This article examines the political and philosophical problem of partisanship—the false inflation of a part into a semblance of a whole—in Plato's Timaeus. Timaeus's “likely story” about the cosmos both exemplifies and addresses this problem, which first comes to light in the dialogue's opening pages. Reflection on the problem of partisanship allows us to grasp Timaeus's understanding of the simultaneously erotic and thumotic work of philosophy, the work of making things whole. While Timaeus is moved by a Socratic love of wisdom, I argue that he implicitly corrects the picture of the erotic philosopher Socrates sets forth in the Republic.

This issue of The Review of Politics is dedicated to the memory of Wilson Carey McWilliams, a long-time member of our Advisory Board and enthusiastic supporter of the study of politics through literature. He was one of the founding members of the organized section on “Politics and Literature” established by the American Political Science Association in 1993. His essay on “Divine Right: Mark Twain's Joan of Arc” is posthumously published here for the first time with the permission of his literary executor, Nancy McWilliams.

This paper explores some of the basic ideological tenets of former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami, showing how they prevented him from realizing his reform agenda. Ideological inconsistencies and ambiguities exposed Khatami and his allies to criticism from both conservatives and radical reformers. Consequently, many Iranians who once voted for Khatami and his allies boycotted the presidential elections of 2005, paving the way for a conservative to succeed Khatami as president of Iran.

Most readers have not agreed with Mark Twain in liking Joan of Arc best of all his novels, particularly because his hand is almost invisible in it. He presents the story as a translation by “Jean Francois Alden” of the remembrances of “Sieur Louis de Conte.” He did not think readers would take a work by “Mark Twain” seriously. Only the initials S. L. C. indicate the connection between the actual and the presumed author. Twain considered Joan to be “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” She was a woman—and a general. She genuinely believed that she was acting on the basis of commands from God. In relating her story, Twain nevertheless shows that nothing human, and certainly no government and no ruler, is entitled to divine honors or right.

It is widely acknowledged that the style of Plato's political philosophizing is radically different from the systems and doctrines approach established by Hobbes and confirmed and redirected by Kant. But what about Aristotle? Does he intend to produce systematic political theory in sharp contrast to Plato's question-centered dialectics? This essay argues that Aristotle's political science is equally as dialogical as Plato's. Taken together, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics form a single set of lectures, craftily organized to lead its immediate Greek audience (the equivalent of Socrates' interlocutors in Plato) deeply into the questions and problems that are Aristotle's theoretical basis for the paradigmatically human activities of practical reason (phronêsis) and thoughtful choice (prohairesis). He accomplishes this goal by allowing none of the answers he or his audience might propose to stand unchallenged, thus acting as another, albeit soberer, Socrates to his politically concerned audience then and, potentially, now.

These two lectures by Leo Strauss, “What Can We Learn from Political Theory?” delivered in July 1942, and “The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews,” delivered November 7, 1943, include not only Strauss's most elaborate statement about the relation of political philosophy and political practice (in the first), but what may well be his fullest written public statements about matters of contemporary foreign policy. Both lectures obviously were carefully considered, composed, and corrected, but Strauss did not attempt to publish either. He may have had second thoughts about some of the arguments he advanced in these lectures, or he may simply have chosen to concentrate his literary efforts elsewhere. Other lectures he prepared during this period but did not publish himself have since been published: “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” delivered April 1940 at Syracuse University, and “Reason and Revelation,” delivered January 1948 at Hartford Theological Seminary, both in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006); “German Nihilism,” delivered to the New School's General Seminar February 26, 1941, is in Interpretation 26:3 (Spring 1999).

Interest in natural law theory regularly revives but the question of whether Aquinas' classic version is viable depends on whether his doctrine has the resources to respond to the classic early modern critiques that were made of it. It is argued that he does have the resources to so respond, although the response pushes the ultimate philosophic question back to the issue of the validity of his natural theology.

Human, All Too Human has received less critical attention than many of Nietzsche's other works, and yet it constitutes a crucial turning point in Nietzsche's overall philosophical development. This essay argues that the problem of culture that had preoccupied Nietzsche in his earlier works continues to animate his thinking in Human, All Too Human, but his position on this problem changes fundamentally. Instead of attributing the fragmentation of modern culture to the uncontrolled growth of science and looking to art and myth to restore cultural unity, Nietzsche now explores the possibility of grounding culture on scientific knowledge. This new concept of culture requires a critique of the Wagnerian romantic-artistic cultural project, which Nietzsche reveals rests on erroneous religious, moral, and ultimately metaphysical assumptions. The radical critique of these latter assumptions forms a bridge to Nietzsche's mature philosophy.

The title of this lecture is not entirely of my own choosing. I do not like very much the term political theory; I would prefer to speak of political philosophy. Since this terminological question is not entirely verbal, I beg leave to say a few words about it.

This article re-examines Herder's status as one of the founders of nationalism in the light of both older and more recent literature. The article focuses specifically on Herder's position with regard to the classical nationalist thesis that state and nationality should be coterminous. It argues that a close reading of Herder's oft cited and most explicit statement apparently lending support to this thesis has been misunderstood. The existing literature underestimates Herder's concern regarding the question of governance. For Herder there can be no case for statehood without just governance. As earlier drafts of his work confirm, Herder was deeply critical of the states he knew and denounced their overly bureaucratic and despotic character. He thought that nations could and should exist without being states. Depending on the circumstances, however, states might fulfil temporary functions to strengthen and preserve the national character, that most essential attribute of every nation. For Herder the diversity of nations is an insurance against despotism. It is not a licence for the creation of states.

This paper seeks to illuminate magnanimity by examining Shakespeare's Coriolanus in light of Aristotle's account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. I contend that contemplation of Coriolanus's similarity to Aristotle's magnanimous man allows us to harmonize two apparently discordant elements of the magnanimous man's character: his seriousness about the good, on the one hand, and his apparently status-oriented intolerance of insult, on the other. Nevertheless, Coriolanus falls short of Aristotle's standard; reflection on his defects reveals that genuine magnanimity requires prudence and a philosophic detachment from the city's moral convictions that Shakespeare's hero lacks.

Traditionally, the epic focused on the heroic deeds of great public figures, but the Romantics remade the genre into something more personal, making the poet himself the hero of their epics. The Romantic disillusionment with politics, flowing from the failure of the French Revolution, lies behind their revaluation of heroism. The turn to nature, which the Romantics present as immediate, turns out to be mediated by their political experience. Wordsworth's The Prelude and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are good examples of the Romantic transformation of the epic and provide a case study in the relation of politics and literature, specifically the politics of literary form.

Diversity and unity are pivotal to the thought of the eighteenth-century German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder. Yet despite the enormous influence of his thought on the late Isaiah Berlin in the development of his own pluralism and Berlin's urging for those interested in cultural diversity to learn from Herder, many commentators fail to heed Berlin's equal recognition of Herder's radical antidualism. Thus, while an increasing number of theorists now note Herder's contribution to philosophical and political thought in being one of the first to recognize the value of cultural diversity, many fail to grasp fully the complexity and subtlety of his understanding of culture. Contrary to what is becoming the orthodox view in Anglo-American political theory, Herder was fully aware of the diversity existing within any given cultural community and promoted cultural interaction and interchange in a spirit of cooperation. He only opposed the cultural domination of indigenous populations.

Michael Oakeshott's concerns about political developments in twentieth-century Europe seem to shape his philosophical writings. Yet Oakeshott persistently portrays himself as a philosopher who has little practical interest in politics. This essay argues that Oakeshott's genteel conception of the good life leads him to develop a political doctrine for practical reasons while disclaiming any practical motives. His diagnosis of collectivist politics in the 1930s reluctantly solicits a philosophical defense of a pluralist political order that is hospitable to his ethical ideal. His writings concerning the self, society, and state develop such a defense. Yet for Oakeshott, political engagement is incompatible with gentility because it conflates worldliness with spirituality. Oakeshott, therefore, disavows the practical aspirations that shape his work.

The Cyropaedia is a biographical account of what Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, knew in order to rule human beings. This essay focuses on Cyrus's twofold Persian education, which consisted of his conventional and heterodox educations. The former emphasized the rule of law, while the latter stressed the need for absolute rule by a single leader. In order to evaluate Cyrus's revolution, one must grasp the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Persian regime that educated him, especially in light of the impressive but short-lived empire he founded. In the end, the Cyropaedia unfolds as a deeply ironic work. Despite Cyrus's prodigious wisdom, the empire he founded was for Xenophon neither unequivocally lasting nor good. In this sense, Xenophon's own knowledge rivals and supercedes that of Cyrus, insofar as Xenophon realized that wisdom is no match for the chaotic world of politics, a sobering and realistic outlook still applicable today.

This essay argues for Walt Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of “aesthetic democracy” emphasizes the affective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, world-making power. Through his poetic translation of the vox populi, Whitman hoped to engender a robustly transformative democratic politics. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life.

As Quentin Skinner argues, political thinkers are best read in historical context. But in what context do Skinner's own interpretations of the history of political thought belong? This essay places his denunciation of grand narratives in the context of the decline of Whig interpretations of history and presents his Republicanism as a substitute source of legitimacy in the wake of the collapse of the British Empire and of the loss of social influence of Christianity. This essay also argues that Skinner's inquiries cannot be understood solely in the light of their historical context. His historical work is linked with his republican philosophy. The relation between his concept of liberty and his contextualism shows the dependence of his contextualist methodology on specific philosophical commitments.