In the Second Treatise, John Locke presents two stories about the development of political society: (1) the dramatic story of the state of nature and social contract; and (2) a more gradualist account of the evolution of political society “by an insensible change” out of the family group. The relation between these two accounts is analyzed in order to deal with familiar objections about the historical truth and internal consistency of contract theory. It is argued that Locke regarded story (2) as the historically accurate one, but that he believed historical events needed moral interpretation. Story (1) represents a moral framework or template to be used as a basis for understanding the implications — for political obligation and political legitimacy — of story (2). Even if the whole course of the evolution of political institutions out of prepolitical society cannot be seen as a single intentional or consensual process, still individual steps in that process can be analyzed and evaluated in contractualist terms. The task of political judgment is to infer the rights and obligations of politics from this representation of political development as an overlapping series of consensual events.

The current historiographical debate over the relation of John Locke's philosophy to the republican political tradition has ignored the medical orientation which Locke brought to his political writings. Recognizing that Locke wrote within a medical paradigm, which he derived from Calvinist religious thought, permits us to see that Locke was working within a variation of republicanism and not in opposition to it. Locke attempted to “cure” political corruption, much as Puritans had tried to cure their society of sin's corruption. The failure of Locke's therapeutic approach to political virtue has provided the basis for recent criticisms of liberalism and a challenge to the convention that Locke was an original and central figure in creating Anglo-American political culture.

An important feature of Rawls's theory of justice is the putative separation of justice and desert. It is shown that Rawls in fact presupposes a quite strong theory of desert which provides the key justification for the original position. It is further argued that the theory of desert has implications for distributive shares which contradict those of Rawlsian justice in general and the difference principle in particular. Finally, it is claimed that this contradiction seems to resist any kind of easy resolution since the theory of justice rests upon, hence requires, the theory of desert.

The treatment of the natural law in the Roman law is puzzling because the relationship between jus naturale and the two other forms of law, jus gentium and jus civile, is far from clear in the texts. Moreover, the jus naturale does not appear to have the dignity most readers expect it to have. This article attempts to sort out the relationships among the three types of jus by showing that the various classifications the jurists use are based on their perceptions of the complexities of nature as a source of right and on the attempt to work out a political embodiment of natural right.

This article explores an attitude which I call perfect constitutionalism. Perfect constitutionalists believe that, properly interpreted, the Constitution requires that our society conform to the best principles of human governance. This belief that the Constitution is nearly flawless not only underlies the so-called fundamental values strand of constitutional thought but also those strands of constitutional argument based on conceptions of the democratic process or the original intentions of the framers. Unfortunately, empirical and theoretical problems result when constitutional theory is reduced to political philosophy. In order to overcome these problems we need to essay a different interpretive approach, one which I call imperfect constitutionalism. Imperfect constitutionalism emphasizes the value of constitutions, even ones that might be improved in many ways.