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.

This article integrates economic and social history, biography, and political theory as it explores how the personal ties of Marx and Engels to Ireland stamped their thought. Marx and Engels struggled to integrate Ireland into their theory of revolution, conceptualizing it as a “special case” of capitalist accumulation, a formulation partly motivated by their human sympathies for the Irish (especially strong in the case of Engels and Marx's daughters). Extended attention in this essay is thus devoted to the special place of Ireland in Marxist theory and praxis, which is pursued on two interconnected research fronts: Ireland's anomalous role in Marx's revolutionary vision and the Irish people's prominent role in the lives of Marx and Engels. While Marx's primary aim was always to capture the citadels of capitalism such as Great Britain, he and Engels concluded in the late 1860s that the thrust could not be administered frontally: they would have to strike at England's soft underbelly – Ireland. Throughout the life of the First International (1864–72), Ireland's place in Marx's strategic vision moved to the center, transforming Ireland into the “lever” of a European-wide revolution. For a half decade in the late 1860s to the early 1870s, Marx and Engels invested the Irish peasantry with this decisive geopolitical role; soon thereafter, their conception of Ireland's theoretical significance altered and dissolved alongside their fading hopes for a European socialist revolution.

Since its publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem has provoked a storm of controversy. With a few exceptions, critics reacted to the substance of Arendt's thesis with considerable bitterness and hostility. This article argues that her detractors badly misunderstood Arendt because they were insufficiently conversant with, or unaware of, her political theory. Fundamental to this theory, articulated at length in her The Human Condition, is the crucial distinction between the public and the private. None of her critics, including those who sympathized with Arendt, have understood that her critical analysis of Eichmann's conduct and of the response of the Jewish leadership to the tragic fate that befell their people makes sense on the peculiar terrain of her political theory and particularly in terms of the public-private distinction which lies at the core of this theory.

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.

Simone Weil had an ambivalent attitude toward Marx. While she thought that the young Marx's celebration of labor had “lyrical accents,” she ultimately believed that Marx had neglected his own insights, embracing a blind worship of mechanization and a theory of history and revolution that was insufficiently attentive to the material conditions of workers. Marx, in her view, was insufficiently materialist and excessively wedded to a hierarchical model of science that maintained the domination of management. Weil and Marx's attitudes toward the dignity of labor and the necessary conditions for socialism are analyzed. The most significant cleavage between them is ultimately due to the differing manner in which they conceive of the relationship between thought and action. Through this comparison, the philosophical underpinnings of the two radically different conceptions of labor and its dignity as a human activity are explained.

This essay reads Euripides's Medea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the making of a refugee. Alongside the common claim that the drama depicting a wife murdering her children to punish an unfaithful husband is about gender inequity, I draw out another dimension: that the text's exploration of women's subordination doubles as a rendering of refuge seeking. Euripides introduces Medea as a phugas, the term for a person exiled, on the run, displaced, vulnerable, and in need of refuge. I adopt the phugas as a lens for interpreting the tragedy and generating enduring insights into dynamics of “forced” migration. Taking this political predicament as the organizing question of the text enables us to understand how dislocation from the gender-structured family can produce physical displacement and a need for asylum while casting the political meaning of Medea's kin violence in a new light.

Whether in the service of aristocratic radicalism or radical democracy, Nietzsche's political thought has most often been associated with transformation rather than limitations. This paper argues that Nietzsche offers a realism that presents politics as driven by grand aspirations and bound by tragic limitations. Nietzsche draws on Thucydides as a source for a realism that is neither reductionist nor transformative, but rather looks to the grandest of human aspirations and the limits to those aspirations. The paper analyzes Nietzsche's treatment of the character of modern idealism, the source of conflicting values, the effects of liberalism, and the consequences of democratic modernity in order to flesh out his tragic realism. Rather than advocating the tyrannical decay he expects in the short term, Nietzsche points the way to a new politics shaped by grander goals and more moderate expectations than the idealistic leveling of modernity.

Alexander the Great is often understood to be the first statesman to attempt a “universal state,” owing in large part to his philosophical education under Aristotle. This picture of Alexander informs many of his depictions in popular culture, and influences his appropriation in contemporary discourse on globalization. I argue here that Plutarch's Life of Alexander offers an alternative view of Alexander's political action, one that explains his imperial ambitions by focusing on his love of honor (philotimia) and the cultural indeterminacy of his native Macedon, rather than his exposure to philosophy. Plutarch's portrayal of Alexander provides a useful model for the study of globalization by showing how political expansion can arise from and give rise to indeterminate political identities.

Continuing philosophic doubt concerning the moral foundations of human rights threatens to undermine the growing belief in liberal democracy. This doubt has its roots in the reaction against the Enlightenment and is evident even in John Rawls's retreat from the apparent universalism of his theory of justice. There are good grounds, however, for regarding the traditional Western belief in moral and political autonomy as a sound basis for human rights and liberal democracy.

Most of the recent attempts to demonstrate the poverty of liberalism and political realism have accepted the realist interpretation of violence with few reservations. For example, few political theologians, theologians of hope, and theologians of revolution have reconsidered or modified this component of the realist perspective even as they have tried to dismantle realism. It is now time to splash what Holmes called “cynical acid” on this assumed orthodoxy, especially but not only in Protestantism. The pacifist perspective on war and violence deserves a hearing which this stacked jury of realists and their critics have refused to grant. This refusal results in part from Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of pacifism, widely considered even by pacifists to be trenchant and compelling.

Conventional wisdom pins responsibility for the Vietnam War primarily on Lyndon B. Johnson. This essay presents a revisionist argument, attempting to shift primary responsibility for the war on President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The case rests heavily on John F. Kennedy's challenge to historians: “How the hell” can they evaluate presidential performances unless they know the “real pressures” and the “real alternatives” confronting the occupiers of the Oval Office. In assessing those pressures, this essay concludes that Eisenhower had the unique luxury of a clean break from President Truman's commitments, thanks to the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu, and a clear-cut alternative provided by the Geneva Accords. Unfortunately, Eisenhower chose to ignore the Accords, committed America to South Vietnam, and played a major role, during and after his presidency, in creating the heavy pressures that shaped Johnson's Vietnam decisions.

The Marxian idea of the great proletarian revolution that will end the pre-history of mankind and inaugurate its true history sprang into public effectiveness through the Communist Manifesto. Well known as is the progress of this idea after its formulation and publication of 1848, we know comparatively little about the process of its formation in the preceding decade. The main cause of this unsatisfactory state must be sought in the fact that the materials for a study of the genesis of he idea have been completely available only since 1932. In the meantime, the monographic literature on the subject has clarified many details; but a comprehensive study is still a desideratum.

In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza attempts to establish a Scriptural basis for liberal democracy by showing that the Gospels, when understood correctly, assert the need for freedom, toleration, and equality. He does so by reducing prophecy to the imaginative expression of prejudice and superstition and then by confining such imaginings to the Hebrew Bible. Spinoza then contrasts the primitive Hebrew prophets, particularly Moses, with an idealized portrait of Jesus, whom he presents as a philosopher, free of prejudice and superstition. Moses was concerned with legislating for a particular regime, while Jesus, according to Spinoza was concerned primarily with salvation. Spinoza thereby exposes the political implications of Jesus' teaching. The injunction that we should obey God rather than man requires freedom and toleration, a condition that can be best guaranteed by a free and democratic regime.

Students of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) are often struck by the fact that although the work portrays Christianity more favorably than Judaism, Spinoza devotes far more time to an examination of the Hebrew Bible than the New Testament. Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Spinoza's comparison of Moses, the greatest prophet in the Hebrew Bible, with Jesus, the most revered figure in the New Testament. Although Spinoza lavishly praises Jesus, insisting that Jesus had achieved more intimate apprehension of God, he devotes far more analysis to Moses. By asserting the superiority of Jesus, Spinoza clearly hoped to appeal to his largely Christian audience.

In the years preceding the Great Famine the people of Ireland were separated in space and spirit by the divisive workings of history and geography and by the survival of ancient local customs that were feudal and in some instances, tribal in origin. In 1825, according to a contemporary observer, there were “different districts in Ireland almost as unlike each other as any two countries in Europe.” A thousand light years and more separated the Georgian splendor of Dublin from the rude Gaelic society of the West. And in all the provinces there were pockets where distinctive local cultures stubbornly endured; like the baronies of Bargy and Forth, in the extreme southeast corner of Wexford, whose inhabitants clung to a Chaucerian dialect until the middle of the century, or the fishing village of Claddagh, outside the city of Galway, where the people maintained a severe aloofness, marrying among themselves and ignoring outsiders.

… if all of us who come from Nietzscheism, from nihilism, or from historical materialism, said in public that we were wrong and that there are moral values and that in the future we shall do what is necessary to establish and illustrate them, don't you believe this would be the beginning of a hope?

Anarchism is one of those concepts about which there generally is deep ignorance or profound misunderstanding.* “In the popular mind,” says Bertrand Russell, “an Anarchist is a person who throws bombs and commits other outrages, either because he is more or less insane, or because he uses the pretencse of extreme political opinions as a cloak for criminal proclivities.” Yet in the history of political thought, as well as in the history of social movements, anarchism has played a role which cannot be overlooked.

William Ockham, the Venerabilis Inceptor and the Doctor plus quam subtilis, started his academic career simply as a theologian and philosopher who did not have, or at least did not evince, the slightest interest in political questions. By 1324 or at least by 1327, he had composed all his purely theological or philosophical works of which we have any knowledge. In all these writings there is no trace of any political idea worth mentioning. Even the struggle about the Franciscan ideal of poverty had left no impression on the lines written by Ockham prior to 1327. While he was in England he was either too remote from the theatre of war or (and this seems to be more likely) he was too much engrossed in the construction of his conceptualistic system of philosophy and theology. In any case, we know from his own words that he did not take part in the struggle about poverty—not even to the extent of reading the pertinent documents—before or during his enforced stay at Avignon until the beginning of 1328.

This article argues that we can best understand the Massachusetts patriot James Otis as a practical political thinker whose writings reacted to changing circumstances and to other writers. He began his career arguing that the British Constitution and natural law both mandated that Parliament not tax unrepresented colonists, but when Blackstone published his opinion that Parliament had a natural and constitutional right to compel the submission of the colonists, Otis became convinced that, however valid his argument had been in theory, it would never convince Parliamentarians. Ultimately he engaged the problem of imperial structure, trying to collapse the political distance between the imperial periphery and the imperial center to overcome the constitutional distance that threatened to separate them for good.