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John Locke is acknowledged to be one of the theoretical founders of the separation of church and state, a distinguishing feature of modern liberal democracies. Though Locke's arguments for the merits of such separation have been subject to extensive investigation, his argument for its feasibility has remained relatively unexamined. This article argues that Locke was confident that separation of church and state can successfully be implemented in all times and places because of his epistemological and psychological insights that human beings are moved to act by unease and that separating church and state removes the unease that causes religiously based political instability. We conclude by noting that Locke's understanding of unease is foundational for his larger ambition to secure political liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steve Biko is one of the most important liberation activists of his time. Yet, his theoretical contribution is not well understood or appreciated. This article reconstructs Biko's political ideas and introduces a new integrated reading and interpretation of his writings, speeches, and recorded interviews. It argues that Biko's Black consciousness ideal should not only be read as engaging an activist movement or programme but, also, as encompassing an original theoretical framework grounded in a communalist ethos of Biko's own conceptual development. It argues that Biko's Black consciousness ideal sought to relate racialised oppression to a historically centred communalist solution framed by two interlocking structural elements—rightful power and free community. The article argues that only by a theoretical and normative consideration of these elements, on Biko's own conceptual terms, do we get a coherent understanding of Biko's distinctive view of free postcolonial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rousseau's account of the "legislator" or "lawgiver" is commonly regarded as one of the most far-fetched, ominous, and baffling parts of his teaching in the Social Contract. In brief, Rousseau's lawgiver seems to be a proto-totalitarian figure whose self-appointed mission is to found a political community by "denaturing" people at a single stroke and who may be a mere figment of Rousseau's overheated imagination. Accordingly, this part of the Social Contract threatens to make a mockery of Rousseau's claim to be "taking men as they are and laws they can be," as well as his claim that the combination of " freedom and equality " is "the greatest good" in the civil state. Following and extending Rousseau's own method of teaching by examples, however, this essay argues that Benjamin Franklin's influence over the American republic—especially through his posthumous Autobiography —offers a prosaic example of the apparently fantastical phenomenon sketched by Rousseau. In fact, I argue that Franklin's case corresponds more fully to Rousseau's description than do any of Rousseau's own examples (such as Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa) and that Franklin showed in practice what Rousseau suggested in theory: that a lawgiver can succeed without relying on coercion and without undercutting the equality that underlies a just society. Franklin's denaturing influence, I suggest, has been crucial for the durability of republicanism in the United States, given the country's size and diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits Tocqueville's famous portrait of the American female, which begins with assertions of her equality to males but ends with her self-cloistering in the domestic sphere. Taking a cue from Tocqueville's extended sketch of the "faded" pioneer wife in "A Fortnight in the Wilderness" and drawing connections to Tocqueville's criticisms of the division of industrial labor, I argue that the American girl's ostensibly free choice to remove herself from public life is not an act of freedom. Rather, it is a manifestation of a particular type of unfreedom that reveals underappreciated connections between the two great dangers about which Democracy in America warns: tyrannical majoritarianism and soft despotism. My argument that the girl's choice to withdraw from public life is coerced rather than free thus highlights the nonpolitical sources of oppression that exist within democratic societies. The paper concludes by raising questions about the need for coercion within Tocquevillian democracy and the implications of this for Tocqueville's "new" political science—indeed, for his liberalism more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay turns to the late thought of Martin Luther King Jr. to bring matters of faith back into debates about dissent in liberal democracies. Drawing on unpublished speeches as well as scholarship in Black theology, religious studies, and political theory, I contend that the post-1965 King is not as interested in moral or pragmatic principles as many democratic theorists think. The late King's movement, I argue, is animated by what Black liberation theologian James Cone calls "black faith." Manifesting Jesus's liberating love—a love that the late King believes already transformed and was still transforming the world—this movement with the poor and dispossessed is caring yet forceful, quotidian yet spectacular, and nonviolent yet revolutionary. Foregrounding the late King's black faith and the movement it animates, I conclude, opens up new horizons for theorizing dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay has two purposes—first, to identify Adam Smith as intervening in the debate between Montesquieu and Hume regarding the nature, age, and robustness of English liberty. Whereas Montesquieu took English liberty to be old and fragile, Hume took it to be new and robust. Smith disagreed with both: it was older than Hume supposed, but not fragile in the way Montesquieu claimed. The reason for this was the importance of the common law in England's legal history. Seeing this enables the essay's second purpose: achieving a more thorough and nuanced understanding of Smith's account of liberty. This requires us to go beyond repeating Smith's famous claim that modern liberty was the result of the feudal barons trading away their wealth and power for inane status goods. As I demonstrate, this is only one part of a much wider story: of liberty requiring, and also being constituted by, the rise of the regular administration of justice, and ultimately the rule of law. Although Smith's history of the English courts and common law has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, it is indispensable to understanding both his reply to Montesquieu and Hume and his wider political theory of modern freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The system of free expression John Milton defends in Areopagitica, a pamphlet against prior restraint in publishing, is often characterized as merely a proto-liberal, truth-based marketplace of ideas theory. But this represents a misunderstanding of Milton's views on the freedoms of conscience, speech, and the press. The tendency in political theory, philosophy, and law to reduce the "free speech Milton" to Areopagitica, and the reduction of that essay to several soundbites, has meant sidelining both the significant exceptions to expressive liberties that Milton calls for and also the role of the social in his theory. This incomplete characterization has enabled Milton's misuse in First Amendment discourse and jurisprudence, where he is made to support hierarchical approaches to free speech that privilege public political speech and are therefore ill-equipped to address the full range of communicative experiences. More comprehensive readings of Milton, however, reveal both certain limits to free expression, and also deep consideration for a wide range of speech acts. By reading Milton's theory of expressive liberties in light of the justifications he provides for those freedoms—i.e., virtue-building and Truth-seeking—this essay provides a fuller account of his views. What emerges is a distinctly Miltonian, virtue-driven "political theory of everyday talk" that locates value in even the most ordinary communicative acts. This theory—embracing both verbal and nonverbal expression—not only complements existing political theories of the everyday but can also help illuminate contemporary free speech concerns, many of which stem from the libertarian approach to expressive liberties that Milton (inadvertently) helped inspire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women's rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men, this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women's right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved lordship and subjection, was transformed into an equal companionate relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the equal rights of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the poet, journalist, and critic Heinrich Heine has not received much attention among recent political theorists, his revolutionary poetry and criticism were foundational for many German thinkers who have become canonical and comprise a powerful theoretical and historical project in their own right. This essay revisits Heine's Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, situating it within the broader arc of his poetry and prose works, to examine the unique mode of criticism he developed in response to a sense of political impasse and paralysis in his moment. For Heine, this paralysis stemmed from the persistence of outmoded institutions in a revolutionary age, and the act of exposing it was the first step toward rebelling against and overcoming it. Heine thus developed a revolutionary notion of criticism that sought to lay bare and get beyond his moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking its distance from classical liberalism, political liberalism seeks to avoid controversial metaphysical assumptions by starting from institutional features of modern polities. Political liberalism also extends the limits of liberal toleration by envisioning societies that it considers nonliberal but decent. This article is concerned with the relationship between these two dimensions of political liberalism, specifically as they are instantiated in the work of John Rawls. I show that these two dimensions are in tension with each other. Put simply, if political liberalism is institutional, then decent societies are impossible. Decent societies are only conceivable within the ahistorical realm of values—a realm that Rawls sometimes slips into, even though its avoidance is central to political liberalism's claim of distinctiveness. Rawls's appeal to hypotheticals to defend his account of decent societies only serves to mask this tension and to foreclose important avenues of inquiry about the non-Western world. I also deploy throughout the article archival material that evinces Rawls' concern with ethnocentrism but also the difficulties he faced in coming up with an adequate account of non-Western societies. On the argument I offer here, this intractability is to be expected, since Rawls did not recognize that the problems with his account were not purely philosophical, but in fact, sociological, political, and historical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent essay in this journal, Tom O'Shea defends socialist republicanism, marrying the value of freedom as nondomination to public ownership of the means of production. In this reply, I argue that the efficiency costs that often attach to public ownership may undercut the ability of the socialist republic to combat domination by public agents. I provide two reasons in support of this claim. First, the economic gains provided by efficiency can insulate individuals from the discretionary power of other agents. Put briefly, the more wealth you have, the less the discretionary power threatens your basic interests. Second, the efficiency costs of public ownership also make it more difficult to hold accountable the managers of economic organizations. This shortcoming of O'Shea's argument reveals a point hitherto neglected in the republican literature—caring about nondomination implies caring about efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century" by Alex Gourevitch is presented. Topics include that the author suggests the association of freedom with universalization; and the use of the universalization of freedom against capitalism.

In their vulnerability to arbitrary, exploitative uses of human power, many of Earth's nonhuman parts are subject to environmental domination. People too are subject to environmental domination in ways that include but also extend beyond the special environmental burdens borne by those who are poor and marginalized. Despite the substantial inequalities that exist among us as human beings, we are all captured and exploited by the eco-damaging collective practices that constitute modern life for everyone today. Understanding the complex, interacting dynamics of environmental domination can orient us to a more liberatory approach to our environmental problems and to one another, both human and nonhuman. To make good on this potential, however, we need to move beyond existing conceptions of domination. This essay reconstructs the concept of domination to illuminate the multiple ways that the human domination of nature interacts with the domination of people, and it identifies changes that could support more emancipatory forms of political order, a politics of non-domination for people and the Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Thomas Hobbes’s critics have often accused him of espousing a form of extreme subjection that differs only in name from outright slavery, Hobbes’s own striking views about slavery have attracted little notice. For Hobbes repeatedly insists that slaves, uniquely among the populace, maintain an unlimited right of resistance by force. But how seriously should we take this doctrine, particularly in the context of the rapidly expanding Atlantic slave trade of Hobbes’s time? While there are several reasons to doubt whether Hobbes’s arguments here should be taken at face value, the most serious stems from the highly restricted definition that he gives to the term “slave,” one that would seem to make his acceptance of slave resistance entirely hollow in practice. Yet a closer examination of Hobbes’s theory indicates that his understanding of slavery is less narrow than it might initially appear—and thus that his argument carries a genuine political bite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freedom of thought has been lauded in political theory and celebrated in human rights discourse. But what kind of freedom is it? I propose that freedom of thought deserves status as a basic liberty, given the significance of thought to human life, the fundamental importance of freedom of thought in establishing and sustaining crucial rights and freedoms, and the value of being able to develop and experience one's thoughts without undue influence from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Oakeshott provides the best articulation of the widespread view that the moral foundations of the modern state limit it to the defense and maintenance of a system of formal rules governing individuals and non-state enterprises. While this understanding of the proper relation between individual and state has been challenged by liberals of a more Rawlsian persuasion, these criticisms have persuaded few to change their minds, as they rest upon assumptions that are plainly incompatible with the view under consideration. I argue that, rightly understood, central and attractive features of Oakeshott’s own conception of understanding, philosophy, individuality, and education lead to significantly different conclusions than those embraced by Oakeshott himself. The “morality of individuality” upon which Oakeshott rests his strict restrictions on the use of state power requires that we be open to the use of that power to guarantee that all receive the education postulated by individuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much scholarly disagreement concerning Plato’s participation in the mid-fourth century debates over Athens’s ancestral constitution (patrios politeia). This disunity stems from contrasting views about the relationship between philosophy and Athenian politics in Plato’s writings. Recently, several political theorists have reoriented our general understanding about Plato’s complex involvement with Athenian politics. However, these discussions do not discuss Plato’s specific relationship with patrios politeia. In order to bridge this gap, I turn to two dialogues within the later Platonic corpus: Timaeus and Critias. By examining the Atlantis myth that spans both dialogues, I discuss how Plato uses the story both to comment on and critique the democratic Athenian constitution. At the same time, however, Plato also advances a unique veneration of democracy by asserting that it is the politeia of the gods. In this way, I argue that Timaeus-Critias contributes a valuable new perspective in the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between Plato’s philosophy and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slavery has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in republican theory. This essay contends that slavery deserves this central status in a theory of freedom, but a more thorough examination of slavery in theory and in practice will reveal additional insights about freedom previously unacknowledged by republicans. Slavery combines imperium (state domination) and dominium (private domination) in a way that both destroys freedom today and diminishes opportunities to achieve freedom tomorrow. Dominium and imperium working together are a greater affront to freedom than either working alone. However, an examination of slavery in practice, focusing on the experiences of American slaves, demonstrates that republicanisms’ acknowledged strategies for freedom-seeking, acquiring insulation from domination through law and through norms, do not encompass the full range of options. Slaves also seek freedom through physical absence, economic activity, and culture. The account of slavery and freedom developed here suggests republican accounts of freedom should either give up their focus on thresholds of freedom, or consider the possibility of a plural conception of freedom that extends beyond just freedom as non-domination to include freedom as collective world-making, or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "On the People's Terms" by Philip Pettit is presented. It outlines the contemporary civic republican political doctrine. Topics discussed include the meaning of liberty and the concept of non-domination; affirmation of a central place for democracy in the political theory of republicanism; and contestation over the use of power in the context of daily democratic politics.

The article presents the author's response to literary criticisms of his book "On the People's Terms" which outlines the contemporary civic republican political doctrine. Topics discussed include the implications of the republican notion of freedom on social justice and political legitimacy; a concrete model of institutions for delivering equally shared popular control; and the need for a system of popular influence over government.

A literary criticism of the book "On the People's Terms" by Philip Pettit is presented. It outlines the contemporary civic republican political doctrine. Topics discussed include the importance of political freedom in framing public policies and in the design of public institutions; republican account of social justice; and challenges in granting general or distal freedom to individuals to eliminate conflicts between the various ways one might spend freedom.

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of political readings of the right to have rights. The gist of the argument is that this right only comes into being in the act of claiming or taking it. At the same time, the political reading suffers from a normative lacuna which is difficult to ignore if right is not to collapse into might. The present article seeks to show that this normative lacuna can be accounted for if one situates the political reading in relation to a certain form of government. Acknowledging Montesquieu’s influence on Arendt’s resort to the principles which guide political action, the article offers a new interpretation of the normative basis of the right to have rights. It argues, first, that this right is democratic, not political, and second, that the principle which sets the right in motion is responsibility, not freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article in Political Theory (40, 5: 573–601), entitled “Human Rights, Freedom, and Political Authority,” Laura Valentini proposes a “freedom-centered” account of human rights. On this account, “human rights are derived from the universal right to freedom, namely each person’s innate right to a sphere of agency within which to pursue her ends and goals without being subject to the will of others” (574). In spite of its prima facie appeal, I argue that Valentini’s theory does not do a good job at explaining some of our settled convictions about the content of human rights and that she offers an implausibly restrictive view of our reasons for respecting human rights. I conclude by very briefly presenting the main elements of a broader perfectionist and dignitarian account of human rights, which seems more consistent with our settled convictions on these matters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay places Isaiah Berlin’s famous “Two Concepts of Liberty” in conversation with perspectives defined as black fugitive thought. The latter is used to refer principally to Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois and David Walker. It argues that the trope of liberty in Western liberal political theory, exemplified in a lineage that connects Berlin, John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant, has maintained its universal meaning and coherence by excluding and silencing any representations of its modernity gestations, affiliations and entanglements with Atlantic slavery and European empires. This particular incarnation of theory is characterized as the Western discursive and hegemonic effects of colonial-racial foreclosure. Foreclosure describes the discursive contexts in which particular terms or references become impossible to formulate because the means by which they could be formulated have been excluded from the discursive context. Through an examination of the action of foreclosure, based largely on unraveling the liberal-colonial convergences of Two Concepts the essay reflects on the political and theoretical problems posed for black political thought by the hegemony of Western formulations of liberty that deny their indebtedness to Western colonialism. Drawing upon juxtapositions between white liberal/republican thinkers and black fugitivity thinkers, it argues a particular lineage of black political thought is compelled to conceive of itself as an escape from the colonial and racial hegemony of Western liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay responds to the argument that Jonathan Riley offers in the February 2013 issue of Political Theory for rendering Isaiah Berlin’s theory of pluralism consistent with his commitment to negative liberty. I show that the “standard of humanity” that Riley attributes to Berlin fails to take account of Berlin’s distinction between “political” liberty (which has nothing to do with our humanity as such) and what Berlin calls “basic” liberty (which does). Consequently, Riley ends up conflating the conditions for living in a decent society (one which respects a minimal core set of human rights) with being a human being. And this leads him to make the further, mistaken assumption that humans need to “exercise” their generic human capacities in order to remain human and not become, in Riley’s words, “robots or moral idiots.” While Riley’s essay is a valuable contribution to our understanding of what we might call Berlin’s ethic of human rights, it ultimately fails in its effort to show that the domain of human rights constitutes Berlin’s standard of humanity (as opposed to decency), and therefore it fails to show that normal human beings must assign overriding moral priority to a modicum of political liberty in order to secure their humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neorepublican treatments of Hobbes argue that his conception of liberty was deliberately developed to counter a revived and Roman-rooted republican theory of liberty. In doing so, Hobbes rejects republican liberty, and, with it, Roman republicanism. We dispute this narrative and argue that rather than rejecting Roman liberty, per se, Hobbes identifies and attacks a language of liberty, Roman in character, often abused by ambitious persons. This is possible because Roman liberty—and, by extension, Hobbes’s relationship to it—is more complex than neorepublican authors have allowed. Drawing on Roman sources, along with Hobbes’s major works, we argue that Hobbes’s theory of liberty owes much to his engagement with Roman sources, and that this theory speaks to the egalitarian elements in his political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the nineteenth century a group of “labor republicans” argued that the system of wage-labor should be replaced by a system of cooperative production. This system of cooperative production would realize republican liberty in economic, not just political, life. Today, neo-republicans argue that the republican theory of liberty only requires a universal basic income. A non-dominated ability to exit is sufficient to guarantee free labor. This essay reconstructs the more radical, labor republican view and defends it against the prevailing the neo-republican one. It argues that neorepublicanism lacks an adequate conception of structural domination, which leaves it without theoretical resources to address certain forms of economic domination. The concept of structural domination allows us to comprehend the coherence of the nineteenth century, labor republican view and identify its relevance to modern labor markets. Labor republicanism takes us beyond a universal basic income to a concern with control over productive assets and workplace organization. As such, it shows us how the republican theory of liberty can support an argument for the transformation of work, not just the escape from it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reinterprets Hegel’s much discussed “failure” to theorize a remedy for the poverty that disrupts modern society. I argue that Hegel does not offer any solution to the problem of poverty because, in his view, the sovereign state depends upon the persistence of poverty. Whereas a state’s achievement of external sovereignty requires the presence of another state, its achievement of internal sovereignty requires the presence of a different, internal other. This role is played by the impoverished and rebellious “rabble,” which opposes the state’s unity and stability. Ethical life cannot eliminate poverty because poverty, and the insecurity that it engenders, are dialectical conditions of the state’s highest development. This interpretation reveals a critical dimension to Hegel’s political philosophy, insofar as the state’s promise of actualized freedom can only be sustained in relation to a mass of internal “outsiders” to whom that freedom does not extend. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Isaiah Berlin’s political thought consistently combines tragic value pluralism with moral priority for a minimum sphere of individual liberty which is defined and protected by a core set of basic human rights. His fundamental concept of a common moral minimum includes multiple components, including the idea that there is a common moral world of plural and conflicting incommensurable objective values and the idea that humans share a common nucleus of needs and interests centered on the overriding goal of human survival. The basic human rights have priority over competing values because the rights are essential for human survival. They determine a common threshold of human decency: decent societies must respect the rights, which are in principle mutually harmonious under ordinary conditions, although emergencies can arise in which some of the rights must be sacrificed to respect others. Berlin’s focus is on decency, which he insists can be maintained without a commitment to political democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes Machiavelli’s accounts of the historical figures Agathocles, Clearchus, Appius and Pacuvius to (1) accentuate the Florentine’s distinction between tyranny and civic leadership, (2) identify the proper place of elite punishment and popular empowerment in his conception of democratic politics, and (3) criticize contemporary Straussian and “radical” interpreters of Machiavelli for profoundly underestimating the roles that popular judgment and popular rule play within his political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I sketch a Kant-inspired liberal account of human rights: the freedom-centred view. This account conceptualizes human rights as entitlements that any political authority—any state in the first instance—must secure to qualify as a guarantor of its subjects’ innate right to freedom. On this picture, when a state (or state-like institution) protects human rights, it reasonably qualifies as a moral agent to be treated with respect. By contrast, when a state (or state-like institution) fails to protect human rights, it loses its moral status and becomes liable to both internal and external interference. I argue that this account not only steers a middle course between so-called natural-law and political approaches to human rights but also satisfies three important theoretical desiderata—explanatory power, functional specificity, and critical capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Timothy Stanton is the latest in a line of Locke scholars who, in focusing on Locke’s theological commitments, have sought to place these at the center of his political philosophy. Stanton insists that those who interpret Locke’s political philosophy in more material terms, centered on individual liberty, government authority, and the need to reconcile both via consent, apply to it a misleading “picture” and fail to perceive its essentials. By showing that this is precisely how Locke himself intended his political philosophy to be understood, with the theology substantially removed, this article shows how Stanton is profoundly mistaken in his interpretation of Locke. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A better appreciation of the material, distributed quality of human agency can illuminate subtle dynamics of domination and oppression and reveal resources for potentially liberatory political action. Materialist accounts of agency nevertheless pose challenges to the notion of personal responsibility that is so crucial to political obligation and democratic citizenship. To guard against this danger, we need to sustain the close connection between agency and a sense of selfhood that is individuated, reflexive, and responsive to norms. Yet we should acknowledge that reflexive selfhood is not the whole of individual agency for the sources of agency extend beyond the individual herself. We also need to recognize the ways that both reflexivity and norm-responsiveness are themselves embodied capacities. When properly conceived, a materialist view of agency can increase awareness of our often-unwitting contributions to systematic inequalities of power and extend our political responsibilities in emancipatory directions, thus holding great promise for democratic life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay draws attention to the importance of Montesquieu’s earliest and unpublished writings on liberty for our understanding of the famous eleventh book of the Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu’s investigation of the nature and preconditions of liberty, the author argues, was much more polemical than it is usually assumed. As an analysis of his notebooks shows, Montesquieu set out to wrest control over the concept of liberty from the republican admirers of classical antiquity, a faction that he believed to be dangerously populist and revolutionary. In order to do so, Montesquieu came up with a redefinition of the concept of liberty that allowed him to argue that monarchical subjects could be just as free as republican citizens. This conclusion has important implications not just for our understanding of Montesquieu’s writings but also and more broadly for our understanding of the intellectual history of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the work of political philosopher James Tully, particularly his ideas about imperialism, which seem contradictory and that focus on indigenous people. The contradiction is found in Tully's assertion that imperialism is more prevalent than has been thought and that there are many unrecognized sources of resistance to imperialism. It is noted that Tully's notion of public philosophy differs from analytic, historical, or genealogical philosophy and that it contains a heavy emphasis on practicality. Other topics include the philosophical basis of imperialism, democracy, postcolonialism, freedom, and citizenship.

It has often been argued that, notwithstanding his commitment to the authoritarian state, Thomas Hobbes is a champion of the “minimal” version of liberty of conscience: namely, the freedom of citizens to think whatever they like as long as they obey the law. Such an interpretation renders Hobbes’s philosophy more palatable to contemporary society. Yet the claim is incorrect. Alongside his notion of “private” conscience, namely, Hobbes develops a conception of conscience as a public phenomenon. In the following, it is argued that this inconsistency serves the purpose of deception: it holds out the possibility of dissent while making it impossible to utilise. Arguably, moreover, this is the proper hermeneutical approach to take to Hobbes’s inconsistencies in general. Indeed, said inconsistencies ought to alert contemporary normative theorists to the instability of the “minimal” version of liberty of conscience attributed to Hobbes: Hobbes himself, namely, shows that it is insufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that many modern discussions of Locke’s political theory are unconsciously shaped by an imaginative picture of the world inherited from the past, on which authority and freedom are fundamentally antipathetic. The consequences of this picture may be seen in the distinction made customarily in Locke studies between the ‘authoritarian’ Locke of Two Tracts on Government, for whom authority descends from God, and the later, ‘liberal,’ Locke, for whom authority arises from the will and agreement of individuals, and felt in the emphases placed on consent and resistance in most interpretations of Lockean political thought. The essay examines the composition and contours of this picture and, by holding up a mirror to contemporary Locke scholarship, draws attention to some of the ways in which it unwittingly distorts Locke’s thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neo-republicans claim that Hobbes’s constitutional indifferentism (the view that we have no profound reason to prefer one constitutional form over another) is driven exclusively by a reductive understanding of liberty as non-interference. This essay argues that constitutional indifferentism is grounded in an analysis of the institutional presuppositions of well-functioning government that does not depend on a conception of liberty as mere non-interference. Hence, indifferentism cannot be refuted simply by pointing out that non-domination is a distinctive ideal of freedom. This result does not suffice to defend the strong version of indifferentism put forward by Hobbes. But it does point to an important limitation of neo-republican constitutional theory: Neo-republicanism will amount to a distinctive paradigm of constitutional thought only if it is understood in a way that conflicts with Hobbes’s understanding of the institutional presuppositions of well-functioning government. It is doubtful that we have good reason to embrace neo-republicanism, so understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary political philosophers discuss the idea of freedom in terms of two distinctions: Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty, and Skinner and Pettit’s divide between liberal and republican liberty. In this essay I proceed to recast the debate by showing that there are two strands in liberalism, Hobbesian and Lockean, and that the latter inherited its conception of civil liberty from republican thought. I also argue that the contemporary debate on freedom lacks a perspicuous account of the various conceptions of freedom, mainly because it leaves aside the classic contrast between natural liberty and civil liberty. Once we consider both the negative/positive distinction and the natural/civil one, we can classify all conceptions of freedom within four basic irreducible categories. In light of the resulting framework I show that there are two distinct conceptions of republican liberty, natural and civil, and that the former is coupled with an ideal of individual self-control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Benjamin Constant's famous lecture comparing ancient and modern liberty can be better understood if it is read alongside a set of unpublished lectures on ancient religion that he delivered one year earlier. Those lectures suggest that Constant's commitment to modern liberty was based in part on his deep anxieties about religious freedom, and that he valued religious freedom because he thought the "religious sentiment" was an important manifestation of a natural human capacity for self-development. In putting religion and self-development at the heart of his vision, he tried to show that modern liberty could have a positive moral or spiritual purpose beyond merely assuring people freedom from interference in the pursuit of their interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Kant and many modern cosmopolitans, establishing the rule of law provides the chief mechanism for achieving a just global order. Yet, as Hart and Rawls have argued, the rule of law, as it is commonly understood, is quite consistent with "great iniquities." This criticism does not apply to a sufficiently robust, republican conception of the rule of law, which attributes a basic legal status to all persons. Accordingly, the pervasiveness of dominated persons without legal status is a a fundamental violation of the rule of law. This legal status can be understood in Kant's sense as an original "right to freedom," one that is not derived from or acquired by membership in a community or from citizenship. The realization of this kind of legal status can already be found in the "cosmopolitan constitutions" of many democracies, which include rights of persons (and not just citizens) to habeas corpus and other statuses that protect those vulnerable to domination. In order that all persons have the appropriate institutional space within which to exercise the powers of persons to address and make claims, institutions such as human rights courts to which those who lack legal status can appeal and be recognized are necessary for a form of the rule of law that is adequate to current circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response to political theorist David Thunder, who critiqued the author's argument regarding autonomy-based liberalism. Thunder, supporting the toleration-based liberal ideas of William Galston, contends that as long as individuals have a right of exit from any institution, association, or relationship, non-traditional cultural practices should be permitted to exist. The author argued that any meaningful right of exit inherent requires state protection, consequently committing society to his autonomy-based liberalism.

The capability approach to distributive justice, as defended by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, represents perhaps the most influential recent attempt to reconcile the competing demands of liberty and equality. Specifically, capability theorists have claimed that their insistence on the universal cultivation of a set of capabilities for basic human "functionings" is fully consistent with a liberal neutrality commitment. Their reason is that these capabilities are, like Rawls's primary goods, rational to want "whatever else one wants." This article suggests, in contrast, that the capability approach fails to satisfy the neutrality requirement endorsed by both Sen and Nussbaum. It further suggests that the non-neutral character of the approach reflects its Rawlsian lineage, and raises serious doubts about the coherence of Rawls's account of primary goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the political trials through which, according to Machiavelli's Discourses, republics should punish magistrates and prominent citizens who threaten or violate popular liberty. Unlike modern constitutions, which assign indictments and appeals to small numbers of government officials, Machiavelli's neo-Roman model encourages individual citizens to accuse corrupt or usurping elites and promotes the entire citizenry as political jury and court of appeal. Machiavellian political justice requires, oil the one hand, equitable, legal procedures that serve all citizens by punishing guilty parties and discouraging retaliatory reprisals, including foreign intervention. On the other hand, frankly acknowledging the power disparities that exist in every republic, Machiavelli outlines how political trials enable pro-plebeian magistrates and populist reformers to thwart patrician-generated smear campaigns arm oligarchic conspiracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on liberalism in response to Shadia Drury's review of his book "Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism." He opposes Drury's claims that the primacy of liberty is one of the fundamental foundations of liberalism and that neoconservative Strauss attributed no value to liberty at all. He contends that Strauss's statements about coded writing are neither liberal nor anti-liberal and his thesis about esotericism is presented as a contribution to the sociology of knowledge.

Much of the appeal of deliberative democracy lies in its emancipatory promise to give otherwise disadvantaged groups a voice, and to grant them influence through reasoned argument. However, the precise mechanisms for delivery of this promise remain obscure. After reviewing Habermas's formulation of deliberation, the article draws on recent theories of argumentation to provide a more detailed account of such mechanisms. The article identifies the key emancipatory mechanism as explicitness in language. It outlines the primary modalities of this mechanism: expressing differences of opinion, mobilising a shared standard of inference, and recognising and excluding fallacious appeals to irrelevant factors such as force or authority. It describes how these modalities are enhanced at a secondary, reflexive level that recognises the partiality and defeasibility of particular argumentative exchanges. Such qualifications, it is argued, support a model of deliberation across discourses that allows a clearer appreciation of its potential and limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Grotius's use of a Roman tradition to establish his notion of a natural and international law in his early treatise De iure praedae (1604-1606). It is argued that De iure praedae, on a methodological level, constituted an attempt to introduce a new doctrine of sources of law by making use of the method of classical rhetoric. On a substantive level, the treatise must be seen as growing out of a Ciceronian tradition of natural law arguments in favor of just war, a tradition further enriched by Grotius with concepts taken from the property law of the Digest. These concepts afforded Grotius with the substantive framework to develop his doctrine of subjective natural rights as sketched in the hitherto unpublished early manuscript Theses LVI. An implication of this investigation of the Roman foundations of Grotius's theory of natural law is that it challenges widespread assumptions about the "positive" character of ancient liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between the ideal of autonomous preference formation and the danger of paternalism in deliberative democratic theory. It argues that the aim of autonomous preference formation can and should be decoupled from a justification of paternalistic state action aimed at reshaping citizens 'preferences. The problem of nonautonomous preference formation is rooted in the communication structure in which each and every one forms her preferences and hence cannot be solved by some paternalistically judging on others' behalf The argument is based on a new formulation of the deliberative democratic ideal, which emphasizes and clarifies the multiple dimensions of freedom it incorporates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment--the affirmation of human freedom is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]