Ronald Dworkin's legal essays have provoked considerable commentary on the nature of rights, law, and judging. Curiously unexplored, however, is the central claim of his work: that it presents a coherent and liberal theory of law. This article examines that claim and finds that Dworkin is most successful in establishing two propositions: (1) in “hard cases” at law there are “right answers” and (2) “articulate consistency” is the appropriate method of discovering and expressing them. Neither of these propositions, however, has any essential relation to the individual rights that he admonishes us to take seriously. Moreover, the right which Dworkin takes most seriously, “equal concern and respect,” rests upon a foundation incompatible with his argument on behalf of “right answers.” Thus, Dworkin's theory of law is neither coherent nor liberal.

“MANY of the troubles of today reflect the distraction of minds to which a sane and balanced view of society has never been adequately presented. … No other writer … has the classical strength and sanity of Professor Green, who was never more thorough and at home than when dealing with those questions affecting citizenship in and for which, it may be said, he lived” (Bosanquet).

The central question guiding this essay is: what does Marx's socialism owe to classical antiquity? Underlying this question is the thesis that Marx's studies of classical Greece supply the angle of vision necessary to bring to light the hallmark of his conception of the socialist polity. The argument challenges a widespread interpretation of the connection between antiquity and socialism in Marx's work—that his socialist vision takes its bearings from the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between necessity and leisure. In Marx's view, the fundamental legacy of antiquity was the notion of freedom as masterlessness. The roots of this legacy are in the political experience of the democratic polis, not in Aristotle's reflections on the ideal household. The core of Marx's project, then, is not to open a realm of freedom beyond necessity, but rather to create spaces for democratic action within the realm of necessity itself, to ensure that work is free and compatible with leisured activities.

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), a self-styled “Christian Democrat” who dominated two generations of Dutch political history, has received passing mention rather than scholarly examination outside the Netherlands. Ernst Troeltsch, speaking of Kuyper's theological work, called him a key figure in the development of modern Calvinistic thought. And Michael Fogarty mentions Kuyper's influence in building “one of the most successful, and in many ways the most instructive political, economic and social movements to be found anywhere in the Christian world.” But, apart from such brief notes, there is little. We propose in this article to sketch Kuyper's career and summarize the ideas with which he attacked Liberalism.

How should institutions be designed so that the votes of the people reflect the general will and not the corporate will of the politically powerful? Rousseau's Social Contract provides us with two mutually exclusive solutions. The first is the more commonly discussed Spartan model where an encompassing public education system eliminates pluralism through social engineering. The second is the often overlooked Roman model of organizing the population into multiple overlapping electoral divisions and checking the power of various interest groups. Rousseau's discussion of Servius's electoral reforms anticipates Madison's arguments about controlling the effects of factions. By distinguishing these two institutional solutions, the article challenges the dominance of Sparta in readings of the Social Contract and supports the broader antiutopian turn in Rousseau scholarship.

Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the United States Supreme Court, has been criticized by some for failing to bring a woman's perspective to the Court, and by others for acting too much like the stereotypical woman who cannot make up her mind. Both criticisms overlook the possibility that O'Connor's impact as a female is derived from the fact that she is promulgating a very specific jurisprudence—that of the feminine. However, it is in employing this jurisprudence that she undermines the potential for both a feminist jurisprudence and for a cohesive conservative bloc on the Court.

Contemporary Augustinian scholarship is distinguished among other ways by its emphasis on Augustine's alleged contribution to the development of the modern notion of history. Except for a few sporadic references to a possible theology of history in the City of God, one finds little in the literature of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries to indicate that the content of that work might be of particular relevance to the problem at hand. The same is not true of the post-World War I period, which witnessed a sudden surge of interest in this hitherto neglected subject, to such an extent that there has scarcely been a major treatment of Augustine's thought written since that time which does not dwell on it at considerable length. Augustine, Langdon Gilkey has recently asserted, is “the father of the historical consciousness,” the first author to exhibit an awareness of the fundamentally historical character of human existence, the only early Christian writer to have brought the whole of history within the compass of a “purposive unity.”

Scholars studying classic political texts face an important decision: Should these texts be read as artifacts of history or as sources for still-valid insights about politics today? Competing historical and “presentist” approaches to political thought do not have a methodological dispute—that is, a disagreement about the most effective scholarly means to an agreed-upon end. They instead have an ethical dispute about the respective value of competing activities that aim at different purposes. This article examines six ethical arguments, drawn primarily from the work of Quentin Skinner, in favor of the historical approach. It concludes that while both intellectual history and presentist theory are ethically justifiable, the best justification of the former enterprise is that it can help us achieve the purposes of the latter.

Thomas More advocated religious freedom in Utopia to promote civic peace in Christendom and to help unify his fractious Catholic Church. In doing so, he set forth a plan for managing church-state relations that is a precursor to liberal approaches in this area. Most scholars locate the origins of modern religious freedom in Protestant theology and its first mature articulation in Locke's A Letter on Toleration. This reading of Utopia shows that modern religious freedom has Catholic, Renaissance roots. The essay discusses how scholars have treated Utopian religious freedom and considers the much vexed question of whether More actually favored this principle. It also presents the historical context for More's analysis, his rationale for religious freedom, its effects on Utopian religion and politics, and More's strategy for promoting religious reform in Europe.

Leading liberal theorist Ronald Dworkin builds a case against paternalism, rooted in his liberal ethical theory, especially the requirement of ethical integrity. But his case is successful only against less sophisticated forms of paternalism. His argument focuses too much on profound ethical convictions, failing to recognize the frequency with which people hold relatively unreflective convictions and the inevitable role of the law in helping to shape convictions. He makes concessions regarding paternalistic actions that come to be endorsed by the persons who are subject to them, but then tries to impose arbitrary limits on such endorsement. Finally, he rests his case against paternalism on the denial of transcendent standards, but is unable to avoid employing such standards himself. Building a case for certain forms of paternalism in a pluralistic liberal democracy is a difficult but necessary task, that can only proceed after removing fallacious objections like Dworkin's.

Plato's Lesser Hippias asks who is the better man in Homer, Achilles or Odysseus. Socrates argues on behalf of Odysseus and his argument ultimately leads him to the conclusion that “he who voluntarily goes wrong and does what is shameful and unjust, if indeed there is any such person, would be no one else than the good man.” This conclusion is repellant to Hippias and Socrates agrees with him while insisting nevertheless that the argument requires this conclusion. But Socrates also says he “vacillates,” sometimes holding this view, sometimes its opposite. Why does Socrates argue for the superiority of Odysseus? Why does he insist on a repellant conclusion? And why does he say he vacillates? The answer to these questions points to indispensable elements in Socrates′ political philosophy.

The U.S. Supreme Court, at various times, has changed the constitutional tests it claimed to use in order to settle free exercise of religion disputes. These changes in official doctrine and the manner in which many cases have been decided have left the Supreme Court open to much criticism from legal scholars. This study differs substantially from previous work in this area. It uses a fact-attitudinal model to analyze the cases from the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts. Its findings indicate that these decisions are, generally, explainable and predictable.

The relationship between Kant and Rawls is apparently an obvious one; Rawls himself acknowledges the Kantian foundations of his approach to questions of justice and political right, and identifies the precise points at which his theory departs from that of Kant. This essay attempts to show that when one examines those points of departure carefully, they turn out to point not merely away from Kant, but directly and inexorably toward the account of political right given by Rousseau in The Social Contract. The essay argues that it is impossible to fully understand Rawls' theoretical project until one sees the (unstable) position it occupies between the Kantian and Rousseauian accounts of political right. Moreover, it argues that the theoretical project undertaken by Rawls, that of revising the Kantian conception of autonomy in an attempt to show how it could be coherently “expressed” politically, was actually undertaken and “completed” by Rousseau — though with ironic, and unsettling, results.

In the past decade American political science has experienced considerable internal conflict and turmoil. To an extent, these disturbances were unexpected for in the early 1960's the “epitaph” for a “successful” behavioral movement had been written and the “credo” of behavioralism presented. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 1960's a “new revolution in political science” was under way, a revolution “directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy.” Behavioral political science was challenged on many grounds, but of central importance were these

This article investigates an oft-alleged kinship between the political thought of Machiavelli and Thucydides concerning “virtue.” In the background is the current debate over whether or not Machiavelli initiates “modern” thought with (among other things) a radically new teaching on “virtue.” Machiavellian virtù is reprised; Thucydidean attributions of aretē, catalogued; observations proffered. Then Thucydides' assessment of the career of Nicias is discussed; this, to support the contention that when read in their proper contexts, contexts carefully crafted by Thucydides, Thucydidean attributions of aretē do not support the apparent kinship between Thucydides and Machiavelli: Thucydides is not a “Machiavellian.”

According to Publius (the nom de plume of The Federalist's authors), a primary task of the Convention was to create an executive of sufficient energy and independence. As he says in Federalist, No. 70: “There is an idea, which is not without its advocates, that a vigorous executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. The enlightened well-wishers to this species of government must at least hope that the supposition is destitute of foundation.” The president must be able to administer the government and defend the nation but he must do so without destroying or being destroyed by constitutional limitations or the political independence of Congress.

Ever since Leo Strauss and C. B. Macpherson, at almost the same moment, challenged the received view of Locke with their novel interpretations of his political philosophy, the question of how Locke wrote, and therefore of how he is to be read, has been prominent in most discussions of Locke. Strauss brought the issue to the fore by arguing the thesis that Locke engaged in “esoteric writing,” that is, that he intentionally said things he did not believe and sometimes withheld things he did, for the purpose of securing both his own safety and the greater likelihood of success of his philosophic project. Needless to say for so bold a claim, the Strauss thesis has not gone unopposed. Sharp issue has been taken both with the claim about Locke's esotericism and more substantively with the philosophic position Strauss attributes to Locke. It is clear that the two issues are intimately connected: the kind of “Locke” one finds depends to a very great extent on the kind of hermeneutical principles one adopts in approaching his work.

HEGEL'S philosophy of freedom and Comte's philosophy of progress have one trait in common, in spite of the basic differences in their starting points. Although Hegel's panlogistic dialectics and Comte's sociological scientism present various levels and antagonistic tendencies of philosophical thought, they share the same indifference concerning the philosophical and structural problems of human existence. While Kant was aware that the basic questions of philosophy referred to the fundamental elements of human life, these new synthetical systems of the historicity of the race did not care about the character and the nature of the human being. They helped to bring to the fore that tendency in thought which was described as the autonomous movement of a universal principle of determination, spiritual or naturalistic, in the process and as the meaning of history. In these philosophical and sociological systems man is only the tool and the actor (the Roman persona in the literal sense) in the self-realization of a universal principle, inherent in the process of society. Thus, human action and attitudes are predetermined by the principles that represent die pseudo-religious meaning of the historical development. So far as this is true, human personality, as centered around the actuality of freedom, spontaneity, responsibility, no longer exists. The hybris of Hegel and Comte to make die dynamic institutions “concrete universals” and to suppress the concreteness of individuals is one symptom of the human situation in the modern world. Slowly developing since the sixteenth century, this situation is completely realized in these philosophical systems that proclaim the immanence of life, the reality of a universal principle of determination and the weakness and frailty of the human personality. This trend of thinking got supremacy in philosophical and scientific modes of investigation, in particular in the powerful stratification of positivist and of empiricist methods in the social sciences. The discovery of Historicism and of Sociologism is the logical result of this basic position. It expresses correctly the stage of consciousness in which man realizes the demonry of the world of institutions which, although his very own achievement, is becoming emancipated from man and developing autonomously like the forces of nature.