Living in the post-9/11 world that we do, it is evident that the contemporary world continues to be very much vulnerable to political disruptions emanating from theocratic politics; and in that sense, any secularist hopes that may have been entertained for a political domestication of religion are far from having been fulfilled. That in turn suggests to us that the concerns that animated the great seventeenth-century struggle against clerical power and theocratic authority are enduring ones, and that we have reason to continue to engage intellectually with critics of priestcraft like Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. Within that broader context, this article concerns itself with Harrington in particular, focusing on his efforts in his polemical writings of the late 1650s to draw resources for Erastian politics from a Hobbes-inspired account of the Hebrew republic.

Charles Taylor has developed a powerful critique of neo-Kantian liberalism and its ontological presupposition, the unencumbered self. According to Taylor, the trouble with deontological liberalism is that its neutral state is incapable of promoting the patriotic virtue that is necessary for the maintenance of liberty. This article responds to Taylor's critique by showing how the citizens of an ideal liberal state acquire a ready willingness to meet their public responsibilities in the absence of a government that promotes patriotism as a good for everyone. In particular, it draws upon Rawls's theory of justice to suggest how liberal citizens naturally develop a deep attachment to the political institutions of their community and to their fellow citizens. The concluding section of the article returns to the relationship between politics and ontology, arguing that unencumbered and situated selves are better understood as alternate moments in the life of the liberal citizen than as mutually exclusive ontological possibilities.

An orderly and almost bloodless movement brought Guatemala independence from Spain in 1821. The tranquil inception of national existence contrasts vividly with the ensuing century and a quarter, a period marked by turbulence and a multitude of factors tending to retard political and economic development. The 1821 Revolution resulted only in the overthrow of Spanish rule; other traditions of colonial times were not so easily cast aside. Politics continued to be the exclusive domain of long-term, personalistic rulers, while economic policy remained under the control of a numerically small land-owning aristocracy. The political chiefs generally allied themselves with the conservative lords of land. Certainly this was true of Rafael Carrera, the uneducated mestizo who dominated the country for nearly twenty years in the mid-nineteenth century. The same pattern existed during the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, 1898–1920. In spite of a few concessions to liberalism, the construction of many roads, and the redistribution of a small amount of land, there is no doubt that the rule of Jorge Ubico, 1930–1944, relied for its main support upon the arch-conservative landed aristocrats.

Constitutional theory has recently turned to the importance of extrajudicial constitutional interpretation. Yet much of the scholarly debate remains rooted in “legal” views of the Constitution, which continue to give primacy to the Court. This article seeks to go further by articulating a Madisonian view of the Constitution, which resituates questions of interpretation within a larger institutional framework. This Madisonian view suggests that the Constitution calls forth continual debate about constitutional meaning. The “settlement” of constitutional issues is not an essential feature of our constitutional system and, thus, constitutional politics with overlapping views, discontinuities, and essentially unsettled meanings are inherent features of the Madisonian Constitution. Recovering the Madisonian vision is an essential step in restoring both the political branches and the Court to the proper place in the constitutional scheme and, in doing so, overcoming the deeply ingrained myth of judicial supremacy.

This article examines Kant's What is Enlightenment? and The Conflict of the Faculties with a view to recovering certain neglected aspects of his defense of freedom in the public use of reason. Kant's arguments in the two works are the most tangible expression of the concern with the scope and limits of reason in politics that runs throughout his political philosophy. Yet the political purpose and rhetorical strategy of that defense has received less attention than it deserves. Kant contends the possibility of establishing ends set by reason as critical standards in politics depends on rulers being persuaded that their interests are best served by cooperating with philosophers. The famous distinction in What is Enlightenment? between the public and private uses of reason proposes the terms of this cooperation. In The Conflict of The Faculties Kant makes similar arguments in defense of the university. He presents it as an institution that exists to serve governments but that can also pursue enlightening ends if government grants it the freedom to do so. The article attempts to show Kant's awareness of enduring conflicts between reason and authority in politics, and it argues that his defense of the public use of reason addresses them in a way that is still worthy of our attention.

Debates regarding obligation in Hobbes have turned on either natural right or natural law interpretations. Both interpretations tend to take up the question of obligation from the perspective of teaching those who contend “for too great Liberty” “how to obey.” But Hobbes also has a second audience, and a second goal in mind: those who contend “for too much Authority” must be taught “how to govern.” From that perspective, a different discussion of obligation emerges. What is revealed is a contiguous set of reflections in Leviathan that pivot on the character of the sovereign and the citizens’ judgment thereof, all of which inform effective obligation and have little in common with received interpretations of obligation. It further reveals a relationship between the failure to manifest sovereign virtue and the natural punishment of pusillanimous and barbaric sovereigns. That is, it speaks to a sovereign virtue ethic in Leviathan.

Leo Strauss often spoke of Jerusalem and Athens. He never spoke of Rome in the same context, never of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Western civilization, in his view, was fertilized by the dynamic tension between only two, not three, cities. This theoretically unresolvable stress between Jerusalem and Athens was what made this culture unique. Western civilization stood between reason and revelation. For Strauss, it seemed self-evident that this tension, which initially arose when the pious Jews encountered the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, was incapable of intellectual reconciliation but still it remained the font of its cultural vitality.

In recent years, Alasdair MacIntyre has supplemented his longstanding critique of the liberal nation-state with a defense, grounded largely in an interpretation of the writings of Aquinas, of the politics of the common good as embodied exclusively in local communities. Even after MacIntyre's account of local politics has been clarified and distinguished from the distortions of some of his critics, there remain weaknesses, chief among which are that the local communities he promotes are pre- or subpolitical and that his hasty dismissal of modern politics involves the sort of caricature of existing political realities alien to Aquinas's prudential assessment of regimes.

Less than a year after Senator Taft died, a foundation was established for the preservation of his ideals. Men's ideals are sometimes confused with their ideas, as is probably the case in this instance, because it is often difficult to distinguish between them. This paper is concerned with both. More specifically, it is concerned with the ideas Senator Taft propagated about foreign policy and the ideals that fostered them.

During Pitt's 1785 campaign for moderate parliamentary reform, William Wilberforce supported the government primarily on a moral basis rather than on political grounds. He explained his reasons to a friend, Lord Muncaster, as follows:

It is not the confusion of parties, and their quarreling and battling in the House of Commons, which makes me despair of the republic … it is the universal corruption and profligacy of the times, which taking its rise amongst the rich and luxurious has now extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people.

Political theorists seeking to respond to public concerns about citizen behavior in democratic politics might turn to the literature on public reason. Within that literature, idealized citizens are expected to abide by what we call the “public-reason-giving requirement” when engaging in political acts. Here we examine what the doctrine of public reason has to say to political actors in nonideal democratic circumstances. We find that the recommendations for actual behavior in this literature rely heavily upon a forward- and backward-looking “Janus-faced” justification, focused on the way in which non-reason-giving political actions have or could serve the long-term interests of public reason itself. Through a critical evaluation of this idea we suggest that public reason has nothing meaningful to say to contemporary political actors. This, we maintain, is a serious flaw in a putative standard for political behavior and thus the liberal commitment to “public reason” under nonideal circumstances is misplaced.

The thinkers of the French Enlightenment are frequently depicted as political rationalists, meaning that they advocated subjecting all laws, institutions, and practices to the withering light of reason, and discarding those found wanting by its standards. However, two of the most prominent philosophes, Voltaire and Diderot, were in fact opponents of the kind of political rationalism that they are often thought to have embraced. Both of these thinkers rejected the idea of a single “rational” political order, advocated gradual reform rather than wholesale change, and denied that the steady application of reason could produce inevitable or endless progress. In effect the Enlightenment was a “revolt against rationalism” (as Peter Gay has called it) not only in the epistemological, psychological, and ethical spheres, but also in the political one.

THE individual in the twentieth century finds himself dwarfed by two giant institutions which decide his political destiny: the state, with its efficient bureaucrat methodically signing papers that may mean success or failure, life or death, for everyman and his world; the other is the political party, which aspires to control the state by mobilizing the masses. Nineteenth-century bureaucracy tended to be rigid and authoritarian, yet unrelated to popular support and limited in its impact on daily life. The nineteenth- century liberal, suspicious of the state, attempted to protect the individual by further limiting the bureaucrat; the twentiethcentury liberal hopes to use the bureaucrat to limit the privately powerful, whereas the totalitarian party hopes to dominate the state and therewith to dominate everyman. When a monopolistic party controls a monolithic state, the individual seems to have no choice but to flee, to obey or to disappear into a concentration camp. Overt individual resistance appears senseless; overt group resistance extremely dangerous and almost certainly doomed to failure.

John P. McCormick has become the leading proponent of a new democratic—or, now, “populist”—reading of Machiavelli. The authors of all three of the other books reviewed here cite McCormick as a source and inspiration; and he has written positive blurbs for their books. In Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) McCormick argued that Machiavelli's praise of Roman “offices or assemblies that exclude the wealthiest citizens from eligibility; magistrate appointment procedures that combine lottery and election; and political trials in which the entire citizenry acts as ultimate judge over prosecutions and appeals” constitutes “a robust, extra-electoral model of elite accountability and popular empowerment” very different from, and much superior to, the aristocratic “republicanism” attributed to Machiavelli by the “Cambridge school.” In Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist Politics, McCormick extends his previous analysis by offering “original readings of crucial themes within … The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories” (1–2). He also expands his critique of competing interpretations of Machiavelli and Rome by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss, John Pocock, and Quentin Skinner.

The Medea is Euripides' most famous play and perhaps his most enigmatic. The unwieldy character of the play's central figure and the movement of the play as a whole defy the traditional categories of tragedy. Attentiveness to the usually neglected political dimension of Medea sheds new light on some of its persistent enigmas. It also suggests that Euripides was less than sanguine about the kinds of excesses the impending war with Sparta was likely to call forth from citizen soldiers. Most importantly, it brings to light Euripides' sober assessment of an enduring political problem: the irreducibly ambiguous character of spiritedness, the warrior virtue par excellence.

William shirer'sRise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York, 1960) has been widely hailed as a great work of history. Harry Schermann, chairman of the board of directors of the Book of the Month Club, says that it “will almost certainly come to be considered the definitive history of one of the most frightful chapters in the story of mankind.” The book has already sold more widely than any work on European history published in recent years. It is probable that tens of thousands of American readers will take theirviews on recent German affairs from Shirer's pages for years to come. For that reason, it is important to point out the serious shortcomings of this work.

The driving forces of modern society—whether economic, technological or nationalistic—do not encourage a very strong sense of citizenship. It is a notion that is either taken for granted, systematically devalued or simply ignored. But we are beginning to realize that this weak sense of citizenship may be at the root of many of our social pathologies. Social theory is increasingly making a noticeable and not insignificant effort to include citizenship theory. The volumes here under review testify to the fruitfulness and indeed energy of this effort. They range widely and do not present a unified picture.

Existentialism, for some of its severe critics, represents a temporary outburst of the dark side of man which is indicative of a passing phenomenon of our age and particularly of the postwar angry generation living on the morbid edges of death, anxiety and the absurdity of human existence. They contend that existentialism is not a philosophy or at least not a serious and disciplined philosophy. Professor Henry S. Kariel characterized existential psychology as “negativism,” and its counterpart, behavioral psychology, as “positivism”; and similarly Professor Eugene J. Meehan describes the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl as having sought to find philosophical certainty “in feeling rather than in thought,” an assessment that falsely indicts phenomenology as an irrationalism. I have singled out these two political theorists as representatives of a widespread misconception of existential philosophy and phenomenology, held as well, I suspect, by many American political theorists. This article is not designed as a direct rebuttal to these misunderstandings and criticisms; it is rather an attempt to show what I consider to be the significant and positive contributions of existential philosophy and phenomenology to the foundation of political theory.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Anti-Federalists wanted representative bodies to mirror the electorate, and that the Federalists envisioned representation as a device for refining and enlarging popular views. This characterization is accurate in a broad sense, but it overlooks an important element in Anti-Federalist thought. I argue that certain key Anti-Federalists, in particular the Federal Farmer and Melancton Smith, synthesized the “mirroring” ideal and the “refining” ideal into a theory of representation that incorporated the best features of each system. This hybrid theory, though overwhelmed in the ratification debates of 1787–88, nevertheless provides a creative alternative model for effective national union.