The quarrel between Socrates and Callicles has long been recognized as the highpoint of Plato's Gorgias. But the acceptance of an overly simple view of Callicles has kept this quarrel from being understood in its full complexity. While Callicles appears to be a cynical immoralist, this appearance hides his deepest convictions; and while he and Socrates never come to a genuine meeting of the minds, the unbridgeable gap between them is due to Callicles′ unwillingness to acknowledge his moral convictions rather than to his lack of them. Through a close examination of their quarrel, the essay attempts to uncover true character of the irreconcilable differences between Socrates and Callicles and thus provide a pathway for a new understanding of Plato's Gorgias.

Hegel's concept of patriotism helps specify an account of the just association of collective identity and state power. This concept has three main features. First, as a distinctly modern virtue, patriotism is limited by Hegel's account of modernity and its link to “subjective freedom.” Second, patriotism forges an important connection between critical reflection and habitual practice, illuminated in a comparison of Hegel's thoughts on ethical education with Aristotelian practical philosophy. Third, these first two dimensions are brought together with a decision grounded in the acceptance of the irreducibly collective dimension of freedom— the will to war for one–s country. Hegel's account of war is also a “test case” for his internally limited patriotism, as a comparison with Kant's argument for “perpetual peace” reveals. In conclusion, this account connects traditional liberal institutions with a republican concern for self-rule in a framework that offers legitimate bounds to a “right to national self-determination”.

This article examines the ties between the work of Václav Havel and his dissident mentor Jan Patočka. Havel's political theory consists largely of an evocative, literary reformulation of a number of themes developed by Patočka, the student of Husserl and Heidegger generally recognized as the most significant Czech philosopher of the century. Insofar as Patočka's work continues to be ignored in the West, the intuitively appealing essays of Havel will themselves fail to be fully understood. This study offers an analysis of Havel's debt to Patočka, as well as an explication of the latter's political thought. With Patočka's phenomenological interpretation of ancient and contemporary thought, of Socrates and Heidegger, a bridge is built between the classical and the postmodern that seeks to ground ethics and politics without recourse to the foundationalism of metaphysical accounts of reality.

Several recent commentaries on Hannah Arendt's political thought have suggested strong connections and affinities between Arendt and Nietzsche or between Arendt and various later Nietzschean, aestheticist, or postmodernist thinkers. But a close reading of Arendt's critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger suggests that an overemphasis on the more Nietzschean or aesthetic aspects of Arendt's work risks obscuring some vital distinctions Arendt makes or preserves concerning politics and aesthetics. More significantly, the Nietzschean or aestheticist interpretation of Arendt tends to conceal or distort Arendt's actual, highly original, and more promising response to various facets of the modern political condition.

This article re-examines Herder's status as one of the founders of nationalism in the light of both older and more recent literature. The article focuses specifically on Herder's position with regard to the classical nationalist thesis that state and nationality should be coterminous. It argues that a close reading of Herder's oft cited and most explicit statement apparently lending support to this thesis has been misunderstood. The existing literature underestimates Herder's concern regarding the question of governance. For Herder there can be no case for statehood without just governance. As earlier drafts of his work confirm, Herder was deeply critical of the states he knew and denounced their overly bureaucratic and despotic character. He thought that nations could and should exist without being states. Depending on the circumstances, however, states might fulfil temporary functions to strengthen and preserve the national character, that most essential attribute of every nation. For Herder the diversity of nations is an insurance against despotism. It is not a licence for the creation of states.

This paper aims to illuminate the ongoing significance of Locke's political philosophy. It argues that the legitimacy of political authority lies, according to Locke, in the extent to which it collaborates with individuals so as to allow them to be themselves more effectively, and in its answerability to the consent such individuals should thereby give it. The first section discusses how the free will inevitably asserts its authority; the second shows the inevitability of the will's incorporation of authority as a kind of prosthesis, which in turn transforms the operation of the will; and the third treats the issue of consent, arguing that Locke is less interested in explicit acts of consent than in the norm of consent, in answerability to which structures of authority should be shaped so as to honor the beings whose capacity to consent is definitive for them.

Any inquiry into the values of a thinker, and particularly a thinker like Marx, such a large proportion of whose thought was political, must include a discussion of the kind of society that he considers desirable. With an individualist thinker this might only involve a discussion of his idea of what was basic to individual human nature, as in Hobbes or Locke, but for Marx human nature was inconceivable outside society and, when considering possible future developments, it was always man-in-society that Marx had in mind.

In the antithesis of Western imperialism and colonial nationalisms and the still uncertain synthesis the United States has had a significant and in some ways a determining role. By the extension of its frontiers into the Caribbean and the Pacific at the turn of the century, the United States found itself an imperialist power. American imperialism consciously endeavored to bring what was best of the Western way of life to its colonial peoples. Nevertheless, it depended on the conventional instruments of military force and colonial-civil government imposed by the conqueror. For the United States the Philippines became the fittest subject for this Westernizing process for which Theodore Roosevelt was the outstanding spokesman and apologist. Under President Roosevelt's direction the work of civilizing a backward people received a full American expression, and from a consideration of that enterprise the temper of American imperialism may be sounded. Drawing from the Philippine experiment and from experience with the Caribbean countries Roosevelt combined practical judgments with certain intellectual and emotional attitudes to elaborate a comprehensive doctrine of imperialism.

Not since the tenth century has Islam been confronted with a greater challenge of self-examination than in the first half of the twentieth century. During its early expansion Islam came into contact with Greek science and philosophy. Its failure to adapt itself to Greek science and philosophy, and to integrate Greek methods and teachings into its own, determined the character of subsequent Islamic thought and institutions. Between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, Islamic society lapsed into scientific and cultural stagnation, accompanied by political corruption and social disorganization. The Muslims transmitted Greek science and philosophy to Europe without having been influenced by it to any great degree. Whereas Western Europe accepted the Greek heritage and tried to harmonize it with Christian teachings, the Muslim world remained essentially unaffected. Assuming a negative attitude, it finally rejected Greek thought and learning as heretical and, in self-defense, returned to literalism and orthodoxy. Ever since, Islam has been dominated by the theology of its medieval ulama or doctors of Islamic Law.

The political thought of Leo Strauss commands the respect and admiration of even his critics. His critical intellectual carpentry is sharp, cutting, and often rebuking. His criticism of modernity, whether it be that of Machiavelli, Max Weber, an existentialist, or a scientific political scientist, is inspired by and deeply rooted in the Greek intellectualistic essentialism, particularly that of Aristotle, and the age-old tradition of nature and natural right as is shown in his work, Natural Right and History

Several recent scholars have raised afresh the question of what Aristotle meant in Politics 1 by the statement that men are “by nature” political, that is, are political animals. This article addresses this quandary by reference to Aristotle's psychology and his notion of political education. It is argued that by concentrating on Aristotle's theory of human locomotion and its implications for moral choice, we may identify the relation he conceived between the polis and human nature. Specifically, the ability of humans to live according to their natures requires the systematic education afforded by the laws and institutions of the polis.

According to Aquinas's view, while the mandate that political authority be instituted and exercised is an immediate consequence of the natural law precept that the common good be promoted, the question of who possesses political authority is settled by customary law. Samuel Beer's rival interpretation, one of the few attempts to discern Aquinas's view on political authority, is incompatible with Aquinas's explicit remarks on these matters. The present account provides an interpretation that both fits Aquinas's few explicit remarks about the source and form of political authority and explains the terseness of his remarks on that subject.

Locke's doctrine of toleration is best understood in the context of his larger argument about the political significance of Christ. Christ, Locke argues, separated the spiritual and political realm. His argument for separating the two realms, his basis for insisting that magistrates be tolerant of religious heterodoxy, is essentially theological. This claim is further developed by exploring Locke's thoughts of the unconcealment of foundation of moral duty which Christ was purported to have brought about. The bearing this unconcealment has on Locke's thoughts of the necessity of toleration is also explored. Finally, some comparisons between Locke and Hobbes's understanding of the significance of Christ are made, with a view to providing a new theoretical approach to their thought.

After World War II bitter controversy broke out in the United States between Catholics, on the one hand, and Protestants and liberals on the other. Although important issues were involved, these controversies have attracted almost no scholarly attention. Donald Crosby's book on Catholics and McCar-thyism is the only full-scale monograph dealing with any aspect of the controversies of which I am aware. My intention here is to draw attention to two additional aspects of the controversy which touch on matters that are still of interest and in need of much more study by historians. These are: (1) ambiguities in the concept of pluralism; and (2) a tendency that emerged in the critique of Catholic authoritarianism to treat democracy as a civil religion. But before taking up these issues we must look briefly at the development of “the Catholic issue” between the A1 Smith campaign of 1928 and the end of World War II.

Hume's famous “Conclusion” to Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature has been an enduring source of interest and controversy to scholars, with some going so far as to argue that the Treatise is inconsistent. Yet in the opening pages of the book Hume makes an odd, rarely noticed allusion to Socrates that helps explain the “Conclusion.” This article argues that the “Conclusion” is Hume's version of calling philosophy down from the heavens, establishing it in the cities, and compelling to inquire into morality and human affairs. Recognizing Hume's Socratic allusion focuses our attention on the centrality of moral and political topics to his mature thought and sheds light on the character of his skepticism. Far from being a confession of despair, Hume's skeptical crisis is an argument for a new conception of philosophy that takes self-knowledge as the indispensable condition of philosophizing about anything.

This essay argues for Walt Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of “aesthetic democracy” emphasizes the affective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, world-making power. Through his poetic translation of the vox populi, Whitman hoped to engender a robustly transformative democratic politics. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life.

Whereas traditionally self–love was considered a moral evil, Rousseau contended that some self–love is benign—and not only benign, but morally necessary and even praiseworthy. The following article offers an interpretation of Rousseau's criteria for distinguishing between good self–love and bad. The distinction between good and bad self–love is neither as simple as many readers think—it does not correspond exactly to the distinction between amour de soi and amour–propre—nor as blurry as many others think. It is, rather, both subtle and coherent. And it might well prove useful in our current efforts to inculcate pride and self-esteem without encouraging complacency or exploitation, efforts which themselves owe much to Rousseau's influence.

Long an icon of the American cultural tradition, Henry Thoreau has recently been welcomed into political theory as a theorist whose political writings go beyond the essays on resistance to government, and contain ideas deeply important for understanding the American contribution to democratic experience. I extend this new appreciation by showing how Thoreau presents a specific model of self-government, individual self-government, that occurs under the frequently irrelevant roof provided by liberal democratic state institutions. Thoreau's model of self-government imagines women and men who are largely free of, or indifferent to, the state; but fully involved in an everyday experience that is deeply political because it allocates values for the individual. Walden is, in this sense, less an escape from government than it is an escape to it. Thoreau spans the spectrum of political philosophy, from Socrates′ concern with justice in the individual, to Nietzsche's model of the self as a governable community, but Thoreau's work is unique, and distinctively American, in its model of a hard-headed individual self-government based upon an unsentimentalized natural world.

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.

It is widely acknowledged that the style of Plato's political philosophizing is radically different from the systems and doctrines approach established by Hobbes and confirmed and redirected by Kant. But what about Aristotle? Does he intend to produce systematic political theory in sharp contrast to Plato's question-centered dialectics? This essay argues that Aristotle's political science is equally as dialogical as Plato's. Taken together, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics form a single set of lectures, craftily organized to lead its immediate Greek audience (the equivalent of Socrates' interlocutors in Plato) deeply into the questions and problems that are Aristotle's theoretical basis for the paradigmatically human activities of practical reason (phronêsis) and thoughtful choice (prohairesis). He accomplishes this goal by allowing none of the answers he or his audience might propose to stand unchallenged, thus acting as another, albeit soberer, Socrates to his politically concerned audience then and, potentially, now.