Recent efforts to theorize the role of emotions in political life have stressed the importance of sympathy, and have often recurred to Adam Smith to articulate their claims. In the early twentieth-century, Max Scheler disputed the salutary character of sympathy, dismissing it as an ultimately perverse foundation for human association. Unlike later critics of sympathy as a political principle, Scheler rejected it for being ill equipped to salvage what, in his opinion, should be the proper basis of morality, namely, moral value. Even if Scheler's objections against Smith's project prove to be ultimately mistaken, he had important reasons to call into question its moral purchase in his own time. Where the most dangerous idol is not self-love but illusory self-knowledge, the virtue of self-command will not suffice. Where identification with others threatens the social bond more deeply than faction, “standing alone” in moral matters proves a more urgent task.

It is widely claimed that Mencius's account of punitive expedition can be understood as a Confucian justification of humanitarian intervention and thus has the potential to play the role of constraining China's imperial ventures abroad. This paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external obstacles—the problem of virtue's self-indulgence and the problem of justification to non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius's virtue-based political theory of punitive expedition from developing into a modern theory of humanitarian intervention. It argues that for the Mencian theory to be relevant in the modern world marked most notably by moral pluralism, it must be transformed into a democratic theory, at the center of which is the stipulation that humanitarian intervention be morally justified internally, that is, to the people of the intervening state, as well as externally, first to the people to be intervened state, and second to international society.

This essay examines Aristotle's account of justice as a virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics by considering two related parts of it: Aristotle's elevated account of justice as lawfulness and his description of equity as a virtue. I focus on moral rather than legal questions by emphasizing Aristotle's identification of justice as lawfulness with complete virtue, and a broad sense of equity as superlatively good character. Some of the more difficult passages in book 5 prove to be tied together by the question of the goodness of justice and I argue that Aristotle points to a specific confusion in this regard characteristic of virtuous people. I conclude that Aristotle's critique of our ordinary opinions about justice offers crucial, albeit limited, support for the superiority of the contemplative life announced at the end of book 10.

Debates regarding obligation in Hobbes have turned on either natural right or natural law interpretations. Both interpretations tend to take up the question of obligation from the perspective of teaching those who contend “for too great Liberty” “how to obey.” But Hobbes also has a second audience, and a second goal in mind: those who contend “for too much Authority” must be taught “how to govern.” From that perspective, a different discussion of obligation emerges. What is revealed is a contiguous set of reflections in Leviathan that pivot on the character of the sovereign and the citizens’ judgment thereof, all of which inform effective obligation and have little in common with received interpretations of obligation. It further reveals a relationship between the failure to manifest sovereign virtue and the natural punishment of pusillanimous and barbaric sovereigns. That is, it speaks to a sovereign virtue ethic in Leviathan.

In this essay I set forth the musical philosophy of Bertrand de Jouvenel, a topic that has not been previously explored. I focus on Jouvenel's literary background; his emphasis on the imagination; his insistence that metaphor is the basis of all thought; and his critique of the “amousia” of modern philosophy, that is, its lack of music. Jouvenel believes that this amousia has led to dangerous political consequences in the twentieth century, such as the aesthetic and psychological promotion of violence. After setting forth Jouvenel's account, I explore these consequences.

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.

This paper contends that Locke's educational writings are more robust in their commitment to autonomy than recent assessments of Locke as a theorist of “disciplinary liberalism” suggest. While Locke's account of parental power is conflicted, it is mostly compatible with a liberal, child-responsive approach to education. Insofar as Locke develops a pedagogy sensitive to the pupil's temperament and his rights as a child, he articulates a nuanced understanding of autonomy, shown to be a product of the individual's participation in a community of rational beings. Complicating both received understandings of Lockean liberalism as atomistic and newer claims about the dark forces of socialization it unleashes, this paper gleans from Lockean education the potential of a socially embedded subject, who looks both within and without himself to cultivate a posture of considerable critical independence.

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 On Liberty, John Stuart Mill famously excluded children and so-called barbarians from his otherwise broad grant of liberty to human beings. While many scholars have analyzed and criticized the barbarian exclusion, little attention has been focused on the denial of liberty to children. This article argues that Mill's theory of liberty rests on an untenable dividing line between childhood dependence and adult autonomy. The processes of discipline and socialization to which children are subject render them incapable as adults of achieving the kind of autonomy that Mill prescribes. Using relational autonomy as an alternative to Mill's model of autonomy, I propose that we should neither flatly deny liberty to children nor present absolute independence as a normative ideal for adults.

The two manuscripts published here for the first time were written by Leo Strauss: the first in 1956 and the second between 1957 and 1962. The first, entitled “Lecture in Milwaukee: Michigan Midwest Political Science,” was written for the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Midwest Conference of Political Scientists on May 4, 1956, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The second is an unpublished passage of “An Epilogue” Strauss wrote for Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, published in 1962. Together these pieces improve our understanding of both the context in which Strauss developed his critique of the new political science and the audience to whom that critique was addressed. These two texts are of “biographical” interest. They are biographical in the sense that they clarify Strauss's thought and its evolution. The “Lecture in Milwaukee” clarifies the context in which Strauss's critique of modern political science was born: confrontation with the political scientists of the 1950s, here represented by Glendon Schubert who is not mentioned in Strauss's published writings. Without this lecture one might overlook the reference to “extrasensory perception” in the ironical discussion of “our man in Missouri” in “Epilogue.” The critique of Arthur Bentley, Bernard Berelson, Harold Laswell, and Herbert Simon by Strauss's students also takes on new meaning if read in the light of this lecture's references and Schubert's published article. Aside from Strauss's view of academia in the 1950s, his references in the lecture to the British Labour Party's policy toward Nazi Germany, to postwar American disarmament, and to prison reform and immigration policy in the United States provide rare and thus important information about Strauss's political views and judgment.

Johann Gottfried Herder was both a philosopher and an active Lutheran minister, who constantly faced the difficult task of negotiating in his own work and life, in his public speeches and activities, the relationship to be established between reason and religion, both their limits and the promises they carry for each other. This article examines Herder's writings on language and reason, religion, myth, and history with the intention of putting together an account of religion and reason along lines that emphasize their continuity with each other. I argue that, in Herder's view, religion and religious education can play an active role in forming the disposition of individuals to humanity, in cultivating both their freedom and their capacity to empathize with others and love them, thus helping to materialize the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment.

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.

Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America is a fictionalized version of Tocqueville's travels through the young United States. Unlike Tocqueville, Olivier de Garmont is accompanied by Parrot Larrit, an English servant who offers a bold egalitarian counterpoint to Olivier's aristocratic liberalism. This article compares Carey's work with Tocqueville's on the consequences of democracy for political institutions, education, and art; discusses Carey's technique of using alternating narration between Olivier and Parrot to capture the complexities of American democracy; and concludes with thoughts about being a friendly critic of democracy in the twenty-first century. Although Parrot and Olivier is no substitute for Democracy in America, it addresses Tocqueville's concerns in a creative and subtle manner, prompting reflection on whether—to use Olivier's terms—democracy has “ripened well.”

Rorty's separation between self-creation and political commitment is at the same time one of the pillars of his political theory and one of its most criticized elements. In this paper I offer a novel criticism of this separation, elaborating a comparison between him and the rhetorical-humanistic tradition of Cicero, Quintilian, the Italian Humanists, and Vico. If many have emphasized the deep humanism of Rorty's thought, still unnoticed is the fact that his version of humanism contradicts a basic tenet of that tradition: the idea that the mastery of communicative skills is key to the development of the person both as individual and citizen. As I will show, Rorty's conclusion about the necessity to neatly separate the two realms is in contradiction not only with that tradition but also with the general scope of his own project and the very humanistic picture he himself draws of culture, society, and the intellectuals.

In recent years, William E. Connolly has argued that the phenomenon of complexity in the physical sciences carries radical implications for political theory: namely, that political theorists should now be revising their concepts of agency, responsibility, and freedom. This very recent project of Connolly's has not (yet) attracted much opposition. Here I offer a critique of Connolly's argument which focuses on three key areas: (1) how he interprets and deploys “evidence” from physical science; (2) his theory of “creative freedom”; and (3) the impact that his recent philosophy has on the idea of the intellect. I argue that Connolly's scientific evidence is not what he claims it is; that the theory of “creative freedom” he offers fails; and that his critique of the intellect fails in theory, and would be highly damaging in practice.

There is disagreement among scholars regarding the mendacity of esoteric writing. Some see it as a necessarily dishonest mode of communication; others argue it does not meet the conditions of lying; others are more nuanced in their assessment. In this article, we seek to resolve this disagreement by offering a systematic analysis of the literary practice in which we argue that there are both truthful and mendacious forms of esoteric writing. In sum, if an author conceals truths from a general audience while still being truthful on the surface of the text or makes it clear that he is being untruthful, he is not lying; yet if an author conceals truths while intentionally being untruthful on the surface, he is lying. Given the parallel ethical structure between esoteric writing and political discourse, we argue that the analysis provided in this article may illuminate the ethical choices made in both written and political statements.

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.”

Some arguments against the law’s special treatment of religion are adapted from Rawls. These overlook the ways in which the abstract rights agreed to in the original position are given specific institutional form at the constitutional stage. Because the rights established in the original position are vaguely specified, liberty of conscience can’t be implemented without reliance on contestable values such as religion. Public reason, when refracted through the four-stage sequence (where it becomes less constraining at each stage of the sequence), is far less constraining than the proponents of liberal neutrality hope. Fulfilling the commitments made in the original position, for people in the world here and now, requires taking account of the values that those people hold. A Rawlsian position thus can support the American regime of religious accommodation.

One of the enduring problems in democratic theory is its inability to specify who should belong to the demos. In recent years, several scholars have been arguing that democratic theory should try to overcome this “boundary problem” through different kinds of global reform. I argue, however, that the boundary problem is an analytical distraction in thinking about global reform. I begin with general doubts as to whether the boundary problem can ground global reform. I then join the developing conversation on Arash Abizadeh's and Robert Goodin's boundary problem arguments. I offer new reasons for why both arguments encounter fundamental difficulties. I conclude by anticipating the concern that my argument does not take the need for global reform seriously enough.