Political conflicts around the world increasingly reflect a religious challenge to liberal rationalism. Given the tendency of modern political rationalism to underestimate the power of religion, it seems reasonable to consider the classical analysis of religious antirationalism set forth with great clarity in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. The play seeks to demonstrate that religious antirationalism—as exemplified by Oedipus—is self-contradictory and self-destructive, but also that it is rooted in such enduring human traits as our awareness of our mortality, our hope for immortality, and our angry refusal to accept our mortality. Sophocles advocates a sober and cautious political rationalism that recognizes the dangers of religious passion to political life, but also the permanence of religious passion within political life. Such a political rationalism, embodied by Theseus, constitutes a middle way between a blind piety which rejects reason and an excessively hopeful political rationalism which underestimates the power of religion.

Thomas Hobbes sought a reconstruction of philosophy, ethics, and politics that would end, once and for all, the bitter disputes that led to the English Civil War. This reconstruction begins with the first principles of matter and motion and extends to a unique account of consent and political obligation. Hobbes intended to produce a unified philosophical system linking his materialist account of human nature to his moral and political theory. However, his materialism gives rise to a set of perceptions, imagination, and desires that contribute to the chaos of the state of nature. The sort of person that emerges from Hobbes's materialist anthropology is unlikely to be able to make the necessary agreements about common meaning and language that constitute the ground of the social contract. Therefore, Hobbes's materialism frustrates the very purpose for which it is conceived.

Scholars have generally traced J.S. Mill's interest in the United States to the commercial and democratic aspects of American society. Yet Mill also suggested a third respect in which America was unique: it was the only existing nation founded on the basis of “abstract principles.” This insight provides the key to a fuller understanding of Mill's various writings on America. In his early essays, Mill worried that America's founding principles and institutions were beginning to take on the characteristics of dogma: they were universally accepted, but no longer discussed. Mill responded optimistically to the Civil War because he believed the struggle to extinguish slavery would ultimately restore the meaning or vitality of the founding principles of liberty and equality. With the nation thus “regenerated,” Mill predicted that Americans would soon recognize and address other illiberal aspects of American society, including the subordinate status of women.

The essay reconsiders the argument of Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History with “radical historicism” and above all its leading representative, Martin Heidegger. Strauss's critique of such historicism is not motivated by the need to recover a teleological natural philosophy for the grounding of natural right. Strauss's turn to “the fundamental problems coeval with human thought” is in accord with Heidegger's claim that the whole is mysterious. His reservation rather concerns Heidegger's attempt, both longing and hopeful, to show that radical questioning of rationalism can solve the problem of philosophy's homelessness in human affairs, thereby taking further modern efforts to make humans “absolutely at home on earth.” In Strauss's judgment Socratic knowledge of ignorance is more authentically open to the aporetic character of the human relation to Being.

Arguably, there have been few contemporary political theorists who have had as great an impact as John Rawls. During his lifetime his work was referred to as “epoch-making” and “cataclysmic in its effect” on the field of political theory. On numerous occasions he was proclaimed “the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century,” and other titles equally celebratory. A number of individuals have gone so far as to credit Rawls with reviving political philosophy, breathing new life into what was (according to Peter Laslett's now famous 1956 declaration) a dead discipline, once again making it a valid and valuable enterprise. While the accuracy of such a claim has been questioned, one fact seems indisputable: Rawls redefined late twentieth-century political theory, altering its “premises and principles.” Indeed, “political philosophy since the early 1970s has been—at least in the English-speaking world—in very substantial part a commentary on Rawls's work.”

Because these books have not received as much scholarly attention as Nietzsche's other writings, Paul Franco's article “Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human and the Problem of Culture” should be welcomed by students of Nietzsche. However, Franco fails to take advantage of the opportunity to really engage with the small secondary literature and move the debate about the significance of these neglected works forward. While Franco mentions most of the other works on Human, All Too Human (henceforth, HH), he barely interacts with what those who have gone before him have said. His decision not to heap “stone upon stone, brick upon brick” (as Nietzsche recommends) is problematic for three related reasons. It (1) forfeits the opportunity to build on what exists—either by affirming, correcting, or adding to the secondary literature in one area of Nietzsche studies where this is possible; (2) makes it impossible for readers to assess the originality of Franco's contribution; and (3) fails readers who should be able to rely upon reputable scholarly writings as fair and faithful guides to the literature on Nietzsche.

Let me begin by addressing what seems to be the central issue that Abbey raises about my article: What does looking at Human, All too Human (henceforth, HH) in the context of the problem of culture add to our understanding of that text? She acknowledges my point that most commentators on HH have focused their attention on Nietzsche's investigation of the “history of the moral sensations” and its connection to his later “genealogy of morals.” She even seems to concede that my attempt to understand HH in terms of Nietzsche's long-standing concern with culture is distinctive. Her problem with my analysis is that it “fails to demonstrate clearly the heuristic value of [its] focus on culture” and it does not sufficiently explain “how reframing the problems of morality as a concern about culture really does illuminate Nietzsche's purposes and achievements in this work.” She attributes this failure to my focusing primarily on the text of HH instead of—to repeat the refrain of her reply—engaging with the relevant secondary literature.