This essay examines the evolution from 1785 to 1800 of Madison's understanding of the proper role of public opinion in the American political system. It provides an insight into Madison's transformation from the leading architect of the Constitution during the 1780s to the opposition leader of the Jeffersonian party during the 1790s. The essay challenges the contention that Madison's writings on public opinion establish his support for using governmental institutions and statesmanship to improve the souls of the citizenry and to develop a common character among them. Instead, it is argued, Madison defended the sovereignty of public opinion as a means for citizens to influence and monitor their representatives’ actions in an extended republic where these tasks were at once difficult and imperative. In the course of this defense, Madison contributed to a developing libertarian tradition of political thought in America based upon the broad protection of freedom of speech and the belief that political truths best emerge from the free flow of ideas.

John Adams's complaints notwithstanding, no one of the American Founding generation has been so consistently misunderstood as James Madison. In recent decades a small handful of scholars have made significant strides toward correcting the Madisonian record. In addition to the justly acclaimed study of Madison by Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty, the thoughtful work of Alan Gibson stands out in this regard. In particular, Professor Gibson's efforts to parse the contemporary debate over the character of Madison's political thought constitute a distinctive and valuable contribution to the literature on Madison and the Founding.

In his most recent essay, “Veneration and Vigilance: James Madison and Public Opinion, 1785–1800,” Professor Gibson makes three central claims, namely, that Madison never wavered in his commitment to popular sovereignty and deserves to be considered a leading and prescient democratic theorist of the Founding, that Madison's conception of the nature and role of public opinion in the 1790s signifies a substantial revision of the earlier Humean understanding of public opinion he embraced in the 1780s, and that Madison did not seek to foster civic education in the American republic. I agree with the first of these claims, though I would make the case for Madison's democratic credentials even more emphatically than Gibson does. In general, however, Gibson and I share common ground in the recognition of the critical importance of the concept of public opinion in Madisonian theory.

This essay examines in detail Tocqueville's paradoxical moderation by focusing on his rich correspondence and notes for Democracy in America. As Tocqueville's critique of the politics of the July Monarchy shows, he was a political moderate and an immoderate mind, and this uncommon combination explains the ambiguities and contradictions in his view of democracy. After exploring Tocqueville's views on moderating democracy, the essay examines the main elements of his new science of politics at the heart of which lies the idea of a wise balancing of various social elements, principles, and ideas. The final section comments on Tocqueville's elusive moderation and his search for greatness in modern politics.

Socrates was not only a paradigmatic philosopher; he was also a paradigmatic citizen according to some contemporary political theorists—paradigmatic for his moral integrity and his political practices of dissent and noncompliance. What is perhaps most exemplary about Socrates, according to some commentators, is that his citizenship was “purely secular,” relying upon no sources of authority beyond the naked moral self. The present article challenges this dominant view of Socratic citizenship by examining Socrates′ relationship to the oracle at Delphi and the mysterious divine sign that frequently turned him away from certain civic activities. Arguing that these sources of authority affected Socrates′ practice of citizenship in significant ways, the essay presents a picture of Socrates that is at once truer to the texts to which these secular views appeal and more instructive for contemporary theorizing about citizenship.

The title, God, Locke, and Equality, as well as its controversial thesis about the necessity of a theological foundation for equality are designed to startle and provoke. Yet those who have kept up with Locke scholarship (not an easy job since there are 5–10 new books on Locke each year, and over 9000 articles have been published about his work) will recognize that in recent years, its topic, the relation of Locke's religious beliefs to his politics, has become an important theme in the interpretation of Locke's political philosophy. This article will attempt to place the book in the context of this literature and evaluate its contribution to the growing number of studies.

In the early years of what John Pocock once called “the Locke industry,” Locke's religious beliefs did not get much attention. The two most influential interpretations of his political thought portrayed him either as a crypto-Hobbesian hedonist, or an apologist for capitalist exploitation, ignoring or explaining away his commitment to Christianity. It is true that John Dunn in his book on Locke's political theory made much (perhaps too much) of Locke's Calvinist upbringing, only to dismiss his political thought as so dominated by a religious worldview that it is irrelevant today.

Although Machiavelli has been widely condemned as a misogynist, his three central political works feature dozens of women who engage in efficacious and often praiseworthy political action. To appreciate fully the character and value of their activity and ultimately Machiavelli's views on women as potential political agents, one must first carefully attend to his conception of animo. Usually translated as “spiritedness,” animo represents the natural assertiveness, energy, and resoluteness that forms the basis of virtù if properly disciplined – usually by a city's modes and orders. By examining the plight of women, however, Machiavelli turns to those persons who stand outside the city's political institutions and thus tend to exercise unbridled animo, for better or for worse. In addition to revealing his deep preoccupation with political outsiders, Machiavelli's appreciation of the political problems associated with womanhood also discloses one of his most radical impieties-the denaturalization of gender norms, an impiety we are only beginning to appreciate today

This essay takes its bearings from an epistolary dialogue between Arthur de Gobineau and Alexis de Tocqueville about the contours of modern politics. Their dispute illuminates in a remarkable way the theological-political problem that suffuses the emergence of modern politics and, as a consequence, provides a helpful frame of reference for understanding several contemporary controversies bearing on the relationship between religion and liberal democratic politics. Moreover, their correspondence casts new light on the underpinnings of Tocqueville's thought. The frankness of this exchange together with the relentless character of Gobineau's arguments, provoke in Tocqueville an articulation of the larger context within which he understands modern politics and, in so doing, reveals an important, though largely neglected, intellectual framework that informs much of his published work.

Jeremy Waldron's much noted book, God, Locke, and Equality, has put the topic of “God and Equality in Locke” at the center of many perhaps most, discussions of Locke these days. I am going to raise some critical objections to Waldron's interpretations, but all the more reason to begin by noting the very many things about this book that I admire.

First, he rejects the insistence by many of the most outspoken Locke scholars that a proper understanding of Locke—or any philosopher of the past—must be purely historical—that it must have nothing to do with us or our concerns, questions, or problems. Professor Waldron cuts through this claim as mere arbitrary assertion.

Second, many Locke scholars, often some of the same ones, insist that Locke's political writings must be understood in isolation from his philosophic writings, especially from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke's editor, Peter Laslett, set the tone long ago when he pronounced judgment: “Locke did not write as a philosopher, applying to politics the implications of his views of reality as a whole.” Rather, according to Laslett, Locke appealed to or drew off of preexisting “modes of discourse.” This approach makes it very difficult to understand Locke as an integral personality, much less as a coherent author or as a thinker to be taken seriously. Waldron thus reopens the lines of communication between Locke's political and his philosophical writings and makes Locke a significant thinker, not just a corpse for the historians.

Professor Alan Gibson's insightful article contains much that is admirable. He is, in my view, correct in calling scholars' attention—particularly political scientists—to James Madison's often neglected views in his National Gazette essays and the foundational role of public opinion on all governments. In addition, Gibson asserts several claims hoping to establish Madison's credentials as a democratic theorist that should be of interest as well. Specifically, he seeks to accomplish four tasks: (1) “to clarify the enduring debate over the credibility of Madison's democratic credentials”; (2) to “examine Madison's role in justifying, popularizing, and understanding… public opinion”; (3) to “highlight some of Madison's neglected insights into democratic theory, especially his understanding of the problem of collective action, and thereby establish him as a prescient democratic theorist”; and (4) to argue the case that Madison “contributed to a developing tradition of political thought in America upon a broad-based conception of freedom of speech and on the belief that political truths best emerge from the full flow of ideas.”

While I concur with much of Gibson's position—especially his fourth, indisputable point—I also disagree with him on at least one significant position: James Madison was not a democrat.

In his History of England, David Hume suggests that the doctrine of resistance should be concealed from the populace. But this suggestion in the very public location of the History has the effect of revealing this doctrine as much as concealing it. How should we understand this perplexing rhetorical strategy? Hume's paradoxical rhetoric is a symptom of the problem that the right of rebellion poses for every political society. On the one hand, the right of rebellion undeniably exists; on the other, no regime can recognize that right fully. The problem of rebellion thus reveals the simultaneous necessity and limitations of law. Hume's playful, transparent rhetoric is intended to compel us to reflect upon the deeper tension between liberty and authority in every political society and to furnish us with an example of how that tension might be prudently and honestly handled.

At a pivotal moment in the History of England, Hume writes: “If ever, on any occasion, it were laudable to hide truth from the populace, it must be confessed, that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example; and that all speculative reasoners ought to observe, with regard to this principle, the same cautious silence which the laws, in every species of government, have ever prescribed to themselves.” On its face, this is a recommendation that the “doctrine of resistance,” perhaps the most important principle of modern liberalism, be kept a secret, hidden away from the people at large.

Critics of liberal individualism have pointed out the many failures of “atomism” as a method in social and political philosophy. Their methodological criticisms have a tendency, however, to devolve into repudiations of moral individualism as such. In part, this is due to a misreading of Hegel and Tocqueville, two critics of individualism who nevertheless upheld the importance of individual rights and what Hegel called “freedom of subjectivity.” My essay brings these two very different theorists together in order to show how each deliberately dispensed with the ontology inherited from eighteenth-century social contract theory, the better to focus on associational life and public freedom. The end result is not a relapse into the rhetoric of civic republicanism, but a refurbishment of that tradition from the standpoint of modern liberty: the liberty of the individual. This common project links Hegel, the idealist philosopher, and Tocqueville, the liberal-republican, in unexpected but complementary ways.

It is no easy matter to do justice to Locke or any other capable seventeenth century thinker: to judge them in terms which are wholly appropriate to them, but which also give due weight to our own necessarily very different needs and preoccupations. Yet if equality is a normative relation which holds in time as well as space (and not a purely pragmatic relation which characteristically fails to hold anywhere at all), there must be a justice which sets a limit to the permissible inroads of all subsequent concerns on the part of other human beings: a personal entitlement to consideration in their own terms and on their own terms before we decide how far to set those terms aside to implement our own purposes in ways which may put their reflections to uses in which they could have held no conceivable stake. So seen the duty is a side constraint on interpretive licence, not an arbitrary restriction of subject matter, or a taboo on cognitive interest. It is fully discharged once we have done our best to grasp what it is they were talking about, and what led them to affirm and deny what they did. After that point, it holds no guarantee whatever (though it may, of course, hold some potential) of contributing further, even heuristically, to our capacity to judge what to make for ourselves of what they affirmed or denied.

Professors Richard Matthews and Colleen Sheehan raise two questions about my essay on James Madison and public opinion:(1) Can Madison be considered a genuine partisan of democracy? (2) Do Madison's writings on public opinion suggest that he believed that the government should try to foster a common opinion among the citizenry?

Sheehan and Matthews diametrically disagree. Like Martin Diamond and Lance Banning, Sheehan argues that Madison was a thoroughgoing democrat not only during the 1790s, but even during the years surrounding the formation of the Constitution. According to Matthews, Madison was the quintessential classical liberal and a proponent of “thin” democracy who believed that citizens should participate in politics primarily as voters who select elite men to make decisions for them.

Long an icon of the American cultural tradition, Henry Thoreau has recently been welcomed into political theory as a theorist whose political writings go beyond the essays on resistance to government, and contain ideas deeply important for understanding the American contribution to democratic experience. I extend this new appreciation by showing how Thoreau presents a specific model of self-government, individual self-government, that occurs under the frequently irrelevant roof provided by liberal democratic state institutions. Thoreau's model of self-government imagines women and men who are largely free of, or indifferent to, the state; but fully involved in an everyday experience that is deeply political because it allocates values for the individual. Walden is, in this sense, less an escape from government than it is an escape to it. Thoreau spans the spectrum of political philosophy, from Socrates′ concern with justice in the individual, to Nietzsche's model of the self as a governable community, but Thoreau's work is unique, and distinctively American, in its model of a hard-headed individual self-government based upon an unsentimentalized natural world.

Locke's Second Treatise of Government argues for the rule of law as just and rightful politics, not only in the fundamental legislation that is the constitution but also in regular governance by the legislature. Locke also argues for executive prerogative, the power of doing good without or even against law during contingency and necessity. Rule by legislation and rule by prerogative each preserve the political community and reflect its foundation out of the state of nature. But they do not easily coexist in the constitution, which provides no means to judge the rightful use of prerogative. President Lincoln's strong, discretionary actions during the crisis of the Civil War illustrate Locke's argument about prerogative's fundamental importance and its problematic relation to ordinary lawfulness. However, as Lincoln recognized, both the Constitution and Congress formally provided for an executive power that was remarkably compatible with the rule of law—and that thereby responded to the Lockean problem.

A modern constitution is a man-made fundamental law, and it sets up a supreme government as agent of the people. What, however, of the commandments of the supreme God? How in face of Him can a man-made law and government be fundamental and supreme?

This is the political-theological problem, we will argue, at the deepest level of John Locke's First Treatise of Government. At that level the First Treatise chiefly undermines, although it also revises. It undermines the primacy of the biblical God, of both his providence and his law, and it also revises biblical fundamentals so as to permit a more rational and civil faith. These are the two leading contentions of this study. If they prove to be true, the First Treatise is much more important to Locke's liberalism than is commonly believed. It is the precondition for his works on toleration and Christianity, the writings setting forth the liberal religion that can abide the primacy of civil government and of “civil interests” generally. It is also, then, the precondition for the Second Treatise of Civil Government. The famous Second Treatise may be the seminal articulation of modern representative government, but the neglected First Treatise proves to be its necessary preface. So we will contend.

In this essay, Lincoln's ideas on democratic leadership are examined in the light of Tocqueville's political theory. In certain respects, Lincoln's words and deeds help to confirm the wisdom of Tocqueville's ideas on the role of leadership in a democracy. But in other respects, Lincoln's thought exposes the weaknesses and limitations of Tocqueville's understanding of democratic leadership. Both Tocqueville and Lincoln believed that the task of leadership was to elevate and educate the citizenry. In order to accomplish this task, they both believed that leaders should rely largely—but not exclusively—on what Tocqueville called the doctrine of self-interest properly understood. Lincoln differed from Tocqueville, however, insofar as Lincoln suggested that leaders in a democracy must remain close to the people's fundamental values and aspirations. Lincoln was such an effective democratic leader in large part because he simultaneously critiqued and embraced those aspects of the American character which worried Tocqueville. Unlike Lincoln, Tocqueville usually failed to recognize the element of mutuality which effective democratic leadership requires.