In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu announces that he would be the happiest of mortals if he could help men cure themselves of their prejudices. Though he demands that we understand prejudice’s role in his work, scholars have not excavated his whole strategy regarding it. Preliminary investigations have concluded that he sought to destroy prejudices because he had a high estimation of popular reason. This article argues that, while he does seek to eliminate prejudices that support despotism, he also encourages salutary ones for liberty. His whole strategy regarding prejudices shows that his use of them reflects a modest assessment of reason. By demonstrating that two of his well-known strategies for political reform—reinterpreting Christianity and encouraging commerce—concern salutary prejudices, this article reveals the centrality of prejudices to his political project overall.

There is a consensus in the literature that the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1916) lacked philosophical sophistication and that understanding of Marxism’s Hegelian origins was lost soon after Karl Marx’s death, only to be recovered with the emergence of Western Marxism in the 1920s. This article challenges this consensus, urging revision of the basic outlines of the intellectual history of Marxism. It begins by sketching two ways contemporary scholars understand the Hegel-Marx connection. It then shows that these views were anticipated before World War I in the work of Max Adler. Against the view that Hegel was “put back into Marxism” in the 1920s or 1970s, then, this article maintains that there have always been sophisticated as well as simplifying accounts of the Hegel-Marx connection.

Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s thoughts, when reconstructed via a critical dialogue, can provide much-needed insight into applying religious truth claims to politics. Arendt emphasizes the role of plural voices for free politics. For her, a solution to the spread of misinformation is to establish and maintain a robust public sphere. For Bonhoeffer, this method is limited and incomplete. He argues that Christians must see the world as a space of solidarity among the oppressed, and a Christ-reality that resists both theocratic legalism and vulgar voluntarism must guide their actions. However, Arendt’s sharp judgment of the dangers of a modern society suggests that even a modest version of religious practice cannot remain intact in the face of modern socio-economic forces. Through a novel interpretation of their political theologies, this article investigates a way for religion to be a conscientious voice in politics yet eschew becoming a tyrannical force itself.

The secondary literature on Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin’s 1953 debate on totalitarianism is in general agreement that these two thinkers offer fundamentally irreconcilable accounts of the phenomenon. This article adds to the literature on this debate by employing a broader temporal frame of analysis. I argue that, when viewed over the longer arc of their development, these thinkers converge in how they approach some of the moral questions associated with totalitarianism. This is especially evident in their reactions to resurgent questions of “German guilt” that arose in the early 1960s. Arendt’s “reality as such” and Voegelin’s “first reality” converge on what I call “moral reality.” Both ultimately treated totalitarianism as, in part, a moral catastrophe insofar as it entailed a loss of this sense of moral participation.

Remapping Sovereignty examines how activist-thinkers from Indigenous societies in North America recast the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty over the course of the twentieth century. While political theorists have criticized sovereignty as the dominant paradigm of political authority, alternatives to sovereignty remain elusive. Recasting these debates, Temin argues that activists-intellectuals in the long Red Power movement of the twentieth century engaged in complex acts of contesting and remapping the logic of sovereignty. If logics of Westphalian sovereignty revolve around “the normative centrality and perceived necessity of the claim to final and ultimate authority over a bounded space” (6) then central to its institutional practice is a refusal of the webs of relationality and interdependence on the land and human and non-human others. Rather than upholding these sovereign logics, Indigenous claims to self-determination, Temin shows, are premised not the assertion of territorial control but on the cultivation of reciprocal relations of care for the earth. Creating alternatives to both the institutions of the sovereign-state and the very conceptual framework of sovereignty entails dismantling and repairing the structural hierarchies and conceptual frameworks that stem from the constitutive disavowal of these relationalities embedded in both the concept and practice of state sovereignty.

This wonderful book is deeply researched, conceptually clarifying, and beautifully written. When read together, its chapters produce a powerful image of the alternative political possibilities outlined by North American Indigenous writers including Zitkala-Ša, Ella Deloria, Vine Deloria Jr., George Manuel, Lee Maracle, and Howard Adams. Temin has done his intellectual work well: I came to the book with extensive knowledge of some of the figures it covers, and little knowledge of others, and came away able to think much more deeply about all involved. This is a first-rate scholarly effort.

Political theory has, until recently, exhibited a telling lack of interest in Indigenous thinkers and ideas. Remapping Sovereignty is an impressive history of twentieth-century political thought that follows recent efforts to correct this tendency. Remapping Sovereignty’s unique strength lies in its focus on individual Indigenous political theorists. Temin presents these figures as sophisticated, systematic thinkers with specific, context-motivated agendas and stakes animating the ideas they articulated. Remapping Sovereignty balances careful historicism with an edifying showcase of how twentieth-century Indigenous political thinkers’ situated ideas continue to offer generally valuable contributions to contemporary political theory. Temin’s textual expositions and the historical context he provides for the conceptual lineage he reconstructs will, hopefully, push readers to exercise and demand more precision when invoking the still sometimes vague category of “Indigenous political theory.”

In her 1983 How to Suppress Women’s Writing, feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ outlined the many approaches used to ignore, condemn, or otherwise belittle the intellectual productions by members of the “wrong” groups.1 In addition to discouragement and blocking access to requisite materials and training, other regular tactics include isolating a given author or one of their texts from the tradition to which they or it belong and simply “ignoring the works, the workers, and the whole tradition,” which Russ considers both most common and most difficult to combat.2 Among the many contributions of Temin’s Remapping Sovereignty is his actively counteracting the ignoring of “the works, the workers, and the whole tradition” by refusing to isolate the six individual North American Indigenous political thinkers who are his focus from the larger, internally diverse, dynamic political worlds of which they are part. Far from monolithic or univocal, what emerges is an intergenerational multi-nation effort to articulate aspirations and concerted action that respond with dignity and power to distinct and overlapping moments in ongoing processes of settler-colonial genocide and dispossession.

I begin where Temin’s book does, with the #NODAPL movement. The movement emerged in 2016 as Standing Rock Sioux citizens organized to stop the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) across their ancestral lands. As Sioux scholar-activist Nick Estes argues, the #NODAPL movement is part of a longer history of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism in the US.1 It is also part of a history of 500 years of Indigenous resistance in the Americas/Abya Yala, one that has intensified with the contemporary expansion of extractive industries. Indigenous resistance in extractive hot zones such as the Amazon has in recent years included pipeline takeovers, blockades, and legal activism to halt land concessions to companies by the state. The response to this activism has been increased violence against protesters and their criminalization.2

Hendrix, Vasko, Gordon, and Bernal raise challenging questions and illuminate key dimensions of Remapping Sovereignty. Their interventions explore the stakes of my interpretive method; probe close readings of the book’s six key thinkers; animate my mapping of Indigenous political theory in longer histories and expanded geographies; and press on the implications of my theorizations of colonial sovereignty and earthmaking for Indigenous and anti/decolonial thought and movements. To synthesize, their comments touch on dual aspects of the book, and how I weave connections between them: on one hand, the historical and interpretive work of (re)mapping Indigenous political theory; on the other, the conceptual insights gleaned through close reading of Indigenous political theory. I address their contributions in turn, starting first with the historical-interpretive dimensions, and next, the political-philosophical implications of guiding conceptual frameworks.

“From this it arises that all the armed prophets conquered,” wrote Niccolò Machiavelli, “and the unarmed ones were ruined.”1 Moses was his preeminent example of a prophet-prince, since Moses relied not only on the revelation of Yahweh, but also on the arms used to maintain the way of life that revelation prescribed. For Machiavelli, the firebrand Dominican Girolamo Savonarola served as a timely Florentine example of a ruined prophet without arms, for mere popular support was not enough to sustain the serious changes the friar sought for Florence’s church and society.2 To be sure, in Machiavelli’s day, there was a widespread belief that the Western church had fallen very far from its apostolic origins; recent popes such as Alexander VI, who had excommunicated Savonarola and fathered Cesare Borgia, could well serve as an archetype of ecclesiastical corruption. But while many agreed with Savonarola’s denunciations of wayward popes and clerics, his attempt at reform turned only into a prelude to the return of the Medici to Florence, and their influence over the papacy.