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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Amitai Etzioni has written a stimulating and provocative defense of a communitarian conception of legitimacy. He contrasts this view to what he calls the deliberative view. In what follows, I argue that Professor Etzioni cannot do without the deliberative view and that indeed he has more in common with Habermas than he thinks.

Amitai Etzioni advances arguments about two forms of legitimacy, what I will call empirical legitimacy and substantive legitimacy. Empirical legitimacy is a matter of what people consider to be legitimate. It is assessed through the methods of social science—conducting surveys, for instance. Substantive legitimacy is a matter not of what people happen to think but of what is legitimate in the sense of being just or morally right. Etzioni's argument about empirical legitimacy, namely, that it is shaped through collective processes that involve emotions as well as reason, I find broadly plausible. Then he makes an argument about substantive legitimacy, one that explains how we are to know if an “act” (a term he uses broadly) is truly just or moral. This latter argument I wish to explore further and to raise questions about.

Martha Nussbaum, in a reaction to the cultural relativism that pervades much of social science, made the following comment:

If the end of a legal system is the well-being of its people, as Madison claims in Federalist, No. 45, and if it is irrational to sacrifice means to ends, as Madison says in Federalist, No. 40, then Cicero was right to conclude that salus populi suprema lex, that the people's welfare is supreme law—that the people's welfare should prevail over conflicting legal arrangements.