The “fall” of Lucrezia in Machiavelli's play La Mandragola is a puzzlement. She is presented as an intelligent and virtuous wife who by play's end not only agrees to commit adultery but murder as well. Any attempt to interpret the play must address the significance of Lucrezia and her fall. It is argued here, however, that the real deception is that Lucrezia does not undergo a conversion—she is of questionable character from the start. Upon examination, her similarity with the Goddess Fortuna reveals a deeper tale being told within the play. Machiavelh uses her to mock the Church, and St. Augustine in particular, and to deliver a frightening message that the free will is no match for the goddess.

While Plato's political dialogues give much attention to the relation of the legal and the divine, this subject receives scant notice in Aristotle's Politics. But this is not a sign that Aristotle neglects or dismisses the subject; it is in fact perfectly consistent with what the author understands to be Aristotle's view of the proper political relation of laws and gods. This view emerges indirectly, and only after reflection on the substance and manner of Aristotle's “umpiring” of a staged debate over the rule of the “best laws” versus that of the “best man” (Politics III). From the standpoint of the highest, Aristotle finds law to be both regime-derivative and somewhat prudence-impeding. At the same time, the “apolitical” character of the best man's rule necessitates the rule of law, and with it —for largely utilitarian reasons — Aristotle's public acquiescence in the apotheosis of the legal. But this teaching, and its basis, emerge fully only when the Politics' relative “silence” is interpreted in light of the open statements of a text much less palatable and thus much less accessible to statesmen and citizens (and even to political scientists): the Metaphysics. The Politics' obliqueness, argues the author, owes to the fact that Aristotle's final understanding of the relation of laws and gods cannot be fully disclosed publicly if it is to achieve its end of improving public life.

It is frequently suggested, today, that toleration and relativism are the same thing. This essay focuses on how John Locke dealt with this issue, that is, how he defended his principle of toleration against the charges of Jonas Proast that it would devolve into unbelief and moral relativism. In replying to Proast, Locke attempts to demonstrate that his principle of toleration will not become a sanction for unbelief and that while it extends to competing conceptions of salvation it does not extend to competing conceptions of the good. That is to say, Locke builds a fire wall between the two areas, the aim of which is to confine toleration to the realm of mere theology—it is this barrier, its basis and its extent and its durability, which I explore.

THE last decade has seen the proliferation of organizations and institutions which have broadened the scope of social communication between African peoples. The sophistication of a broad African perspective, which tended to be a monopoly of top-level leadership, is now permeating the lower strata of African society. Previously, consciousness of a common African destiny had to be induced by the elite, but in recent times the masses have become sensitive enough to events in the continent to cause anxiety to leaders whose performances have to be constantly compared. This nascent psychological unity is standardizing expectations throughout the continent. Thus events in one part of the continent tend to echo in another. Following the alleged plot against Houphouet-Boigny's regime, the Ivory Coast National Assembly passed a law on January 17, 1963, authorizing the government to impress into public service anyone whose activities it considered detrimental to national security. Anticipating a similar plot the legislature of the Upper Volta passed a law on January 29 creating a High Court of State to deal with offenses against the state committed by deputies, ministers, and other officials and also empowered the government to impress any person into forced labor in the national interest. Colonel David Thompson, the leader of the abortive coup d'état in Liberia, was reported to have argued that there was no reason why 5,000 Liberian soldiers could not capture a government if 250 Togolese soldiers succeeded. The recent crop of mutinies in East Africa centered around the common theme of Africanization and the improvement of the service conditions of the army.

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.

In this article, the venerable but still not entirely resolved issue of Hegel's relationship to liberalism is discussed. In contradistinction to recent communitarian accounts, the Kantian and Enlightenment idea of rational freedom in Hegel's political philosophy is shown to be the basis for Hegel's critique of traditional liberalism. While the Hegelian state incorporates most of the rights and freedoms ordinarily associated with liberalism, Hegel's rationale for these rights and freedoms is never the traditional liberal one. In conclusion, the relevance of Hegel's ideal of the rational state to our understanding of contemporary liberalism and its discontents is assessed.

In 1756 Adam Smith reviewed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality and claimed that it was indebted to the second volume of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. While much recent scholarship has taken this as the point of departure for studying Smith's engagement with Rousseau, the place of Mandeville in shaping that engagement has been largely neglected. This article brings Mandeville back into the picture and reassesses Smith's engagement with both thinkers in light of the connections he identified between their works. This involves reconstructing Mandeville's historicized account of the development of sociability and government, and showing how Rousseau developed this to articulate his critique of modern society. In evaluating Smith's response to this challenge, it is argued that he only partially succeeded in distancing his own analysis of commercial society from Mandeville's principles.

This article discusses the democratic side of Locke's political thought, which is generally not appreciated. How is it that Lockean constitutionalism is also “popular government,” institutions, that is, but institutions considerably informed by a democratic spirit? The answer involves Locke's three characteristic innovations in institution-planning: “civil” government, a supreme “legislative” power coupled with a responsible executive, and, inter alia, a vigilant “majority”—a party or movement of the people with authority to elect to government and to rebel against any non-popular government. While Locke does raise up a powerful executive, he also makes it dependent as a rule on a rather democratic legislative. What Locke wishes to induce over time is something like parliamentary government, with the executive vested in a cabinet and the whole more or less responsible to the people in his sense, especially to a majority.

To what extent are liberal democracies democratic? That question guides this reconsideration of the first and fundamental plan for liberal government, that of John Locke. I shall argue that Locke's plans are more democratic, and more radical too, than is generally believed. True, important parts of Locke's teaching correspond to undemocratic features with which we are now quite familiar. Liberal democracies have more or less capitalist economies in which wealth and big corporations are protected, they are moved not only by public opinion but also by liberal opinion-leaders of one stripe or another, they are governed not by the people in assembly but by constitutional governments.

It is now commonplace to acknowledge Alexis de Tocqueville's support for Algerian colonization. Less well understood, however, is why he also endorsed the French strategy of “total war” in the regency. How was Tocqueville's liberalism linked to the specific shape of violence in Algeria? By situating his Algerian writings in the intersecting intellectual contexts of the 1840s, this essay argues that Tocqueville endorsed total war in Africa because of his passion for glory. Far from an aristocratic anachronism, that passion was the product of contemporary scientific debates over voluntarism in France. It was also shaped by the lingering legacies of revolutionary republicanism and Bonapartism which defined glory in terms of national defense. By tethering modern liberty to this conception of glory, Tocqueville provided resources for rationalizing settlerism's exterminationist violence.

Scholars often link the emergence of welfarism and socialism to a loss of religious faith. Yet an examination of the beliefs of secularists who had lost their faith suggests that the loss of faith did not result in an emotional need that social reformism sometimes met. Nonetheless, an examination of welfarists and ethical socialists such as T. H. Green suggests that there was an intellectual or rational link between faith and social reformism. Here many Victorians and Edwardians responded to the dilemmas then besetting faith by adopting immanentist theologies, and this immanentism often sustained a moral idealism that inspired various social reformers.

American society over the past dozen years has undergone a general and continuing crisis. Almost everyone agrees on that point, but on the deeper meaning and significance of the crisis, on its origins and precise nature, there is massive disagreement. From all points of the political spectrum flow streams of mutually exclusive analyses and prescriptions.

Despite his statements that the fear of damnation is greater than the fear of violent death, scholars have generally overlooked Hobbes's vision of hell. Hobbes's reinterpretation of hell is meant to redirect peoples' anxiety about whether they will get into heaven or hell into anxiety about whether there is a hell and if so, what it will be like. He did not expect that citizens of his state would accept his theology or that they would become secularists or atheists. He hoped that they would be left with an indeterminate belief they would be averse to examining. This becomes clear when Hobbes's theology is seen in light of his epistemology and his complex rhetorical strategy. Hobbes's theology has been rejected, but there is an affinity between his hopes for indeterminate belief and the religious attitudes of many in the West.

This article demonstrates the radical character of Locke's attack on patriarchalism in the Two Treatises of Government, in part by showing that that attack implies the rejection of the natural and divine order to which patriarchalism appealed to justify itself. In this way, Locke's attack on patriarchalism, which prepared the way for his individualistic liberal politics, is also shown to be an important part of his solution to the political problem of religion. Special attention is given to Locke's disagreement with the Bible concerning the family and its place in political life.

This article examines the foreign policy of Prince Clemens Metternich of Austria, the chief architect of the Vienna Treaty of 1815, in the light of Enlightenment political thought. Metternich is commonly considered a reactionary and practitioner of callous balance-of-power diplomacy, and this article seeks to refute this conclusion. By examining Metternich's deeply held theoretical beliefs on the nature of the European state system, and above all his Kantian belief in progress and federalism, this essay concludes that Metternich pursued a reformist, and indeed idealistic, program in international politics which cannot be divorced from late Enlightenment philosophy. His Conference System, which was designed to regulate European politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, represented a novel experiment in European union which remains a pressing concern in the contemporary international system.

In this article, I sketch a reading of Rawls's work that ties together many of the features that distinguish it from the work of other authors commemorated in this issue. On this reading, the two world wars and the Holocaust pressed the question of whether a just liberal democracy is possible. Seeking to defend reasonable faith in that possibility, Rawls developed a theory of justice for an ideally just liberal democracy. He argued that such a society is a “real possibility” because, given reasonable psychological assumptions, the basic institutions of a just society would engender the moral support of its citizens. In doing so, Rawls challenged alternative accounts of moral motivation that enjoyed some currency in the analytic philosophy of the time. The interpretation of Rawls's work defended here therefore locates him in the philosophical as well as the political history of the twentieth century.

Adam Smith's adaptation of the classical tradition of moral philosophy constitutes an important attempt to shape the language of the virtues to the conditions of commercial society. An overlooked avenue to understanding his enterprise is his analysis of the practice of daily conversation, both as a medium of moral knowledge and as a source of the sorts of virtues possible in commercial society. In his attempt to answer the challenge of egoistic, “licentious” philosophers such as Bernard Mandeville—whose notion of “private vices, public benefits” typified the then-fashionable argument that modern society is held together not by virtues, but by the mutual satisfaction of interests—Smith drew on a combination of natural law theory and Scottish sociology to fashion a conception of moderate virtue that could harmonize prudence and benevolence, as well as the “masculine” virtues of self-command and the “feminine” virtues of humanity, in ways consonant with the character of daily interactions in a modern society.

John Rawls claims that his system of political liberalism represents the “completion and extension” of liberty of conscience, a grand solution to the problem of religious diversity that accompanied liberalism's emergence in the early modern world. I argue that such a claim cannot withstand historical scrutiny, that Rawlsian liberalism instead represents a retreat from the commitments that drove liberal tolerationists. Rawls's political liberalism forces individuals with non-mainstream comprehensive doctrines either to change the doctrine to fit Rawls's conditions of publicity; to manufacture a “public” justification for comprehensively derived political stances; to seek to change the parameters of public debate through, for example, civil disobedience; or to advance comprehensively derived views only so long as public reasons follow in due course. The first two of these solutions run counter to the historical development of liberty of conscience, and the third fails due to Rawls's pervasive emphasis on stability. The fourth misrepresents the nature of moral reasoning and comprehensive doctrines themselves. In conclusion, I argue that underlying Rawls's liberalism is a belief-action split that has historically suppressed religious liberty and, more troubling, a type of repression that undermines the very notion of comprehensive doctrines.

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.

In recent years the question of the feasibility and importance of participatory forms of government has been increasingly debated. Academicians, students, workers, poverty groups, party members, and environmental action groups have demanded greater participation in decision-making. They have concluded that civic involvement is the answer to what they characterize as the malaise of contemporary society: loss of governmental authority, feelings of powerlessness, overcentralization and bureaucratic manipulation, and inauthenticity.

This emphasis on participation is the dominant theme in Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. Arendt argues that a truly human life must have a public dimension to it. In many respects, though, her political thought in general, and her case for participation in particular, are distinctively different from others who also favor greater citizen involvement.