This article deals with the possibility of ascribing passions to states in Thomas Hobbes's political theory. According to Hobbes, the condition of sovereign states vis-à-vis one another is comparable to that of individuals in the state of nature, namely, a state of war. Consequently, the three causes of war (competition, diffidence, and glory) identified in chapter 13 of Leviathan could also be relevant to interstate relations. Since these war triggers are mainly passions, one could presume that state action is motivated by passions as well. Some argue that it is just a figurative way of speaking. Others claim that the passions of war affect only sovereign rulers. I explore an alternative answer based on the ability of sovereigns to direct the preexisting passions of their people.

This article examines the peculiar fusion of secular and religious temporal orders in Hobbes's Leviathan in light of the debate between Löwith and Blumenberg over the origins of modern time consciousness. The analysis places Hobbes more securely on the side of Blumenberg by uncovering the constructive agency at work in the anxiously future-preoccupied account of human nature which distinguishes Leviathan from Hobbes's earlier works and which gives his revision of Christian eschatology its psychological coherence and rhetorical force. This interpretation of Hobbes as an early architect of modern time consciousness fills in the missing temporal pieces in Blumenberg's own engagement with Hobbes and gives the theme of temporality—of creating and securing the experience of an open future above all—the attention that it deserves in the account of Hobbes's modernity.

Scholars have long contested James Madison's position on religious liberty. Madison believed in governmental noncognizance of religion. The dominant view, voiced by Vincent Muñoz, interprets that to mean that government should take no notice of religion either to target it or to allow religious objectors exemptions from neutral and generally applicable laws. While there is much to commend Muñoz's view, it fails to accurately convey Madison's position. Noncognizance, for Madison, meant not that government should not notice religion, but that it should assume no authority over it. Consequently, Madison believed government should not interfere with religious duties unless to achieve important ends via carefully tailored policies.

The first book of Agamben's Homo Sacer series contains very few references to Heidegger. Even so, the pages that Agamben devotes to Heidegger in the third part of the book are far from a digression. They touch on a number of crucial topics that are vital to both Heidegger and Agamben, such as the relationship between philosophy and politics, the specific philosophical motivations behind Heidegger's political commitment, and life as a central philosophical theme. This article evaluates Agamben's interpretation of Heidegger in those pages by concentrating on two interrelated questions: (1) whether and to what extent Agamben's biopolitical reading of Heidegger is plausible and persuasive, and (2) how to judge the relationship between their respective accounts of life, which center around the two seminal concepts of “bare life” and “facticity.”

I begin by congratulating the Storeys on their splendid achievement. They have managed to write an eminently readable account of a “conversation” among four complex French thinkers. As a reader learns from the footnotes, their presentation of the unfolding argument is based on an enormous amount of scholarly research, but they never let the scholarship interfere with the smooth flow of their prose.

In diagnosing a distinctively modern discontent, the Storeys have written a biography of a distinctively modern idea of happiness (141). Their achievement is to show that these two stories are the same. Montaigne's promise of what they term “immanent contentment” is itself connected to the ubiquitous if amorphous restlessness that plagues our culture today. Montaigne sought to find happiness not in transcendence or salvation, but in the simplicity of ordinary pleasures. Life is a game of variety and excitement, not an anguished pilgrimage to an eternal home. This counsel—meant to bring peace and to inoculate us against dogmatism—paradoxically underwrites the pervasive unhappiness of our time.

Why We Are Restless is informed by a certain Tocquevillean urgency. As the Storeys tell us in their introduction, their students, among the most privileged young people in America, are profoundly uneasy, their souls agitated and restless as they ponder questions about how they should live and what will make them happy. The Storeys attempt to make sense of this by examining the thought of what they call four “old French philosophers” (xii). They acknowledge that such an approach, focusing on the writings of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville as a way of understanding this contemporary American unease, might seem “counterintuitive” (xii) and they are not wrong. The French moralistes are by no means the only thinkers who can shed light on what the authors argue is a distinctively modern form of restlessness. But they convincingly show that these thinkers offer a good, if for Americans somewhat novel, starting point to help our anxious young understand what is troubling them. In brief, the Storeys argue, it is the modern turn away from the transcendent in all its forms (philosophic, religious, and heroic) that explains the restlessness of their souls. As Tocqueville sagely observed, “the soul has needs that must be satisfied,” needs that we moderns have for too long ignored.

The Storeys have undoubtedly written a splendid book. Its excellence lies not only in the authors’ ability to bring to light the thoughts of their subjects but in their own powerful social criticism folded into the analysis throughout.

For scholars of American political history, the 2016 election was a moment of methodological reassessment. After Donald Trump eviscerated his seemingly “respectable” GOP challengers in the Republican presidential primary and went on to win the general election, historians and theorists of the American Right rethought the reigning “ostracization thesis,” a memorable phrase Edward H. Miller uses to describe a historiographical narrative grounded in the theory that American conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan, had prevailed in the 1980s by systematically purging their movement of extremists in the 1960s and 1970s (258). In 2017, Rick Perlstein, one of the most celebrated popular historians of the conservative movement, published an essay in the New York Times memorably titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” In it, he expressed regret for helping to forge this narrative in his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001). Cory Robin updated his influential book The Reactionary Mind (Oxford University Press, 2011; 2018) to account for Trump's ascendance. “Like most observers of American politics,” Robin wrote in the preface to the second edition, “I was shocked by Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election.” But if the 2016 election prompted a critical reassessment, then the 2020 election and its chaotic coda (i.e., the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021) prompted a scholarly reckoning not only with modern American conservatism, but also with the broader narrative arc of twentieth-century American politics. The four recent books under review here, which were all published after the 2020 election, represent some of the first revisionist fruits of this reckoning.