Some Thoughts Concerning Education offers the theory of governance the Two Treatises lack. Education is the key to Lockean politics: self-government and public order require virtuous citizens, and these citizens, as Locke suggested in the Essay and explains in the Education, are made rather than found, constructed from the ground up by discipline. Through early and careful practices of education, they are enmeshed in a net of habit and custom that naturalizes the moral commitments they are taught, rendering the process, and the artifice, invisible. Locke entangles his subjects in an architecture of power of which they become the bearers, thereby providing the foundation for public order and limited government. Locke's disciplinary liberalism allows us to better appreciate late modern subjectivity as an achievement, rather than a given of political life, albeit an achievement that involves some uncomfortable compromises and a willingness to accept, if not laud, our disciplinary commitments.

While most political theorists focus on the role of reflective judgment in Kant's Critique of Judgment, the political dimensions of art itself have been overlooked. Kant's treatment of art suggests a consistent political message: art, as an analogy, can teach basic values for citizenship. I examine his hierarchy of the arts, as well as his treatment of genius and taste, arguing that each is informed by Kant's belief in the heuristic capacity of art.

In his response to the fictitious “sensible knave” in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume argues that the practice of justice is always in our own interest. This article provides the first comprehensive interpretation of Hume's response, incorporating his discussion of virtue and happiness in his essay “The Sceptic.” It will be seen that this argument is a hedonistic one, resting on the superior pleasure and security of a life of modest wealth and intellectual cultivation. Hume's argument ultimately fails, and he knows it. He offers it nonetheless because it is generally true and socially beneficial.

January 1939, the eve of World War Two, Waldemar Gurian and several of his colleagues, after months of meetings and negotiations, published the first issue of the Review of Politics. It realized a project dear to the hearts of Gurian and the others who had felt the need for a journal with a new blend of ideas. Tucked away on the inside back cover of that first issue and every issue for many years afterward were these simple words: “THE REVIEW OF POLITICS, without neglecting the analysis of institutions and techniques, is primarily interested in the philosophical and historical approach to political realities.” Over the years I have heard several explanations for the brevity and succinctness of the statement. Perhaps it was in keeping with the directness of the times or its war-worried atmosphere. From what I have come to know, however, given the personalities involved in the founding of the journal, this simple and straightforward statement of purpose was, as one of the subsequent editors said, basically what they intended to do.

Let's begin by presenting some newly discovered documents concerning Niccolò Machiavelli. The biographical detail may at first appear overwhelming, but the light these documents shed on the chronology of Machiavelli's composition of The Prince helps to answer some old questions concerning the character of Machiavelli's little treatise. The new documents date from the year 1515. They were drawn up at a time of financial difficulty and profound personal disappointment in the life of the former Florentine secretary and second chancellor. In 1512 Machiavelli had been fired from the chancery of the Florentine Republic. In 1513 he had been arrested on a probably false charge of conspiracy, tortured (although he gave no confession), and then unexpectedly freed in a general amnesty following the election of a Florentine, Giovanni de' Medici, as Pope Leo X. In 1515, at the time these documents were drawn up, Machiavelli was still out of favor. But he was also putting into prose the theoretical work that established the extraordinary reputation still associated with him today.

The most striking feature of Rousseau's self-presentation in the Confessions is his pathos-filled anticipation of future adversity. Never quite arriving at the depths of despair he foresees, however, Rousseau instead offers the reader glimpses of a surprisingly robust happiness. In this article I present a new political reading of the Confessions that is attentive both to the rhetorical surface of the work and to its charming subplot. Guided by Rousseau's humorous understanding of truth telling, I argue that the Confessions is shaped by a complex literary ruse that colors much of what Rousseau has to say about frankness, happiness, and his own idiosyncrasy. Far from being undone by his shadow-dappled imaginings, Rousseau's conscious dissimulations reflect his concerns about the public value of enlightenment and his commitment to authorial responsibility.

In his work Politics as Religion, Emilio Gentile credits Eric Voegelin with having invented, if not the expression itself, then at least the concept of “political religion” which the latter would use consistently throughout the 1960s to describe totalitarian regimes. In his Autobiographical Reflections, drawn from an interview recorded in 1973, Voegelin revisits the use of this expression and gives an indication of the sources that inspired him to adopt it:

Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is designed to provide the education necessary to produce citizens guided by the obligations of natural law. A careful examination of his recommendations, however, reveals that his education does not in fact teach children to obey the law of nature directly. Instead, it teaches them to obey the law of opinion or reputation. At the same time, he encourages children to see themselves as rational and therefore free. The law of reputation provides the necessary restraint to balance the desire for liberty, and the desire for liberty ensures that citizens must respect others in order to win their esteem. Respect for others' rights, an essential element of Lockean natural law, emerges from this specific combination of the law of reputation and the love of liberty.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Oakeshott are often labeled conservative thinkers, and taken to theorize rigid limits to individual agency and criticism. Tracing several modes of affinity between the work of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, one can recognize the conventionality and rule-governed character of linguistic practices and yet affirm a deeply individualistic account of agency and action. Each thinker respectively characterizes the individual as located within a context of action that is richly structured by intersubjective rules and practices. Yet each also recognizes an ineluctable dimension of individuality and contingency to action that surpasses mere rule following or the reprise of conventional practice. The very situatedness of the individual agent within a framework of linguistic practices shared with others provides the friction that enables individual criticism and transgressive political action. Wittgenstein and Oakeshott thus present a perspective on political agency and criticism that is a salient alternative to both conservative and radical views.

By exploring Addams's lifelong fascination with work, this essay analyzes the ways in which her understanding of work fundamentally shaped her wider political vision. For Addams, work was the foundation of not only a personal sense of identity, but also a collective democratic character. The workplace had the potential to be the model of a cooperative community, providing a venue for social solidarity and civic reciprocity. By working together, Americans would develop a more cosmopolitan and inclusive politics. In short, the essay argues that Addams's political thought was an attempt to revitalize democracy by giving meaning to work. It concludes by suggesting that her arguments can be applied to many contemporary political problems, and that today's democratic theory and practice would be enlivened by a renewed attention to work.

Alexander the Great and his legacy suffuse The Prince, a fact that has received little attention. Machiavelli uses Alexander to illustrate the form of rule in which one is lord and all others are slaves. In recounting the Roman Republic's conquest of Greece, Machiavelli treats Alexander's vanquished successors. Alexander's legacy enters Rome itself, igniting in Romans the desire to subject the world to sole preeminence. According to Machiavelli, Caesar imitated Alexander, and Caesar overturned the republic, initiating the rule of one in Rome. Caesar had his own Roman successors, the emperors who ruled under his name. Rome succeeded in imposing the rule of one on Europe. That form of rule exists in Machiavelli's times with the states of the Turk and the Sultan as well as with the papacy in a limited respect. Something of the old Rome and its Alexandrian aspirations persists in Christian Rome.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Jon Elster have taken great interest in the famous “children's” fable, “The Fox and the Grapes.” Elster believes the fable pinpoints problems in utilitarian doctrine while Sartre contends it demonstrates how consciousness copes with frustrated desire. As impressive as these insights are, neither philosopher can fully explain the cognitive and cultural processes involved in sour grapes. To improve upon their theories, I will argue that amour-propre is an important psychological motive inspiring sour grapes as well as show that sour grapes is built into the value commitments and institutional structures of democratic life through Tocqueville's analysis of American democracy.

The essay explores the relationship between value pluralism, as Isaiah Berlin understood it, and liberalism. It consists of two main parts. In the first part, I argue that value pluralism does not entail liberalism, and I criticize two philosophers—William Galston and George Crowder—who believe that it does. In the second, I reconstruct and defend Isaiah Berlin's own understanding of this relationship, drawing on an essay that is often neglected by Berlin's interpreters: “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life.” Berlin thought that the relationship between value pluralism and liberalism was largely psychological. He believed that those who embraced value pluralism would be more likely to affirm liberal institutions, because they would be more likely to exhibit certain virtues—notably empathy, imagination, and openness to other ways of life—that typically motivate tolerance.

This essay questions the seemingly laudatory judgment of Cesare Borgia in The Prince, chapter 7, by highlighting its emphasis on Borgia's dependence on the arms of others, which Machiavelli equates with “fortune.” During their encounters in 1502–1503, Machiavelli became keenly aware of Borgia's dependence on his papal father, on France, and on mercenaries. The praise of the “foundations” Borgia allegedly laid to remedy this dependence (including a fantasized conquest of Tuscany) is not Machiavelli's own assessment but the voice of Borgia's self-dramatizing and self-deceiving exaggerations. Knowing the weakness behind Cesare's bravado, Machiavelli could not have considered him the model of the “new prince,” still less of the “redeemer” invoked in chapter 26. On the contrary, Borgia is the negative model of the new prince who depends on the arms of others, inevitably fails, and blames fortune misconstrued as malicious fate.

In skirmishes over the interpretive turn, the work of Charles Taylor is frequently cited as representing the state of the art. Yet a systematic assessment of Taylor's interpretivism in light of the most salient criticisms made against it has not been conducted. This paper argues that Taylor's interpretivism withstands the strongest criticisms made of it so far, and therefore is an essential resource for revitalizing the interpretive turn. Although it is widely acknowledged in the secondary literature that Taylor's interpretivism rests on ontological claims about human agency, this paper presents a novel justification for this thesis as derived from a Heideggerian phenomenology of moods. It also presents two novel ways in which a defense of Taylor's interpretivism helps to bridge the gap between empirical social science research and normative political and ideological critique. In the latter discussion, it draws on Taylor's most recently published work.