Although the concept of legitimacy is widely invoked in social science literature, political discourse, and common parlance, key empirical and normative questions about legitimacy are often left far from answered, especially “Legitimated by whom?” and “Legitimate by what criteria?” Recently these questions have been raised with particular acuteness with regard to the nascent international society, for instance, the standing of the International Criminal Court and the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition.

In Democracy's Discontent, Michael Sandel argues for a revival of the republican tradition in order to counteract the pernicious effects of contemporary liberalism. As in his earlier work, Sandel charges that liberals who embrace the ideals of political neutrality and the unencumbered self are engaged in a self–subverting enterprise, for no society that lives by these ideals can sustain itself. Sandel is right to endorse the republican emphasis on forming citizens and cultivating civic virtues. By opposing liberalism as vigorously as he does, however, he engages in a self–subverting enterprise of his own. That is, Sandel is in danger of undercutting his position by threatening the liberal principles upon which he implicitly relies. This danger is greatest when he presses his case against the unencumbered self, when he appeals to the obligations of membership, and when he treats republicanism and liberalism as adversaries rather than allies.

Through an extended critical engagement with John P. McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy, this paper aims to shed light on Machiavelli's account of relations among the many and the few in the Discourses on Livy. While we agree with McCormick that Machiavelli should not be too quickly subsumed within the republican tradition, as interpreted by the “Cambridge School,” we reject the idea that Machiavelli's central thrust is prodemocratic. By focusing on the structure and logic of Machiavelli's arguments, we show that Machiavelli was critical of the capacities of ordinary citizens to govern themselves. As a result, Machiavelli emphasized and endorsed continuous elite intervention in the political life of the mixed regime, even as he paid due attention to the people's participation in a political regime with appropriate laws and institutions. Machiavelli's political theory, as embodied in the Discourses on Livy, challenges the transparency and equality that contemporary egalitarians and democrats embrace.

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.

Nietzsche's concept of the higher man is often seen as vague. The article adds concreteness to the concept by studying an example of a higher man, Napoleon. Napoleon embodied power and spiritual health, and was therefore an admirable person. By looking at Nietzsche's description of Napoleon as an artist, we also gain insight into the higher man as a political actor: he uses the public arena as the medium on which he practices his art. In doing so, he presents himself as a exemplar of humanity, inspiring others to seek their own path to excellence. By studying this, we gain important insight into Nietzsche's political teaching. But Nietzsche's account of Napoleon is not one-sided: he also describes Napoleon's corruption. The fall of a higher man is both a warning of the dangers of the political realm, and a reminder that sickness and health are closely connected. Even the mightiest individual is fragile.

The essay explores the relationship between value pluralism, as Isaiah Berlin understood it, and liberalism. It consists of two main parts. In the first part, I argue that value pluralism does not entail liberalism, and I criticize two philosophers—William Galston and George Crowder—who believe that it does. In the second, I reconstruct and defend Isaiah Berlin's own understanding of this relationship, drawing on an essay that is often neglected by Berlin's interpreters: “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life.” Berlin thought that the relationship between value pluralism and liberalism was largely psychological. He believed that those who embraced value pluralism would be more likely to affirm liberal institutions, because they would be more likely to exhibit certain virtues—notably empathy, imagination, and openness to other ways of life—that typically motivate tolerance.

An unfortunate consequence of viewing Arendt's thought in terms of a Hellenic-Nietzschean continuum is to raise serious questions about the enduring significance of Arendt's work on totalitarianism and its opposite: political and personal freedom. What is missing from the dominant scholarship is an appreciation of Arendt's acknowledged debt to Tocqueville; there is considerable suspicion that their differences are more important than their similarities. But Arendt and Tocqueville agree that the central political problem of modernity is despotism. Parts one and two challenge the view that Tocqueville is only concerned with soft despotism, whereas Arendt addresses the issue of harsh despotism which she subsequently abandoned. This article also restores Arendt's appreciation for Tocqueville's call for a new science of politics to overcome the problem of modernity. Part three shows their reliance on the “art of associating together” to preserve freedom in an age dominated by isolated and lonely individuals.

Montesquieu's theory of separate powers is elaborated in a discussion of the constitution of England in Book XI, chapter 6 of The Spirit of the Laws, which is by far the most discussed section of that work. Many commentators have interpreted the English system straightforwardly as Montesquieu's ideal regime. But while he greatly admires the legal separation of powers in the English constitution, he worries that the spirit of “extreme” liberty among the English could undercut the constitutional separation of powers that protects their liberty. Montesquieu's ambivalence thus raises questions as to what sort of “spirit” a regime must have to sustain a constitution of separate powers and so to preserve individual liberty. His reservations about England are important for understanding his philosophy of liberalism and have broad significance for any polity that seeks to protect individual liberty through a constitution of separate powers

Political is a ubiquitous and seemingly indispensable term in the discussion of human affairs. We use it to speak of quite different kinds of things — institutions, actions, conflicts, expenditures, a type of discourse, a branch of science, and such. We apply it to the life and thought of modern nations, ancient cities, and primitive tribes. Even the internal affairs of businesses, unions, schools and churches are sometimes called “political.” In all these cases, we assume that the term has, or at least can have, some definite meaning. Yet it is difficult to say what, if anything, “political” signifies in its various applications and how it signifies what it does.

In 1756 Adam Smith reviewed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality and claimed that it was indebted to the second volume of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. While much recent scholarship has taken this as the point of departure for studying Smith's engagement with Rousseau, the place of Mandeville in shaping that engagement has been largely neglected. This article brings Mandeville back into the picture and reassesses Smith's engagement with both thinkers in light of the connections he identified between their works. This involves reconstructing Mandeville's historicized account of the development of sociability and government, and showing how Rousseau developed this to articulate his critique of modern society. In evaluating Smith's response to this challenge, it is argued that he only partially succeeded in distancing his own analysis of commercial society from Mandeville's principles.

In the light of the emerging global ecumene there is an ongoing intellectual discourse that focuses on the quest for a reorientation of political theorizing. It challenges the more or less canonized approaches to the understanding of political life and thought that dominate Western mainstream political and social science. This essay critically explores the epistemological assumptions underlying the prevalent paradigm of socio-political analysis, and points out its weakness in coming to grips with the multi-civilizational cosmos of human self-understanding which makes up the historico-political world. It argues that a genuine hermeneutical science is needed in order to restate the meaningful pattern of human self-interpretation across cultures and civilizations in its historical depth and global reach. It takes as its starting point the rise of the great civilizations in the axial times and their respective visions of order which still shape modernity. These post-axial visions, various as they were in appearance and content, merged with political power to provide the meaning-creating symbolic forms of societal self-understanding, thus providing society with a logic of order. This essay defines the common ground of the intercivilizational modality of human existence in history and society as the proper subject of comparative political theorizing, insofar as it intends to bring to our attention the essence of the political in all of its historical modalities.

Students of American political theory find themselves in general agreement concerning the character and significance of their most celebrated document, The Federalist. Few deny that this series of essays in support of the Constitution by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay represents a substantial contribution to the literature of political theory. The nature of the contribution is also well established. The Federalist, it is agreed, is a skillful exposition of the principles of constitutional republicanism — an exposition not haphazard or fanciful, but controlled by constant reference to the capacities and limitations of the political animal. The latter point is often emphasized; Benjamin F. Wright states: “The aspect of The Federalist which is of universal applicability is … its recognition of the importance of human nature in politics, togetherwith its remarkably penetrating analysis of the motives and the behavior of men in a free society.” x Finally, there is agreement on the general outlines of this theory of human nature. The authors of The Federalist, it is said, were decidedly “realistic,” brooking no illusions of the inherent goodness or rationality of man, but holding firm to “a conception of human corruptibility.” 2 The adjective most often employed is “pessimistic.”

“Political theology” is now a fixture within political theory's lexicon. Although Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) is identified as the contemporary locus classicus for the concept, that work's primary task is only to elaborate a “sociology of juristic concepts.” Beginning in the 1990s, however, Schmitt's entire corpus has increasingly been interpreted as one motivated by “political theology” in a stronger sense—as political action based upon faith in (Christian) revelation. I challenge this thesis by (1) examining its history, (2) drawing attention to the many aspects of Schmitt's (mostly Weimar-era) work that are deeply at odds with this thesis, and (3) reexamining his (mostly postwar) remarks ordinarily cited to bolster the thesis. Ultimately, the core of Schmitt's thought lies elsewhere; returning to the purported father of political theology brings clarity to the bourgeoning discussion of this topic within the discipline.

This essay is meant to help prepare a confrontation with the philosopher who is the most penetrating and thoroughgoing opponent of liberal democratic civilization. Nietzsche characterizes the modern democratic spirit, in all its forms, as “decadence.” This decadence he understands, however, as the final, catastrophic emergence into broad daylight of a previously hidden historical process which has been unfolding in all Western history: the “nihilism” of Athens and Jerusalem, of scientific rationalism and Judeo-Christian monotheism. Nietzsche understands himself as the thinker through whom this process finally attains self-consciousness. Now by Nietzsche's own testimony, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the published writing in which his mature philosophy finds its fullest expression. Yet Zarathustra, because it comprises the “Yes-saying part” of Nietzsche's project, because in it “the eye is spoiled by the tremendous need for seeing far,” possesses a “remoteness” that makes it the most difficult to approach of all his finished works (cf. EH, p. 1141). It seems to presuppose, rather than supply, an account of how Nietzsche understands the cultural crisis to which Zarathustra is responding. My purpose here is to attempt to gather from Nietzsche's diverse pronouncements a synoptic, consistent statement of his critique of the West.

Contemporary liberals who advocate strict separation between church and state often defend themselves by suggesting that such a position is the only one compatible with the principle of liberal neutrality, whose origins go back to John Locke's first Letter on Toleration. This essay argues that this line of reasoning is mistaken. While Locke did endorse the neutrality principle, he did not endorse strict separation, and this fact suggests that the connection between liberal neutrality and strict separation is not as secure as many liberals have assumed. This examination of Locke's attitudes toward neutrality and strict separation aims both to clarify what is at stake in contemporary debates over strict separation in liberal states and to consider the conditions that would have to be met to mount a Lockean argument against weakening church-state separation in contemporary liberal states.

Development approaches to the study of politics, precisely because they focus on movement through time, seem uniquely positioned to illuminate the logic and experience of the polity in a manner that cannot be captured by more conventional political science methods. And yet, political development has come to be seen as whatever historical change happens to a regime, neglecting the normative nature of the polity. The result is an “a-constitutional” approach to political development. This paper argues that political science can and should examine development in normative terms and that attempts to fit political development more securely within value-free social science threaten to rob it of its promise.

It is now commonplace to acknowledge Alexis de Tocqueville's support for Algerian colonization. Less well understood, however, is why he also endorsed the French strategy of “total war” in the regency. How was Tocqueville's liberalism linked to the specific shape of violence in Algeria? By situating his Algerian writings in the intersecting intellectual contexts of the 1840s, this essay argues that Tocqueville endorsed total war in Africa because of his passion for glory. Far from an aristocratic anachronism, that passion was the product of contemporary scientific debates over voluntarism in France. It was also shaped by the lingering legacies of revolutionary republicanism and Bonapartism which defined glory in terms of national defense. By tethering modern liberty to this conception of glory, Tocqueville provided resources for rationalizing settlerism's exterminationist violence.

This article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon's thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon's view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this “surcharge of people” is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon's thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon's political aims and thought more broadly.