This paper seeks to clarify the long-standing controversy over Aristotle's relationship to the natural law tradition. The paper argues that a precondition for any adequate assessment of Aristotle's natural law credentials is a close analysis of the Nicomachean Ethics V.7 discussion of the just by nature. Such an investigation, the primary concern of section 1, reveals that Aristotle's characterization of the politically just as partly natural and partly conventional does entail that nature serves as a normative ground for just law. With this conclusion in place, section 2 then turns more directly to Aristotle's relation to the natural law tradition. Despite important differences between Aristotle's account of the normative foundations of law and those found in the paradigmatic natural law teachings of the Stoics and Aquinas, I argue, there are nonetheless features of later natural law thought on the purpose and evaluation of law which are genuinely Aristotelian in orientation.

This paper separates Wollstonecraft's critical concept of “machiavelian” power and the capacity for domination, from a neutral concept of politics as the complex processes surrounding the power to govern, from her normative account of popular sovereignty which emphasizes collective political power to ensure the discharge of natural duty by way of civil and political rights and duties. Wollstonecraft's voice as political judge—which is audible throughout her work, but particularly clearly in her book on the French Revolution—articulates the ways that political power can be abused and misused, and can also be effective. Her theory is political in several ways: she interrogates the nature of political power and its explanatory importance; she consistently articulates political judgment about matters both conventionally political and social; she offers a theoretical justification for the expansion of the scope of politics to cover relations that hitherto were thought to be outside its domain; and finally her work itself constitutes a political intervention.

Some contend that politics functions best when deference is given to tradition and authoritative community norms, while others argue for the importance of independent thought and doubt about received sources of authority. Insight into this question can be found in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. While Tocqueville is often taken to regard the doubt characteristic of intellectual independence solely as a pathology, I show that he also saw it as a potential precursor to conversation, a stimulus to self-assured conviction, and a counter to distortionary abstractions. Nonetheless, Tocqueville also elaborates the destructive outcomes of too much doubt and intellectual independence. I identify the ways in which he seeks to discipline and educate the drive to independent thought so as to attain its benefits without falling victim to its pathologies. In doing so, I demonstrate the ways in which Tocqueville can be a guide to navigating the perennial tension between intellectual inquiry and authoritative community norms.

I argue that Nietzsche offers an account of how strong political states develop and how the highest forms of individuality emerge when the political will of these strong states weakens. Communities develop strength in proportion to the hostility of their environment. In order to flourish in a hostile environment, they must cultivate powerful and ambitious citizens by intensifying their most powerful drives, such as a lust for power. To control these citizens they must ruthlessly suppress individuality and allow these drives to be discharged in ways that do not threaten the community. This is achieved through an inflexible value system. When the political will of the state declines and this moral code weakens, the highest forms of individuality emerge. This account clarifies why Nietzsche tends to praise aristocratic states and brings into focus the obstacles to achieving the highest forms of human flourishing within a democratic state.

Followers of Leo Strauss have criticized Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the activity of philosophy as historicist. MacIntyre himself has been dismissive of Strauss. I argue that these apparent disagreements obscure their deeper agreements about the activity of philosophy. Rather than holding to historicism, MacIntyre's account of philosophy has a strong symmetry with Strauss's. To counter modern dogmatism, both Strauss and MacIntyre argue for a balanced mixture of history and philosophy to contend that philosophy's task is to gain knowledge of natural reality. Yet both place similar epistemic limits on philosophy, arguing that philosophy's gains are modest and always open to revision. Moreover, both hold that no authority other than human reason can direct the activity of philosophy. Putting MacIntyre and Strauss in a more careful conversation enriches the account of the fundamental philosophical problems that each addresses.

As the late Patrick Wolfe phrased it, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Settler colonialism as a “structure not an event” captures the idea that settler colonial invasion of Indigenous lands should not be contained as a phenomenon of the past, but rather is continually reproduced throughout the history and present of settler societies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. To say this is also to raise the question of how to trace and analyze the development, legitimization, and maintenance of the colonial structures in these societies: those built on the dispossession and occupation of stolen lands. To this end, Rita Dhamoon's definition of settler colonialism helps in thinking of it as “not only a structure but also a process, an activity for assigning political meanings, and organizing material structures driven by forces of power.” Dhamoon points us toward attending rigorously to this process in ideological, institutional, structural, and historical terms.