It is frequently suggested, today, that toleration and relativism are the same thing. This essay focuses on how John Locke dealt with this issue, that is, how he defended his principle of toleration against the charges of Jonas Proast that it would devolve into unbelief and moral relativism. In replying to Proast, Locke attempts to demonstrate that his principle of toleration will not become a sanction for unbelief and that while it extends to competing conceptions of salvation it does not extend to competing conceptions of the good. That is to say, Locke builds a fire wall between the two areas, the aim of which is to confine toleration to the realm of mere theology—it is this barrier, its basis and its extent and its durability, which I explore.

Contemporary liberals who advocate strict separation between church and state often defend themselves by suggesting that such a position is the only one compatible with the principle of liberal neutrality, whose origins go back to John Locke's first Letter on Toleration. This essay argues that this line of reasoning is mistaken. While Locke did endorse the neutrality principle, he did not endorse strict separation, and this fact suggests that the connection between liberal neutrality and strict separation is not as secure as many liberals have assumed. This examination of Locke's attitudes toward neutrality and strict separation aims both to clarify what is at stake in contemporary debates over strict separation in liberal states and to consider the conditions that would have to be met to mount a Lockean argument against weakening church-state separation in contemporary liberal states.

Questions of exclusion, membership and the status of resident foreigners press upon liberal political thought and society with a particular sharpness, given the universalist underpinnings of the liberal commitment. How within the horizon of liberalism and rights discourse are we to think of the foreigner? The article suggests some reasons why we should consider suspect the cluster of notions surrounding alienage and sketches why the moral salience of the foreignness of these outsiders at our door and present among us has diminished, and thus brought under scrutiny our traditional comportment toward them. But it is not so much intended here to seek a resolution of these issues as to motivate a cluster of questions, to argue for their importance and to show the inadequacy of the treatment of them that we have inherited.

Liberalism is now thought to be particularly inclined toward internationalism, so that international guarantees of human rights are regarded as a quintessentially liberal project. Classical liberal thought had a different view. So Vattel's mid-eighteenth-century Law of Nations, which is much more insistent on individual rights, is also much more sympathetic to national claims than the pre-liberal doctrines of Grotius. Even John Locke's classical liberalism is quite attentive to the claims of nationality. The national element in classical liberal thought remains evident in the thought of the American Founders and in nineteenth-century liberalism.

According to Aquinas's view, while the mandate that political authority be instituted and exercised is an immediate consequence of the natural law precept that the common good be promoted, the question of who possesses political authority is settled by customary law. Samuel Beer's rival interpretation, one of the few attempts to discern Aquinas's view on political authority, is incompatible with Aquinas's explicit remarks on these matters. The present account provides an interpretation that both fits Aquinas's few explicit remarks about the source and form of political authority and explains the terseness of his remarks on that subject.

Political science is uncomfortable with collapse, given the discipline's reliance upon stable political institutions and the presumably thick soup of political culture in which they stand. Even after Barrington Moore's classic study of revolution, the lingering question of Why did the state collapse when it did? troubles those who failed to anticipate profound change; but this rarely inhibits the accusation that ideological opponents made an even poorer job of prediction. In this respect the last six years in the study of Russian politics have been very lively.