John Adams was unique among the Founding Fathers in that he actually read and took seriously Machiavelli's ideas. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, Adams quoted extensively from Machiavelli and he openly acknowledged an intellectual debt to the Florentine statesman. Adams praised Machiavelli for having been “the first” to have “revived the ancient politics” and he insisted that the “world” was much indebted to Machiavelli for “the revival of reason in matters of government.” What could Adams have meant by these extraordinary statements? The following article examines the Machiavellian ideas and principles Adams incorporated into his political thought as well as those that he rejected. Drawing upon evidence found in an unpublished fragment, Part one argues that the political epistemology that Adams employed in the Defence can be traced to Machiavelli's new modes and orders. Part two presents Adams's critique of Machiavelli's constitutionalism.

Eric Voegelin's political theory, which is often understood as “conservative,” actually contains very radical elements. An examination of Voegelin's understanding of the genesis of modernity in more detail than hitherto has been attempted shows that four apparently different accounts of modernity's origins can be isolated in Voegelin's writings. An attempt to synthesize these accounts indicates potentially radical implications for both Christian theology and Western political institutions. Such a synthesis shows that the sources of modern consciousness are inherent in orthodox Christianity, which in turn implies a fundamental reconsideration of Christian revelation and its political impact.

The blame for the environmental disaster that threatens to overtake us unless something is done to avert it is often laid at the door of the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it. Typical of this trend is Lynn White's landmark essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), which traces the West's ruthless exploitation of nature to the biblical injunction that human beings are to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over all other living things. Ironically, White's indictment all but coincided with the triumph of an older theory the object of which was to demonstrate against the Enlightenment that, far from being hostile to modern science, the glory of our civilization and the instrument of its conquest of nature, the Christian tradition was the principal agent of its emergence. Christianity would thus be simultaneously and for the same reason responsible for what is best and what is worst in the modern world. The article challenges the premise that these two theories share, namely, that modern science is a child of premodern Christian thought. It begins with a restatement of what was once the commonly accepted view of our relationship to nonhuman nature and ends with a brief account of the essential limitations of modern natural science.

Tocqueville says that the superiority of American women is the chief cause of the power and prosperity of American democracy. That superiority is the result of an education that treats women as capable of freedom, but the use of that freedom is to maintain the bonds that restrict women to the household. The present article examines the role of the family and women in the new political science Tocqueville thought necessary for the defence of democratic liberty. It is argued that as the primary influence of democracy upon the family for Tocqueville has been to eliminate the authority of fathers who were the “arbiters of mores” and thereby the defenders of liberty in aristocracy, so democratic liberty depends for him above all upon the new role of women as the makers of mores. Through the agency of women, otherwise fragile religion constitutes an effective limit to the authority of the majority, but what makes it possible for religion to operate through women is their exclusion from the world of commerce, and what maintains this exclusion is the strict conjugal morality that women themselves defend in America. How far the role of women as guardians of democratic liberty might be justified is shown to depend for Tocqueville upon arguments for it that are other than those commonly accepted by American men.

Reprising an ancient strand of philosophical reasoning, contemporary environmental theorists often argue as if nature (the land, ecosystems) were a repository of value in itself, establishing guidelines for human conduct in moral and political matters. John Stuart Mill supposedly discredited such reasoning in his 1854 essay, “Nature.” But modern intrinsic-value-in-nature theories differ from those that Mill attacked, as a careful reading of Leopold's A Sand County Almanac reveals. Leopold, whose thought provides the inspiration for most of the intrinsic-value-in-nature theorizing within environmental philosophy today, tacitly rejects the modernist, physics-derived view of nature as a realm of timeless, abstract laws. He replaces it with a view of the land and its creatures as historically concrete, unique totalities that can almost be read as “texts,” and thus may inspire respect and love (rather than detached theorizing alone) on the part of the ecologically-aware person. The key virtue for Leopold is “perception,” a blend of training, hermeneutic skill, and identification with the natural world.

It is argued that natural law can be known without the aid of revelation, and so it seems to be a medium through which people of different faiths can live together and talk to each other. However, Leo Strauss argues that Aquinas's understanding of natural law cannot possibly provide such a medium because Thomas relies on Christian revelation to develop his account of natural law. To counter this claim, this article makes a distinction between the way Aquinas presents his natural law teaching to his readers in a discussion of revelation and the way he thinks human beings may come to know natural law independent of special revelation. This distinction leads to a consideration of the deepest issue dividing Strauss and Aquinas: their rival accounts of the relationship of philosophy to theology.

Many important scholars have seen significant similarities in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and Niccolo Machiavelli, but the only two references to Machiavelli in Hamilton's papers suggest deep misgivings about the kinds of politics we now call Machiavellian. This essay attempts to clarify Hamilton's ambiguous relation to the sage Florentine by focussing on the problem of waging war effectively and remaining free at the same time in the thought of both statesmen. Although Hamilton understood at least as well as Machiavelli the necessity of dynamic virtù in princes and civic virtue in free citizens, he sought to establish a new order of the ages, a republican empire, which would supply an effectual moral alternative to the genuine Machiavellian regimes of his day.

Rousseau's concept of human perfectibility and his suggestion that a group of anthropomorphic animals might actually be human beings in a primitive state of nature have led an increasing number of studies to cite his Discourse on Inequality for offering an early version of Darwinian evolution. I argue that a different picture emerges once we examine Rousseau's discussion against the backdrop of eighteenth-century debates on the viability of the chain of being and the possibility of multiple human species. The significance of his speculation has less to do with his special insights on human descent than with the political point to be made were it true. Rousseau uses orangs-outang like the pongo to construct a viable model for criticizing his contemporary Europe and to defend his claim that the kind of political inequalities associated with late European society do not issue from God or nature but are accidental events in the life of the species.

On the face of it, there would seem to be little evidence suggesting that the political science of Thomas Jefferson owed much, if anything, to the speculation of Niccolò Machiavelli. The Virginian appears to have mentioned the Florentine by name but once, and he did so in a manner conveying his disdain for the author of The Prince. And yet, as I try to show in this article, Jefferson's commitment to limited government, his advocacy of a politics of distrust, his eager embrace of a species of populism, his ultimate understanding of the executive power, and the intention guiding the comprehensive legislative program that he devised for Virginia make sense only when understood in terms of the new science of republican politics articulated by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy.

An unfortunate consequence of viewing Arendt's thought in terms of a Hellenic-Nietzschean continuum is to raise serious questions about the enduring significance of Arendt's work on totalitarianism and its opposite: political and personal freedom. What is missing from the dominant scholarship is an appreciation of Arendt's acknowledged debt to Tocqueville; there is considerable suspicion that their differences are more important than their similarities. But Arendt and Tocqueville agree that the central political problem of modernity is despotism. Parts one and two challenge the view that Tocqueville is only concerned with soft despotism, whereas Arendt addresses the issue of harsh despotism which she subsequently abandoned. This article also restores Arendt's appreciation for Tocqueville's call for a new science of politics to overcome the problem of modernity. Part three shows their reliance on the “art of associating together” to preserve freedom in an age dominated by isolated and lonely individuals.

Feminist critics of Locke perceive a conflict between his promise of political liberty and equality and women's individual and social circumstances. Many feminists point to an incongruence in Locke's thought between formal political rights and the substantive inequalities women experience in a variety of social relationships. Emphasizing Locke's liberal distinction between private and public, these feminists explore how women's actual personal, marital, familial and economic (i.e., private) positions mitigate against the possibility of political emancipation for women. Opposing this interpretation, this article will argue that Locke's feminist critics misread Locke and misinterpret his distinction between private and public. What some feminists represent as a dichotomy between public and private is actually for Locke a multitude of interacting spheres in which individuals live. An examination of these spheres will reveal a latent potential in Locke's philosophy for addressing women's particular circumstances.

Democracies do not fight one another. This is because they are self-organizing systems and therefore fundamentally distinct from other states. As systems, liberal democracies have more in common with science and the market than they do with undemocratic states. By contrast, undemocratic states are best conceived as instrumental organizations pursuing relatively well defined goals. Liberal democracies do not normally pursue particular goals, are rarely comprehensible as rational actors, have unusually open boundaries, are self-transforming, and handle greater complexity than instrumental organizations. These characteristics provide the foundation for their mutually pacific relationships. The U.S. president's partial insulation from these characteristics explains why the United States has sometimes undermined small quasi-democratic states. This analysis sheds light on how norms and institutions help maintain the democratic peace.

At a few places in his Philosophy of Right Hegel directly addresses the discussion with his famous predecessor Immanuel Kant. These places indicate very clearly the distinction between the two philosophical standpoints. This article focuses on Hegel's criticism of Kant's views on peace and international law. For two reasons however, it starts with Hegel's rejection of Kant's moral point of view. First, this criticism is presupposed in Hegel's rejection of Kant's view on politics. Second, at least a partial return to Kantian morality is implied in Hegel's statement that war, although not to be condemned categorically, must be limited both quantatively and qualitatively.

This article challenges the received view that Woodrow Wilson provided the intellectual foundation for the subsequent expansion of the executive power of the presidency, by examining how Wilson arrived at his later presidentially centered account of American politics in Constitutional Government. Its focus is a memo that Wilson wrote in December 1885 while preparing an essay on “The Modern Democratic State.” Wilson's objectives in using the executive were determined in large measure by a conception of modern democratic opinion leadership that he had worked out before he entered public life. He correctly sensed that executive power, with its decisionistic bias, posed a serious problem for constitutional self-government. By making it subserve opinion leadership, Wilson meant to remove executive action from the apex of modern constitutional government and thus subordinate executive power to deliberative politics.

Several recent commentaries on Hannah Arendt's political thought have suggested strong connections and affinities between Arendt and Nietzsche or between Arendt and various later Nietzschean, aestheticist, or postmodernist thinkers. But a close reading of Arendt's critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger suggests that an overemphasis on the more Nietzschean or aesthetic aspects of Arendt's work risks obscuring some vital distinctions Arendt makes or preserves concerning politics and aesthetics. More significantly, the Nietzschean or aestheticist interpretation of Arendt tends to conceal or distort Arendt's actual, highly original, and more promising response to various facets of the modern political condition.

When citizens elect leaders whose policies conflict with standing international agreements, which claim deserves more respect, the treaty or the will of the majority? International law and democratic theory both point to constitutionalism as a way to address this dilemma. An examination of the effects of the elections of John F. Kennedy in 1961 and Willy Brandt in 1969 on U.S.-F.R.G. alliance commitments shows that the dilemma is not resolvable in principle, but that constitutional democracies adopt a variety of practices including consultation, public diplomacy, and commitment reinterpretation to make the tension between the two principles manageable.

This article explores the theme of love and the political in the thought of Hannah Arendt by examining her attitude toward such kinds of love as eros, philia, agape, cupiditas, caritas, compassio, fraternitas. Arendt generally regards love as unpolitical because of its inherent inclination to exclude the outside world. But she has shown a sustained interest in the relationship between love and the political. Arendt's concern for love is dictated by her search for a new, public, and artificial vinculum—or bond. This public bond, what Arendt calls amor mundi, is basically grounded in the notion of political friendship. I argue that amor mundi would be of more relevance, if it included not only political friendship but an element of eros as the craving for the durable world as well as two strands of agape—love of forgiveness and an enlarged neighborly love.

This article examines three important texts in which Eric Voegelin discusses the Christian Faith. While it is true that one finds no personal confession of faith in Voegelin's works, one nevertheless finds there an extraordinary openess to the experiential truth expressed in Christian Symbols.

In a powerful series of texts, Hilary Putnam has criticized what he takes to be a prevalent scientistic conception of objectivity in modern philosophy. This article is concerned with two connected facets of this critique, upon which Putnam himself has laid increasing emphasis: the attempt to reconstruct conceptions of ethical and political value in the wake of his criticism of “metaphysical realist” notions of objectivity, and his affiliation with the tradition of pragmatist philosophy. Four principal manifestations of Putnam's concern with ethical and political value are examined: the internalist argument for moral objectivity; the criticism of instrumental reason; the account of a “moral image”; and the “reconsideration of Deweyan democracy.” It is argued that an interpretation of Dewey's moral and political philosophy provides an illuminating vantage point from to understand the shortcomings of Putnam's ethical and political writings.