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² Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision (Boston, 1960).Google Scholar

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⁴ Thurow, Lester, The Zero-Sum Society (New York, 1980);Google ScholarGalbraith, J. K., Economics and the Public Purpose (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

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⁷ The quotation is from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. For a discussion of this, see Mosher, Michael, “Civic Identity in the Juridical Society,” Political Theory, 02 1983, 117 ff.Google Scholar

⁸ Two asides are in order. First, the action-behavior distinction alluded to here is most prominent in ordinary language analysis. Second, the suggestion that an action's results are predictable is sure to give pause to those who see this running counter to Arend't claims. However, the predictability implied here is a minimalist one: nothing more is at stake than the contention that actions only persist so long as the actors themselves feel that certain results will flow from their acts. If this belief were consistently frustrated, then acting itself would disappear as we collectively wallowed in despair.

⁹ These possible goals for action are those implied by Arendt and Machiavelli, respectively.

¹⁰ Arendt, H., The Human Condition (New York, 1958).Google Scholar

¹¹ Pocock, , Machiavellian Moment, pp. 211–18.Google Scholar

¹² Ibid., pp. 446–461.

¹³ Ibid., p. 197; Wills, Garry, Explaining America (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Pocock, , Machiavellian Moment, p. 165.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 213.

¹⁶ There is, of course, a problem in this formulation, for it is haunted by a certain circularity of argument. Specifically, there is a sense in which worthy acts are necessary if one is to create a public space. Likewise, a public space is to some degree necessary if there are to be worthy acts. In this sense, a public space is both precondition for and consequence of the practice of virtue. Occasionally, republicanism has avoided confronting this issue by simply circumventing it: by invoking an event whose consequences or a person whose actions set the republican experience in motion. Hence, the recourse to “explanation” by way of the sagacious lawgiver or the founding experience. Just as often, though, republicans have contented themselves with a more mundane and less-heroic rendering – one which relies more fully on an evolutionary conception of the republic's rise. To some extent, Machiavelli's account of (or better yet, well-nigh silence on) the rise of Venice fits this pattern, as indeed, with emendations, does his discussion of Rome.

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¹⁸ Ibid., p. 212 and p. 410.

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²² Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 30.Google Scholar One might recall, as well, Captain Vere's speech to his officers during Billy Budd's court-martial. As Vere said, “do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move … as sailors, yet as the King's officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true that, in receiving our commissions, we in most regards ceased to be natural free agents” (Melville, H., Billy Budd [New York: Signet, 1961], p. 68).Google Scholar

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²⁸ MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1981),Google Scholar argues, as have countless others, that the effort to remove teleological components from our understanding of man is both misguided and philosophically illegitimate.

²⁹ Pocock, , Machiavellian Moment, p. 552.Google Scholar

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⁴¹ Walzer, , Spheres of Justice,Google Scholar attempts both to vindicate and to reinforce distinctions within social and political life which, though not equivalent to the classical, public-private split, nonetheless bear a family resemblance to it. That he undertakes such a task testifies to the pervasiveness of the “social,” or, as Walzer phrases it, to the danger that those criteria relevant to one sphere of action will come to dominate all others. Moreover, his proposals, in terms of both political philosophy and public policy, intimate a number of ways in which such distinction might begin to break the grip of the social—and do so without recourse to utter anachronism.

⁴² Richter, Melvin, ed., The Political Theory of Montesquieu (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 111–22.Google Scholar Of course, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and countless others had doubts regarding liberalism quite akin to those of Dahl and Thurow. For a sketch of some of these, see Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, 1977), pp. 67–128.Google Scholar

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