This paper investigates the Confucian conception of political responsibility as a political virtue essential for an ordinary non-Confucian ruler's actualization of humane government by paying close attention to the early Confucian discourses of Heaven and disaster. After briefly discussing Confucius's seminal idea of responsibility, this paper shows how Mencius developed the political conception of responsibility, as a noncausal responsibility shared by the ruler and the virtuous ministers for a humane government, especially under the condition of natural disasters. It then discusses how the Han Confucian philosopher Dong Zhongshu reformulated the Mencian theory of responsibility and humane government under radically altered political circumstances by advancing a new version of Confucianism, central to which is the causal conception of political responsibility. This paper concludes by discussing how the evolution of Confucian political theory from Mencius to Dong Zhongshu should be understood with a view to the question of political legitimacy.

The article offers a reconstruction of Donoso's idea of political theology by analyzing his main work, the 1851 Essay on Catholicism, Socialism, and Liberalism. Commentators have often confined the role of Donoso to a footnote in the literature on Carl Schmitt. To better appreciate his original thought, this article analyzes his account of the secularization of theological ideas. Donoso understands modern politics as a confrontation between the philosophies of socialism, liberalism, and Catholicism, which diverge on questions about the nature of man, of evil, and of society. Modern worldviews are thus read through simplified Catholic dogma. Donoso's vision of politics as secularized theology develops in dialogue with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The Donoso-Proudhon-Schmitt rapport allows a consideration of political theology in terms of metaphor and literary device. Within this larger story, Donoso represents the moment when a traditionalist figure of thought slowly detaches itself from its historical foundations.

John Stuart Mill's account of his education in Autobiography (1873) is typically sifted through three interrelated sets of polarities: nurture/nature; reason/emotion; authority/autonomy. First, the father tried to mold the son's development towards a specific ideal, curbing his spontaneous growth. Second, James relentlessly sharpened John Stuart's analytical prowess to the almost total neglect of his emotional needs. Third, the authoritarianism involved in the design and execution of James Mill's curriculum rendered John Stuart Mill incapable of autonomy. This article argues that the dualities of nurture/nature and reason/emotion are not unambiguous, though ever-present in the reception of the younger Mill's education. Widening our perspective in their examination opens the possibility of a different assessment of that famous education being no education for autonomy.

Political theory scholarship tends to resist guilt, and especially collective guilt, as a framework for thinking about wrongs committed in the past or still enduring. The voices and experiences of those wronged, however, often imply that they are attributing guilt, and they are attributing it to a collectivity. I follow their lead and think through the potential of political guilt in motivating reparation and redress. Drawing on insights that Karl Jaspers fails to fully develop, I appropriate his notion of political guilt as situation, and read it as something that is contested among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Through contestation political guilt creates political spaces for reckoning with the past, and can be instrumental in making space for marginalized voices. I apply my framework to race relations in the contemporary United States, but guilt could be a catalyst to rethink postcolonial relations as well.

Style is easy to dismiss but crucial to understand, and Goodman's explanation of why style matters politically is one of the reasons that I, as a specialist in Roman rhetoric and political thought, appreciate his book. The absence I see in Goodman's book haunts my own work too; I have only just begun seriously applying myself to the task of rethinking and redress.

Goodman's is a thoughtful discussion of the importance of eloquence, or “skilled speech” (10), for politics. He offers nuanced portrayals of Cicero, Burke, Macaulay, and others wrestling with the possibilities of eloquence under changing circumstances. Most of the subjects of these chapters were themselves involved in politics—and hence were reflecting on and honing their own rhetorical practice as much as contributing to rhetorical theory. Goodman insists on the importance of rhetoric's “stylistic abundance”—“a quality of language in excess of argument” (13).

In his encyclopedic masterwork Li livres dou Tresor (The Books of Treasure), the mid-thirteenth-century Florentine civil servant and rhetorician Brunetto Latini proclaimed “the very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero” to be “the finest orator in the world and the master of rhetoric.”1 How might this remark by a medieval professional civic administrator (even one with pronounced Ciceronian proclivities) pertain to Goodman's book? I take as my inspiration for the ensuing comments Latini's phrase in Tresor—“The very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero”—in relation to the final word of Goodman's subtitle: “Conditions.” As I began to peruse Words on Fire, I expected to encounter discussion of “wisdom” and of related ideas such as “reason,” “natural law,” and “justice” rather often. After all, these factors constitute indispensable features of Cicero's political theory. I was thus greatly surprised to discover that Goodman mentions them only belatedly and briefly (65–66).

Goodman defends that most maligned aspect of the rhetorical tradition: eloquence. Surely, one would think that eloquence, by its very nature, speaks for itself and quite effectively so, with all the pleasing and persuasive effects of a grand style. Perhaps popular audiences are easily carried along by decorous speech, but Goodman addresses his defense to theorists of politics who tend to greet obvious rhetorical flourish with a deep suspicion of manipulation and deception, or at least of frivolity. On this view, the best thing that can be said about eloquence in its classical form is that it poses no serious threat since the modern advent of mass society and large-scale democracy marks its demise. Goodman forces readers to reconsider the story of the rhetorical tradition's elitist, manipulative, and obsolete character through an engaging, nuanced, and unexpected retelling of Ciceronean eloquence as a tradition that spans the ancient and modern world, one that survives and responds to the challenges of democratic judgment in large polities. Goodman's compelling and insightful book poses an important challenge to theorists of democracy, both contemporary and historical, to take eloquence seriously as an invitation to democratic judgment.

Nearly all twenty-first-century readers of St. Augustine of Hippo become interested in him after reading the story of his Confessions. Yet when nonspecialists want to read more of him, they are directed to the later and more magisterial writings whose author is not immediately recognizable as the young searcher from the Confessions: City of God, On The Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, the scriptural commentaries, the anti-Pelagian tracts. The bishop of Hippo, unlike his younger self—and also unlike his philosophic predecessors, as he well knew—was obligated not to let so much as his word choice cause scandal to pious and uneducated ears.1