Rousseau and Heidegger’s critiques of the modern commercial city, as well as their valorization of rural life, speak to problems of urban–rural polarization and rural alienation. This article disentangles Rousseau’s rural political vision which promotes agrarianism in service of egalitarian republicanism from that of Heidegger, which seeks to radically overcome the “uprootedness” of post-Enlightenment civilization by reconnecting the Volk to its primordial rootedness-in-the-soil of the fatherland. It proceeds by (1) comparing their critiques of the modern commercial city, (2) reconstructing their plans for rural political renewal, and (3) identifying the roots of their differences in competing understandings of “Being,” “nature,” and “history.” It concludes that Rousseau’s more nuanced evaluation of agrarianism, which better comprehends both the limits and possibilities of rural life, serves as a valuable corrective to Heidegger by providing a vision of rural politics that challenges but nevertheless proves more amenable to compromise with increasingly urbanized liberal democracies.

Scholars have identified a primary goal of legislation in Plato’s Laws: to make citizens virtuous and thereby happy. But in focusing on this goal, they have left unexplored another: to shape how citizens understand and face death. This article shows how these two goals are tied together. I first argue that in book I, Kleinias serves as an example of how legislation can miseducate citizens by leaving them with conflicting views of virtue and thus with conflicting evaluations of death. Then, I turn to two of the Stranger’s statements on virtue, happiness, and death in books I and II and argue that these statements hold a positive teaching on virtue, and thereby death, that he thinks wise law must inculcate in citizens.

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu announces that he would be the happiest of mortals if he could help men cure themselves of their prejudices. Though he demands that we understand prejudice’s role in his work, scholars have not excavated his whole strategy regarding it. Preliminary investigations have concluded that he sought to destroy prejudices because he had a high estimation of popular reason. This article argues that, while he does seek to eliminate prejudices that support despotism, he also encourages salutary ones for liberty. His whole strategy regarding prejudices shows that his use of them reflects a modest assessment of reason. By demonstrating that two of his well-known strategies for political reform—reinterpreting Christianity and encouraging commerce—concern salutary prejudices, this article reveals the centrality of prejudices to his political project overall.

Theorists have responded to the challenge of pluralism in East Asia by either advocating a less-demanding form of Confucianism or neutral liberal democratic institutions. This article transcends this dichotomy by extending the challenge down to the individual, prioritizing “exit-based” institutional mechanisms characterized by polycentric interjurisdictional competition over collective “voice.” Drawing from the tradition of epistemic liberalism, this framework not only provides groups the space to enact their moral commitments but facilitates cultural discovery in a complex environment where knowledge of what is of cultural importance is in the first place not centralizable. Our novel proposal accepts the pluralist’s preference for an anti-perfectionist regime without being committed to political democracy. In our approach, not only is Confucianism knocked off its special status in justifying the social order, even democracy is deprived of its special status in the arena of governance.

Rousseau’s civil religion in the Social Contract has been interpreted as either an authoritarian institution that reinforces the collectivist ideal of the Social Contract or as a non-coercive proposal aimed at promoting toleration. This article offers an alternative account that emphasizes popular sovereignty as both the source and object of civil religion. On this reading, civil religion is a democratic choice by a sovereign people of the kind of beliefs and behavior they want to collectively endorse and expect from each other. When established by the people, civil religion serves the higher function of exemplifying and preserving political freedom in a political community. Recognizing the popular roots of civil religion helps us to understand it as an essential condition for maintaining the body politic that Rousseau envisions in the Social Contract and an important component of his democratic thought.

Shakespeare’s Cymbeline explores the tension between the desire for freedom and the obligations individuals owe to their social and political communities. Through the course of the play, characters seek freedom from the authority of their fathers, kings, emperors, and gods with devastating consequences. Tragedy is only averted once these characters understand that the freedom and authority they variously desire is only fulfilled in a mutual love or good will that is bolstered by forgiveness. The play’s setting at the birth of Christ is carried through in the Christian argument and outcome of the plot.

There is a consensus in the literature that the Marxism of the Second International (1889–1916) lacked philosophical sophistication and that understanding of Marxism’s Hegelian origins was lost soon after Karl Marx’s death, only to be recovered with the emergence of Western Marxism in the 1920s. This article challenges this consensus, urging revision of the basic outlines of the intellectual history of Marxism. It begins by sketching two ways contemporary scholars understand the Hegel-Marx connection. It then shows that these views were anticipated before World War I in the work of Max Adler. Against the view that Hegel was “put back into Marxism” in the 1920s or 1970s, then, this article maintains that there have always been sophisticated as well as simplifying accounts of the Hegel-Marx connection.

Scholarship over the last 70 years has shown that Madison looked to Hume for insight regarding faction, constitutional attachment, and political methodology. But the now commonplace image of a Humean Madison is misleading. I argue that Madison’s understanding of self-government drew from the science of man articulated in Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, and Reid’s common sense philosophy. These Scottish sources, all of which were critical of Hume, relied on Butler’s conception of the authoritative conscience. This recovery of Madison’s Scottish sources restores the primacy of reason and conscience in his system, in which the interest-based clash of factions, about which Hume theorized, is a secondary mechanism, always subordinate to the reason-based pursuit of the common good. For Madison and his Scottish sources, the will’s responsiveness to reason is the sine qua non of self-government.

Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s thoughts, when reconstructed via a critical dialogue, can provide much-needed insight into applying religious truth claims to politics. Arendt emphasizes the role of plural voices for free politics. For her, a solution to the spread of misinformation is to establish and maintain a robust public sphere. For Bonhoeffer, this method is limited and incomplete. He argues that Christians must see the world as a space of solidarity among the oppressed, and a Christ-reality that resists both theocratic legalism and vulgar voluntarism must guide their actions. However, Arendt’s sharp judgment of the dangers of a modern society suggests that even a modest version of religious practice cannot remain intact in the face of modern socio-economic forces. Through a novel interpretation of their political theologies, this article investigates a way for religion to be a conscientious voice in politics yet eschew becoming a tyrannical force itself.

Political and legal theorists have long been interested in how the principle of national self-determination emerged over the course of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to anti-colonial movements. In general, national self-determination has been associated with the anti-colonial turn to statehood, sovereignty, and representative government. This article recovers an anti-statist, anti-electoral theorization of self-determination from the work of Indian political thinker Radhakamal Mukerjee. I show how Mukerjee’s engagement with evolutionary theories of politics in the early twentieth century led him to depart from Indian nationalist appropriations of the discourse of self-determination in the aftermath of WWI. Mukerjee historicized state sovereignty, representative government, and individual rights as products of Western Europe’s trajectory of political development and constructed “Asia” as a region marked by anti-statist collectivism. The article thereby highlights the overlooked role of evolutionary arguments in forming a novel, anti-statist conceptualization of anti-colonial self-determination.

In this article, I offer a novel critique of Jeremy Waldron’s attempt to reconcile Locke’s skeptical epistemology with his normative theory of equality. I argue that Waldron’s turn to a theologically valent “real resemblance” to ground Lockean equality cannot confer the moral or ontological objectivity he imputes to his Lockean egalitarianism. I identify interpretive issues with Waldron’s turn to John McDowell’s metaethics to explain this resemblance’s theological valence. I highlight instead Locke and McDowell’s shared emphasis on education and our communities in cultivating moral sensibilities. Locke’s education underscored the ethical imperative of cultivating epistemic and social virtues to improve fallible understanding and probabilistic judgments. This pragmatic guidance offered a bridge between our authoritative moral claims and our engagement with others qua equals and everyday conduct in the world. I conclude by locating Locke’s continued relevance in his practical measures for realizing egalitarian commitments despite our fallibility, not his theological premises.

Hannah Arendt did not live to complete her anticipated work on judgment, a faculty she considered essential for resuscitating political life against the threat of totalitarianism. Scholars have attempted to reconstitute it, primarily through her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Yet when discussing her turn to judgment, Arendt cites the ancient Greek historian Herodotus as a model, claiming that recovering the ancient sense of histor (judge) is crucial to reclaiming human dignity. Herodotus is in fact central to her depiction of the Greeks throughout her work. Excavating his influence not only helps clarify her theory of judgment; it also reveals how she both distances herself from Heidegger and yet retains certain core agreements. Her reading of Herodotus thus helps delineate the intellectual relationship between two of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers, while inviting us to reflect on how and why to read the Greeks today.

The secondary literature on Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin’s 1953 debate on totalitarianism is in general agreement that these two thinkers offer fundamentally irreconcilable accounts of the phenomenon. This article adds to the literature on this debate by employing a broader temporal frame of analysis. I argue that, when viewed over the longer arc of their development, these thinkers converge in how they approach some of the moral questions associated with totalitarianism. This is especially evident in their reactions to resurgent questions of “German guilt” that arose in the early 1960s. Arendt’s “reality as such” and Voegelin’s “first reality” converge on what I call “moral reality.” Both ultimately treated totalitarianism as, in part, a moral catastrophe insofar as it entailed a loss of this sense of moral participation.

Judith Shklar’s negative brand of liberalism is sometimes thought to have little to say about the ethical character required of citizens in liberal democracies, beyond the injunction to avoid cruelty. In this article, however, we argue that Shklar’s negative liberalism prescribes four distinctively political virtues—rational empathy, a healthy apprehension of state power, self-restraining tolerance, and being a good loser—that, taken together, constitute an ethos of skeptical vigilance. We survey Shklar’s criticisms of republican and communitarian accounts of civic virtue to clarify her concerns about attempts by the liberal state to cultivate these virtues and analyze the case of passive injustice to highlight tensions between active citizenship and liberal values. We conclude with some reflections on how Shklar’s political theory attempts to persuade her readers of the importance of adopting and practicing an ethos of skeptical vigilance.

Contrary to the notion of collective self-rule, in modern democratic states the set of individuals that make the rules and the set of individuals to whom rules apply cannot be one and the same. Recognizing this “non-identity thesis” has important implications for democratic theory. Among them is the need to recognize that any democratic system will involve rule over others and that democratic procedures will not be sufficient for political legitimacy.

Many academics assert a link between the principles that ought to determine the selection of teaching material in higher education and the principles that ought to govern a just society. This article considers five models of this relationship: (1) Identification, in which good syllabus design is part of social justice; (2) Isomorphism, in which a good syllabus takes the same form as a just society; (3) Instrumentalism, in which a good syllabus is a means for achieving social justice; (4) Isolationism, which seeks to protect syllabus design from undue social influence; (5) Interdependence, in which the quality of a syllabus and the justice of a society depend on each other in a variety of complex ways. I conclude that Interdependence incorporates the most important insights of the other four models while avoiding their individual limitations.

Remapping Sovereignty examines how activist-thinkers from Indigenous societies in North America recast the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty over the course of the twentieth century. While political theorists have criticized sovereignty as the dominant paradigm of political authority, alternatives to sovereignty remain elusive. Recasting these debates, Temin argues that activists-intellectuals in the long Red Power movement of the twentieth century engaged in complex acts of contesting and remapping the logic of sovereignty. If logics of Westphalian sovereignty revolve around “the normative centrality and perceived necessity of the claim to final and ultimate authority over a bounded space” (6) then central to its institutional practice is a refusal of the webs of relationality and interdependence on the land and human and non-human others. Rather than upholding these sovereign logics, Indigenous claims to self-determination, Temin shows, are premised not the assertion of territorial control but on the cultivation of reciprocal relations of care for the earth. Creating alternatives to both the institutions of the sovereign-state and the very conceptual framework of sovereignty entails dismantling and repairing the structural hierarchies and conceptual frameworks that stem from the constitutive disavowal of these relationalities embedded in both the concept and practice of state sovereignty.

The encounter with the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led some prominent thinkers in East Asia to painfully grapple with the questions of constitutional government and democratic self-government by embracing the discourse of rights and the political systems of Western origin in a way suitable in the local Confucian context. However, the seminal Confucian constitutional discourse did not see its full fruition due to various, often tragic, historical events, including civil wars and national divisions. In the end, the rise of modern states in the region, liberal democratic or communist, made the idea of Confucian constitutionalism completely obsolete in the public discourse, reinforcing the popular belief propagated by (liberal or socialist) elites that Confucianism was the single greatest obstacle to modernizing East Asian states and societies.

The Darkened Light of Faith is a work in the history of black political thought that speaks to contemporary challenges. It provides intricate reconstructions of David Walker’s rhetorical methods in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World; the democratic perfectionism of Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, and Anna Julia Cooper; Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany’s debate about the meaning and implications of civic republicanism for oppressed peoples; Ida B. Wells’s and Billie Holiday’s use of journalism and music to reeducate American moral sense on lynching; and W. E. B. Du Bois’s use of art as propaganda to call readers to higher character. Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin make cameo appearances. Rogers provides not only riveting intellectual history but also rigorous argument about the faith-based character of democratic transformation.