Romeo and Juliet is often the first play by Shakespeare that students and playgoers encounter. For many it remains the paradigmatic depiction of pure and passionate love, ruined by a meaningless feud and unsympathetic opponents. Scholarly interpretations often encourage this view. This article shows that the play is more complicated—and more interesting. Although the lovers and their passion are noble and beautiful, or precisely because they are pitched at so high a level, they cannot endure and mature as viable adults in a healthy community. Verona itself is characterized as stunted: in its civic arrangements, relations among and within families, incentives for adolescents to grow up, and in the inadequate guidance of spiritual institutions. The article explores the relation between the private passion of young love and the political circumstances which nourish or destroy it. It aims to deepen the responses of audiences that love the play, its memorable lovers, and love itself.

Scholars have noticed that Edmund Burke's impassioned economic tract in favor of market liberty, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, appears to be at odds with his political philosophy and rhetorical temperament of prudence and restraint. This essay challenges this interpretation. I contend that Burke's emotional statements in the writing reflect strong continuities with his earlier reflections and political activities regarding economic issues. From his earliest days in Parliament to his final years, Burke was a firm supporter of commercial liberty, both domestic and foreign. I conclude by arguing that we cannot properly understand Burke's belief in gradual reform unless we grasp his idea of incremental commercial improvement.

In 1756 Adam Smith reviewed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality and claimed that it was indebted to the second volume of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. While much recent scholarship has taken this as the point of departure for studying Smith's engagement with Rousseau, the place of Mandeville in shaping that engagement has been largely neglected. This article brings Mandeville back into the picture and reassesses Smith's engagement with both thinkers in light of the connections he identified between their works. This involves reconstructing Mandeville's historicized account of the development of sociability and government, and showing how Rousseau developed this to articulate his critique of modern society. In evaluating Smith's response to this challenge, it is argued that he only partially succeeded in distancing his own analysis of commercial society from Mandeville's principles.

While generally a steady ally of James Madison and the nationalists, Gouverneur Morris, delegate from Pennsylvania, worked from a different conception of republican politics. Morris's republicanism was more old than new, relying on the divided sovereignty of a mixed regime to protect the rights of citizens and minorities. This conception, it is argued here, bears the stamp of Machiavelli, especially regarding the relationship of the classes and the role of the executive. Like Machiavelli—but unlike Madison—Morris wanted to underscore society's class divisions, organizing the representatives of rich and poor into two distinct, and hostile, chambers of the legislature. And like Machiavelli, whose “civil prince” was the champion of the people, Morris's executive was to be the “guardian of the people” and the “guardian of liberty.”

Tocqueville's writings on pauperism have gained renewed attention in the last decade. Scholars study his Memoir on Pauperism (1835) to contextualize his thought in the nineteenth century, to question the extent of his liberalism, or to locate his policy solutions on a spectrum from private charity to state welfare. Yet Tocqueville's response to pauperism must be interpreted in light of “the social question,” or the problem of how to alleviate not only the material ills of poverty, but also the phenomenon of social exclusion that accompanied it. His discussion of the social question, I argue, illuminates his particular theory of rights and their possibilities. His thoughts on the poor laws culminate in a novel theory of the educative potential of property rights. This theory of rights prompts us to revisit his position on extending political rights and on the role of political participation in overcoming class division.

The topic of friendship is enjoying a renewed interest among political theorists and philosophers. The three books reviewed here join several other recent works on friendship and the creation of a journal of friendship studies, Amity. Despite their shared focus on friendship, the three works under review complement rather than duplicate one another. Alexander Nehamas's work is designed for a general readership, with scholarly nuance being largely relegated to the notes. The books by P. E. Digeser and Ann Ward are more typical academic publications. While Ward focuses almost exclusively on Aristotle, Nehamas and Digeser treat him as the touchstone for all later discussions of friendship in the Western tradition.