America, we argue that the superrich are obliged to a particular kind of charity, which we specify as philanthropy. To fulfill their philanthropic duties, the superrich must steadfastly attend to three obligations: maintaining their local communities, safeguarding local liberties, and providing moral leadership. In the conclusion, we suggest how the superrich might be disciplined unto this virtue.

Modern commentators tend to view John Locke's theory of money either in terms of a process of naturalization placing currency completely beyond the realm of politics or as an effort to provide a moral foundation for a convention subject to epistemic instability. This study builds on the latter interpretation but offers an alternative to the standard view that Locke sought to remove monetary policy from the scope of ongoing political deliberation. While Locke emphasized the concept of trust necessary for the networks of credit and economic exchange, his account of money also prioritized prudential judgments and distinct discursive contexts, especially relating to distributive justice. Locke's economic tracts give reason to reconsider his putative role as founder of the “sound money” doctrine and shed light on aspects of his statecraft only partly visible in his more familiar political works.

Anthony Trollope uses the characters and drama of his “semi-political” Palliser novels to pursue the ends of Alexis de Tocqueville's political science in a lighthearted yet serious way. Describing himself as an “advanced conservative Liberal,” Trollope claims that his “political theory” is expressed most fully in the Palliser novels. Preoccupied with the phenomenon Tocqueville designates the “democratic revolution,” the novels emphasize the historical “tendency towards equality,” consider its social and political implications, and intimate how traditionally aristocratic England might respond to it. While he endorses the justice of the democratic revolution, Trollope shows that it is accompanied by such disadvantages as a decline in human excellence and greatness. Realistic depictions of character arouse sympathy for his view that by adopting a posture of prudent liberalism toward the advance of equality, the English could both reform their aristocratic institutions and rely on those institutions to mitigate the excesses of democracy.

Leo Strauss is most well known for his thesis on the philosophic practice of exotericism. One of strangest aspects of his work is the amount of attention he devoted to Xenophon. This article attempts to explain how these two important facets of Strauss's thought are connected by examining their connection in his first published treatment of them both: “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon.”

Throughout his career, Frederick Douglass linked the achievement of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy to Americans’ perception of their collective past and future. In so doing, I argue, Douglass developed a distinctive, temporal account of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, temporal continuity lent force and content to demands for equality—demands which would succeed only if the whole demos cultivated a specific orientation to its collective past, present, and future. Douglass offers a productive contrast to contemporary democratic theory, which often misses the importance of temporality suggested by his account and thereby risks surrendering its powerful egalitarian resources. Moreover, temporality provides a new lens on what many interpreters see as an episode of inconsistency in Douglass's thought: his brief, quickly abandoned contemplation of colonization proposals in the spring of 1861. Ultimately, Douglass turned to temporality in order to decide whether democracy for African Americans required affiliation with, or disaffiliation from, the United States.

Montesquieu's Persian Letters offers a remarkable guide into the methods and substance of political education, and especially political education at a distance. In two particular series of epistolary exchanges between distant letter writers and recipients we are shown a talented educator in action, one especially adept on two fronts. First, in these exchanges Usbek shows himself to be uniquely sensitive to the concerns of his interlocutors. Second, his sensitivity to these concerns shapes not only the methods by which he presents his political teaching but also its substance. This paper argues that Usbek's political education speaks, by design, to the inclinations of its recipients, and that this political education is itself grounded on the teaching that the best regime in practice is that which most effectively responds to the inclinations of its inhabitants.

Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has traditionally attracted interest from scholars of political theory for its apparent hostility to political philosophy, and more recently for its compatibility with Marxism. This paper argues for a reconsideration of Kierkegaard's potential contributions to political theory by suggesting that the work's shortcomings belong to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, and are in fact intended by Kierkegaard. Attentiveness to the literary development of the pseudonym allows us to see a Kierkegaard who is a deeper and more direct critic of Hegel's political philosophy than is usually presumed. By creating a pseudonym whose argument ultimately fails, Kierkegaard employs Socratic irony in order to point readers to the need to recover Socratic political philosophy as the appropriate adjunct to the faith of Abraham, and as an alternative to Hegelian, and post-Hegelian, political thought.

This article examines Jeremy Waldron's concept of the “circumstances of politics” (CoP), which he describes as the felt need for a common decision in the face of disagreement. Waldron uses the CoP to detach certain issues surrounding civic virtue and institutional design from questions about substantive principles such as justice and human rights. While emphasis is often placed on the fact of disagreement, I argue that the other aspect of the CoP, the need for collective action, is in fact the more fundamental. Waldron's arguments rely on an understanding that there is expressive value in citizens affirming commitment to the political community and on an awareness of how the nature of politics as public collective action is structured by the constitutional architecture. I argue that a lopsided focus on disagreement threatens to obscure the fact that the political sphere is itself a fragile achievement that is in need of continual support.

This paper proposes a new framework for categorizing approaches to the history of political thought. Previous categorizations exclude much research; political theory, if included, is often caricatured. And previous categorizations are one-dimensional, presenting different approaches as alternatives. My framework is two-dimensional, distinguishing six kinds of end (two empirical, four theoretical) and six kinds of means. Importantly, these choices are not alternatives: studies may have more than one end and typically use several means. Studies with different ends often use some of the same means. And all studies straddle the supposed empirical/theoretical “divide.” Quentin Skinner himself expertly combines empirical and theoretical analysis—yet the latter is often overlooked, not least because of Skinner's own methodological pronouncements. This highlights a curious disjuncture in methodological writings, between what they say we do, and what we should do. What we should do is much broader than existing categorizations imply.

More and more decisions in our societies are made by algorithms. What are such decisions like, and how do they compare to human decision-making? I contrast central features of algorithmic decision-making with three key elements—plurality, natality, and judgment—of Hannah Arendt's political thought. In “Arendtian practices,” human beings come together as equals, exchange arguments, and make joint decisions, sometimes bringing something new into the world. With algorithmic decision-making taking over more and more areas of life, opportunities for “Arendtian practices” are under threat. Moreover, there is the danger that algorithms are tasked with decisions for which they are ill-suited. Analyzing the contrast with Arendt's thinking can be a starting point for delineating realms in which algorithmic decision-making should or should not be welcomed.