Although it is largely overlooked, Thomas Hobbes spent the final years of his life translating Homer’s epic poetry. Despite an overwhelmingly popular extant English edition of the Iliad by George Chapman, Hobbes chose to proffer his own account, often taking great liberties with the source material. Juxtaposed against Chapman’s translation, we see that Hobbes implicitly critiques the political philosophy it commends—a philosophy which disrespects kingly power, misunderstands sovereign authority, and abdicates human virtue. Hobbes sees these elements as corrupting the poetic imagination of England, precipitating much of the unrest we see in the seventeenth century. In correcting and reframing these tales for a new world, Hobbes provides a moral scaffolding for his political philosophy through one of the most widely read classical texts of his time.

This article explores Francesco Guicciardini’s concept of the imagination and argues that it plays a vital, yet hitherto unexplored, role in his political thought. What are called “imaginary conceptions” determine the effects that different governmental strategies have upon a given society. As these both affective and cognitive conceptions are tied to shared, symbolic representations, understanding informal aspects of political life becomes a crucial aspect of Guicciardini’s construal of effective government. To understand these aspects it is necessary to reconstruct the historical genesis of the communal representations as it determines the specificity of the society under consideration. The historical contingency of a society’s imaginary conceptions forces political theory to “imaginatively construct” the institutional forms it suggests, rather than “discover” them among the exempla of the past. The centrality of contingent, imaginary conceptions to political reality leads Guicciardini to break with former Renaissance conceptions of exemplarity.

During the nineteenth century, liberalism played a fundamental role in the newly formed Latin American nation-states. Yet little attention has been paid to how liberal thinkers on the periphery reacted against liberal theories suffused with pro-colonial rhetoric and Eurocentric bias. This study examines the underexplored reaction of José Victorino Lastarria to John Stuart Mill’s liberal project. Lastarria, one of the most influential nineteenth-century Latin American liberals, critically engaged with Mill’s liberalism, discerning there an example of Eurocentrism that missed insights from the republican Latin American experience. This article examines the intellectual connections and disconnections between Mill’s liberalism, representing the imperial metropole, and Lastarria’s thought, a form of liberalism in the newly independent peripheral states. By reconstructing his discussion of Mill, this article presents Lastarria’s main political ideas to a broader audience.

Rawls suggests that facts about the political virtues must be part of the construction of a reasonable political conception of justice. The thesis of this article is that, if an account of political virtue is a necessary element in a reasonable political conception, then so too is an account of political vice. The political vices are those attitudes, feelings, and dispositions that systematically work against reasonableness or the other cooperative or discursive goals of political virtue. The article concentrates on several epistemic-political vices along with practical-political vices that have epistemic elements. Epistemic-political vices such as close-mindedness or gullibility are especially worrisome in the digital age, given their tendency to undermine practices of public reasoning and deliberative democracy. Each political vice is understood as a characteristic failure of one of the Rawlsian burdens of judgment. Each is in this way a more specific form of unreasonableness.

Kant begins the 1781 Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason with a history of metaphysics told as a sequence of failed political regimes. This history has been largely passed over both in the literature on Kant’s metaphysics and in that on his political philosophy. This article provides an interpretation of Kant’s history of metaphysical regimes as a way of exploring the political themes and aims of the First Critique. Kant’s opening narrative articulates the role his critique of metaphysics plays in establishing the possibility of a lawful order of reason that defends morality against threats arising from reason’s theoretical dissatisfaction. The political history of metaphysics presented in the A Preface reveals Kant’s understanding of the public role philosophy must undertake in the context of the modern crisis of reason.

In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” John Rawls implied that a well-ordered society would be a deliberative democracy and said that public reason is essential to it. After his turn to political liberalism, he was chary about claims of truth. In Section 1, I lay out essential features of Rawlsian deliberative democracy. In Section 2, I introduce some prominent commentary on Rawls’s treatment of truth and public reasoning. On these readings—collectively “the non-permissive reading”—Rawls’s treatment of truth has problematic implications for public reasoning and therefore for deliberative democracy. In Section 3, I survey those implications. In Section 4, I argue that the texts which are taken to support the non-permissive reading support a very different reading. In Section 5, I argue that Rawls does not endorse the theses imputed to him by the non-permissive reading and that his view does not have the implications surveyed in Section 3.

Alexis de Tocqueville highlights a paradox at the heart of the democratic spirit. Egalitarians are allergic to markers of social hierarchy and are on the hunt to identify and abolish remnants of the old regime’s entrenchment of aristocratic rank. The resulting abolition of personal hierarchy, however, does not deliver equality and freedom. Rather it inclines democrats to accept depersonalized forms of discipline at the hands of public opinion, the tutelary state, and the market economy. Tocqueville argues that the commitment to an “imaginary equality” lies at the root of the soft despotism he finds across democratized institutions, mores, and economic relationships. He develops a distinct account of the emergence of domination under conditions of formal equality. Social dependence in liberal societies does not derive from a new class of elites or the rise of capitalist economic formations. Equality is itself connected to new, impersonal forms of servitude.

Adam Smith argued that human beings naturally desire to dominate others and that they enjoy it. He showed how ancient masters, landlords, and economic actors in some eighteenth-century English and colonial markets were driven by their love of domination against their own economic interests. Recent scholarship argues that to fully understand the role libido dominandi plays in Smith’s thought, love of domination should be associated with the broader concept of vanity and esteem-seeking. This article challenges that interpretation, showing that, for Smith, the love of domination has nothing to do with the love of praise but that most of the pleasure people derive from it is to see their ends promoted by others without the need to persuade them about the utility of those ends. This understanding locates the love of domination outside commercial society where, under certain socio-economic circumstances, mutual persuasion among individuals is the rule.

This article defines and defends three Rawlsian rationales for a cultural turn in education for democratic citizenship within digitized societies. Due to the importance of political culture for realizing deliberative democracy, it is misguided to hold that a primary or exclusive focus of such education should be on learning how to use digital tools for engaging in politics. Pace this technique- or skills-oriented focus, this article argues that the educational responses to the wide-ranging cultural developments of the digital political public sphere should not be a matter of “training” but of “cultivation.” Accordingly, democratic education for digital citizenship should pay attention to nurturing citizens’ political virtues so that, when they are dealing with fundamental political questions, they are willing to comply with the requirements of public reason and a corresponding duty of civility.

In his recent analysis of digital platforms as a medium for (democratic) political communication, Jürgen Habermas has proclaimed a constitutional imperative to maintain a functioning public sphere—leaving open, however, what this would require. While a growing literature develops ideas for social media reforms, these models put the cart before the horse. To restructure social media in a targeted manner, one first needs to determine the platforms’ desired contribution to democracy—which is far from obvious. Social media have a plurality of democratic affordances and can thus be assigned different, sometimes competing roles. To determine social media’s place in democracy, we need to do what Habermas has failed to do: locate social media in the center–periphery model of political communication in media society. In doing so, I argue that social media reforms should primarily aim to empower agents in the periphery.

This article traces the conceptual history of key terms used to describe and criticize bad political regimes, focusing on the displacement of “tyranny” by “dictatorship” and “authoritarianism.” Classical Greek thought understood tyranny primarily in terms of the character of rulers, whereas the modern idea of dictatorship emerged from a Roman conceptual framework that focused on authority and its legitimation. New problems of legitimation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries diminished the utility of the character-centric concept of tyranny and increased the fruitfulness of dictatorship for political analysis. The emergence of the modern state in the nineteenth century shaped the conceptual field by increasing the salience of problems concerning the appropriation or usurpation of sovereignty, the distortion of popular legitimation and accountability, and the incentives for submission to illegitimate orders. I conclude that the use of “authoritarianism” is likely to increase in prominence, but that retaining multiple regime concepts enriches analysis.

Does John Rawls’s justice as fairness require virtuous citizens to eschew self-interested motivation in favor of motivation by the aim to promote justice when making decisions about their labor or investment participation in their society’s economy? Analyzing Rawls’s ideas of advantage and of legitimate ends and tracing the purpose and implementation of his difference principle, the article shows how G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s allowance of productive incentives reflects misunderstandings of Rawls’s theoretical aims and of the fundamental liberalism of Rawls’s well-ordered society. In that society, political civility permits making such decisions by appeal to each citizen’s self-interested aims and values.

Martha C. Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice was a ground-breaking work of political philosophy, and had particular influence in the field of animal ethics.1 By arguing that animals ought to be considered recipients of justice, and not just of moral concern, her book helped to launch the so-called ‘political turn in animal ethics’. The political turn accepts familiar claims in animal ethics about the moral status of animals, but extends them in at least two ways.2 First, the political turn does not just see our obligations towards animals as a matter of personal morality but claims that we also have duties of justice that demand enforcement by—and transformation of—our collective institutions. Second, the political turn asks us not only to change our collective institutions, but to also reframe our understanding of the communities that they are designed to serve. We must recognize—and formally acknowledge—that our communities are ‘multispecies’ and comprised of nonhuman animal members.

The Currency of Politics is a major contribution to the history of economic thought, a history too often neglected by political theorists. Especially important are Eich’s arguments about the fragility of trust, and the way in which money both enables and undermines such trust. In his words, monetary trust “does not simply imply the enforcement of existing contracts but the realization of a more fundamental, and more equitable, social contract that requires a sharing of sacrifices and benefits. … In a democratic society monetary trust must be tied to a negotiation over justice” (18). In discussing Aristotle and the Greek world, Eich retrieves claims about the role of currency in contributing to reciprocal justice, especially if not exclusively in democracies. Money is a tool of reciprocity and equality—coinage can enable the spread of a “specifically egalitarian political ideology” (37). Money enables us to recognize injustices, and “possibly, amend them. Currency contains within itself the necessary condition for its own improvement” (27).

My comments on Kahan’s new history of liberalism have a relatively narrow focus: the book’s organizing concept, fear, rather than its insightful accounts of different authors and movements. I suppose that makes me a “lumper,” in the familiar dichotomy between lumpers and splitters that Kahan cites in his introductory chapter. But I’m afraid that even historians have to lump it sometimes. For you need to know just what idea you’re splitting up, even if your goal is to trace its different manifestations. You need to identify the genus correctly if you want to record the lives of its most interesting species.

In the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” Michel de Montaigne aims to upend human arrogance about our superiority over other animals by enumerating the many wonders of the nonhuman animal world. We see birds building intricate nests; spiders thickening and slackening their webs with an engineer’s precision; ants and bees organizing themselves into complicated societies; and dogs making reasoned judgments about the likely location of their prey. Although we may be inclined to dismiss these behaviors as mere instinct, Montaigne argues that it is presumptuous “to judge that the beasts do by natural and obligatory instinct the same things that we do by our choice and cleverness.”1 And even if other creatures do act with less conscious design than we do, he asks, does that make their actions any less wondrous?

I commend Kahan for this ambitious and erudite new intellectual history of liberalism. Freedom from Fear tells a story of liberalism’s development that de-centers concepts such as natural rights, consent, equality, constitutionalism, or even the proverbial social contract with which liberalism is commonly identified. Locke is out; Adam Smith and Montesquieu are in. Instead of fixating on seventeenth-century England or the so-called “Enlightenment,” the “short 19th century” (9–22, 77–120) becomes decisive. Contrary to reductionist criticisms of liberalism as atomistic, secular, or deracinated, Kahan emphasizes that liberalism has traditionally been bolstered by three distinct “pillars” of political freedom, free markets, and morality. These pillars have been marshaled at successive stages of liberalism’s development in response to a number of liberal “fears,” ranging from the threats posed to liberty by the arbitrary power of church and state, by social and political revolutions, poverty, nationalism, totalitarianism, populism, and so forth. Extrapolating from Judith Shklar’s seminal understanding of liberalism in terms of minimizing cruelty, Kahan expands her concern with fear to a wide range of periods and thinkers, offering fresh interpretations of canonical figures such as J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville while showcasing lesser-known thinkers such as A. V. Dicey, Léon Bourgeois, L. T. Hobhouse, the Ordoliberals, and many others. Kahan’s readings of individual thinkers are consistently illuminating and worthy of discussion in their own right, but my remarks focus on the book’s larger conceptual framework.