In 330 BCE, before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens, the statesman Demosthenes delivered what would become his most famous court speech, On the Crown. Commentators have called the speech “tragic” owing to the litigant's unusual appropriation of tropes from Attic tragedy to make his case. I offer an alternative reading of Demosthenes's speech that rests upon an alternative approach to theorizing democratic judgment. I argue that the rhetorical force and political significance of Demosthenes's metaphors, linguistic expressions and ideas depend upon the institutional setting in which they were delivered. This is because within each institutional site, a specific political practice of judgment is taking place that structures the reception of and response to ideas and images. Demosthenes's speech is in fact “anti-tragic” and reflects the democratic practice for which it was created.

Building on studies by Thomas L. Pangle and Robert C. Bartlett, this article contends that Montesquieu's rhetorical moderation with respect to religion in The Spirit of the Laws serves a substantively radical project, that is, the gradual diminution of religious devotion through the spread of liberal-commercial civilization. Taking up the major passages of praise for religion in general and for Christianity in particular, I examine the strategy that allows Montesquieu to claim the mantle of moderation in spite of his radicalism on this crucial issue: allowing his prominently advertised positions to be undercut by his own historical observations and comparisons, and thus teaching by contradictions. I also argue that, notwithstanding his claim to be treating faith merely from a practical point of view, Montesquieu offers a theoretical challenge to revealed religion.

Gandhi famously shook the foundations of the British Empire and sparked the beginning of a new anti-imperial era. But his critique of empire does not quite fit the familiar script of twentieth-century anti-imperialism. Gandhi's positions ranged from sincere expressions of imperial loyalty to a condemnation of English civilization while endorsing its moral empire, to an unqualified disavowal of the Britsh Empire without necessarily claiming independence. Reconstructing the long arc of his (anti-)imperial thought, this article shows that the idea of empire operated in the early Gandhi's thought in two ways: as the authorizing source of the rights of Indians and as the addressee of political claims. This genealogy helps explain the complex trajectory of his two separate breaks from empire. The article ultimately suggests that the key to understanding the global resonance of Gandhi's ideas lies in his transformation of the imperial adversary into a universal addressee of action.

The denial of Locke's debt to Hobbes has long been characteristic of many scholars of Locke influenced by the Cambridge School. Peter Laslett was the first to argue for this view, and he did so in conscious opposition to Leo Strauss and his interpretation of Locke. The recent discovery by Felix Waldmann of a memoir that confirms Locke's deep interest in Hobbes as well as his prudent concealment of that interest has undermined Laslett's case against Strauss. Waldmann's discovery, moreover, comes in the wake of other historical work, by Jeffrey Collins and others, that has provided further grounds for abandoning the Cambridge view of Locke. These developments have yet to lead to a serious reengagement with Strauss's interpretation of Locke, but they should, because his controversial claim about Locke's debt to Hobbes has been vindicated.

In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians. Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previous History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The utilitarians, Stephen was confident, could serve as a kind of synecdoche for a whole age. Further, if the utilitarians did not grasp the whole truth, there was no doubt that their “creed” would make up part of the “definitive system” that would arrive in due time.