In arguments for a more tolerant Hobbes, Leviathan's endorsement of “Independency” is often Exhibit A; however, the conditionals Hobbes attached have received little attention. These—and the dangers of “contention” and sectarian “affection” they identify—are essential for understanding Hobbes's views on toleration. Together, they express a vision of “difference without disagreement” in which the accommodation of diversity in religious worship and association depends on the suppression of disagreement through sovereign- and self-discipline over speech. This expressly antievangelical ideal of toleration as a civil silence about difference presents a challenge to the more tolerant Hobbes thesis, particularly in its recent “Erastian Independency” guise. It also raises deeper questions about what might be at stake in applying the labels of “intolerant” or “tolerant” to Hobbes today.

This article examines early modern English public houses and related period miscellany—broadside ballads, conduct books, and songs—to more closely investigate the discourses and performances of drinking culture. Drinking culture, I argue, not only had a significant role in shaping the Restoration's civic culture of political participation and the emerging early modern public sphere, but also positioned emotions of pleasure and melancholy as social and political objects of care and cultivation. While the politics of pub culture and intoxication have been well documented by historians and literary scholars of early modern England and eighteenth-century America, much of this discussion has not yet been incorporated into political assessments of the public sphere and its history. Reinserting emotion and intoxication into the emergence of the public sphere helps to flesh out the history of feeling and social ritual in civic engagement.

This article examines Reinhold Niebuhr's contributions both to twentieth-century liberalism and to reflection on liberalism's relationship to political ethics. These contributions are, I argue, twofold. First, Niebuhr's account of moral psychology chastens liberal ambitions and assumptions, offering a more “realistic” liberalism (while avoiding certain weaknesses of “realist” theories). Second, Niebuhr's thought points to the importance of ethos—the combination of dispositions, temperament, and perceptions that shape individual conduct—in defining liberalism and determining the quality of political action. In articulating an ethos of humility, moderation, skepticism, irony, and self-restraint, Niebuhr offers a reformulation and defense of liberalism, and a warning against dangers that threaten liberalism both from within and without.

Through a critical analysis of the positions of Rawls and Habermas, the article argues against the proviso that religious language be “translated” into an allegedly neutral vocabulary as a condition for full inclusion within public political reasoning. Defending and expanding the analysis of Maeve Cooke, it maintains that both Habermas and Rawls mischaracterize the nature of religious reasons in relation to reasons alleged to be “freestanding,” “secular,” or “postmetaphysical.” Reflection on the origins of religious discourse and the component thought to be retained when such discourse is “translated” demonstrates the untenability of a sharp distinction between “rational” and “religious” discourse on matters pertaining to morality. The article nonetheless affirms the need for common acceptance of the justificatory language of coercive political policies, but contends that this language is best conceived as a historically evolving wide (not universal) agreement, and as a confluence of various types of agreement.

For nearly half a century democratic citizens have been preoccupied with the search for self-respect. Though classical liberalism places this question outside its purview and many commentators see in such a concern evidence of a “thin-skinned” political culture, John Rawls has recently provided serious arguments for the political relevance of self-respect. These arguments, we claim, are deeply indebted to the social and political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deep albeit underexamined influence on Rawls shows itself both in Rawls's conception of the social problem as well as in his solution to it. Rawls's belief that the provision of self-respect can solve the social problem is uniquely Rousseauan not only because of its emphasis on equality but also because it suggests political life can and must reconcile the conflicts between self and society at a fundamental level.

The Wellek Library Lectures from which these two books developed were given in 1996. The English version (2015) translates the material of the lectures that address the themes of “the conversion of violence,” in particular in the philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel, and of “inconvertible violence.” “Inconvertible violence” signals those forms and practices of violence that annihilate possibilities of resistance, that cannot be arrested by political power and transformed into civil and social exchange. The French version (2010) includes a second part made up of further essays—on Clausewitz, Marxism, Lenin and Gandhi, and Schmitt and Hobbes—in which Balibar continues to wrestle with the categories “violence” and “politics” and the complex, elusive relationships between them.