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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is an ugly and dispiriting thing to bear witness to the full measure of horror in the United States’ past and present of racial domination. A history running from genocide, colonization, and enslavement through lynch law and Jim Crow to contemporary mass incarceration and organized abandonment attests not only to the longevity of white supremacy, but its creative capacities for reorganization and institutional innovation. In view of this long national nightmare, what could sustain faith in the dream of a multiracial democracy that has not yet materialized—and may never come to be?

Rogers’s remarkable book manages to be both deep and broad, both provocative and persuasive; it attends with equal care to the burdens of historical reflection and of theoretical investigation. I’ve learned a great deal from the text, and expect to keep learning as I return to it over time. One admirable feature is the ease with which it explores particularism while resisting parochialism. Rogers examines a distinctively black tradition of political theorizing, a tradition that Eddie Glaude calls “Black democratic perfectionism”1 and that in Rogers’s account includes Baldwin, Du Bois, and Wells. Rogers neither gives the tradition the name that Glaude assigns it nor shows much interest in naming it at all, apart from a stray reference or two to “Black perfectionism.” This bears further study. He identifies the tradition as a distinct enterprise while noting that it was not hermetically sealed off from the wider discursive world. Perfectionists also contributed to other traditions that one might, in the right mood, call “mainstream,” and that include Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, and Sidney Hook. Rogers reminds readers that the perfectionists were in conversation with racial liberals and classical rhetoricians and theorists of democracy and assorted others, and that deepening these conversations is essential both to realizing whatever potential the mainstream views still have, and to understanding the content and value of the black perfectionist intervention.

Darkened Light is intended as a contribution to the history of political thought. Political philosophers and theorists have much to say about freedom, equality, domination, exclusion, and justice. Still, they often overlook the views of those who suffered under the weight of oppression. African American political thought is a rich archive in this regard—a philosophical vision of democracy forged in the crucible of struggle. Darkened Light is reconstructive in form, fueled by sensitivity to the experiential conditions of black people. This led me to two central questions. (1) How should we understand the political-philosophical thinking of African Americans who often found themselves dominated by the society they so diligently sought to transform? (2) What must their vision of democracy presuppose about the people they appealed to and the society they stood in?

Bryan Cheang and Daniel Ho’s polycentric or libertarian critique of moderate Confucian perfectionism begins from the reality of cultural complexity, which results from “non-linear forces of interaction between multiple parts” (5).1 Cultural complexity stems, through a long evolutionary process, from cultural diversity, which is compounded by cognitive diversity (6), militating against any attempt to centralize cultural knowledge or to maintain a political order grounded in a specific cultural ideal. Attributing both political liberalism (including Zhuoyao Li’s account of multivariate democracy modified from it) and moderate Confucian perfectionism to a “voice-based” approach, Cheang and Ho espouse “exit-based” political arrangements, where “individuals and groups not only pursue their values, but physically enact the cultural rules they favor” (15). For Cheang and Ho, what is most important is the widest range of individual choice under the condition of “hyperpluralism” (17), allowing individuals to choose competitive institutional arrangements, similar to a free market, defined by multiple decision-centers and “small social worlds” (20) that arise spontaneously. In their view, despite its moderately perfectionist nature, my idea of pragmatic Confucian democracy is a form of cultural perfectionism incompatible with the cultural and cognitive complexity of hyperculturalism. I raise two questions.

Sungmoon Kim’s criticism largely misunderstands liberal polycentrism and the cultural knowledge problem that motivates it. In his attempt to defend a pragmatic Confucian democracy, he doubles down on precisely the monocentric thinking that polycentrism transcends. He conflates liberal polycentrism with standard political liberalism. Kim seems to think that our position merely seeks a neutral state in which Confucianism is contained within small social worlds. While our framework does adhere to state neutrality, it is not merely a management strategy for pre-existing differences. It is grounded in cultural experimentation in the face of ongoing social change. We are not simply trying to carve out maximum space for plurality because people disagree. Rather, we recognize that we do not, and cannot, know how these differences will interact, revise, and evolve to produce new cultural pathways beyond what exists. Kim misses this point, and it is not a small one.

If not for the humanitarian devastation occasioning the citation, Hannah Arendt might have been entertained to learn that, on October 9, 2025, nearly 50 years after her death, she was invoked by no less an ecclesiastical authority than Pope Leo XIV. Commending the bravery of journalists covering “Gaza, Ukraine, and every other land bloodied by bombs,” the new Pontiff quoted a famous passage from the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”1 Pope Leo went on to preach, “We are not destined to live in a world where truth is no longer distinguishable from fiction,” exhorting his audience to “be vigilant in order to ensure that technology does not replace human beings, and that information and algorithms that govern it today are not in the hands of the few.”2 Nine months on, the mission is not looking particularly auspicious.