This article examines whether Aquinas's political science is philosophy or theology, a question that arises from his understanding of happiness. If the supernatural vision of God constitutes perfect beatitude or the ultimate end, then how can an account of imperfect happiness—political virtue—be given without reference to it and hence without appeal to revealed theology? I argue that Aquinas provides a strictly philosophical account of imperfect happiness by showing that, among temporal goods, virtue most fully instantiates general attributes of beatitude such as self-sufficiency and continuity, even though it does not perfectly instantiate them. This way of demonstrating the superiority of virtue to other temporal goods requires no appeal to supernatural beatitude, and thus political science, which takes this imperfect happiness as its first principle, is philosophy.

Can and should judges refer to the natural law? I address these questions from the point of view of James Wilson, paying specific attention to a question the scholarship does not address: Why does Wilson believe judges can (and must), in certain instances, refer to natural law? I develop a new taxonomy of Wilson's conception of judgment that answers this question. Wilson's definition of judgment as including the moral sense and reason, and his division of reasoning into demonstrative, moral, and legal reasoning, indicate why he countenances judicial recourse to natural law in certain cases yet remains committed to popular sovereignty and judicial restraint. Wilson describes “judgments of nature” as intuitive judgments based on self-evident truths and articulates how judges might be called upon to make certain judgments based on a manifest repugnancy to the natural law. His judicial decisions confirm this commitment to natural law and judicial restraint.

This paper investigates the Confucian conception of political responsibility as a political virtue essential for an ordinary non-Confucian ruler's actualization of humane government by paying close attention to the early Confucian discourses of Heaven and disaster. After briefly discussing Confucius's seminal idea of responsibility, this paper shows how Mencius developed the political conception of responsibility, as a noncausal responsibility shared by the ruler and the virtuous ministers for a humane government, especially under the condition of natural disasters. It then discusses how the Han Confucian philosopher Dong Zhongshu reformulated the Mencian theory of responsibility and humane government under radically altered political circumstances by advancing a new version of Confucianism, central to which is the causal conception of political responsibility. This paper concludes by discussing how the evolution of Confucian political theory from Mencius to Dong Zhongshu should be understood with a view to the question of political legitimacy.

The article offers a reconstruction of Donoso's idea of political theology by analyzing his main work, the 1851 Essay on Catholicism, Socialism, and Liberalism. Commentators have often confined the role of Donoso to a footnote in the literature on Carl Schmitt. To better appreciate his original thought, this article analyzes his account of the secularization of theological ideas. Donoso understands modern politics as a confrontation between the philosophies of socialism, liberalism, and Catholicism, which diverge on questions about the nature of man, of evil, and of society. Modern worldviews are thus read through simplified Catholic dogma. Donoso's vision of politics as secularized theology develops in dialogue with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The Donoso-Proudhon-Schmitt rapport allows a consideration of political theology in terms of metaphor and literary device. Within this larger story, Donoso represents the moment when a traditionalist figure of thought slowly detaches itself from its historical foundations.

Impressed by Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of liberalism but alarmed by its consequences, Leo Strauss turned in the 1930s to the medieval Islamic philosophers (falāsifa). A review of a key cleavage in their political philosophy—reflected in the contrasting positions of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina—identifies the fundamental alternatives Strauss found available to him on the role of religion in politics, and on the necessity and efficacy of political activism more generally. It thus illuminates the trajectory of Strauss's thoughts on the relationship between reason and revelation: from an initial appreciation for the “golden mean” between Nietzsche and liberalism he believed he had found in the writings of al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, to a more apolitical “Avicennan” stance after his arrival in America. This last, it is suggested, was a contingent stance requiring reconsideration in light of new circumstances in American politics today.

Many Machiavelli scholars emphasize his discussion of fear and neglect the important role that hope plays in his thought. I analyze Machiavelli's frequent references to hope throughout his corpus to offer an explanation of what he means by ‘hope,” examine the relation between hope and fear, and identify the benefits, dangers, and limits of these two foundational and complementary passions. Greater attention to the role of hope in Machiavelli's thought can help us understand the significance of this passion for Machiavelli's political project, particularly his view of freedom.

The eighteenth century is often thought of as an important era for the secularization of British philosophy. One dimension of this secularization involves philosophers developing theories that, while not explicitly rejecting God, are less reliant on claims about God for their intelligibility and plausibility. A comparison of Adam Smith with his teacher, Francis Hutcheson, reveals an underappreciated facet of this process. Hutcheson portrayed God as an impartial legislator and used this metaphor to clarify contested moral rules in a way that would make little sense if God did not exist. In contrast, Smith's impartial spectator does not require belief in a God who is the author of the moral law in order to determine the correct interpretation of contested moral principles. By pursuing this alternative conception of impartiality, Smith developed a theory that was, in this respect, less reliant on religious premises than Hutcheson's had been.

John Stuart Mill's account of his education in Autobiography (1873) is typically sifted through three interrelated sets of polarities: nurture/nature; reason/emotion; authority/autonomy. First, the father tried to mold the son's development towards a specific ideal, curbing his spontaneous growth. Second, James relentlessly sharpened John Stuart's analytical prowess to the almost total neglect of his emotional needs. Third, the authoritarianism involved in the design and execution of James Mill's curriculum rendered John Stuart Mill incapable of autonomy. This article argues that the dualities of nurture/nature and reason/emotion are not unambiguous, though ever-present in the reception of the younger Mill's education. Widening our perspective in their examination opens the possibility of a different assessment of that famous education being no education for autonomy.

Carl Schmitt's constant denunciation of political compromises has received little attention. This omission is damaging in two ways. On the one hand, it misses a central aspect of Schmitt's political thought. On the other, it deprives those interested in discourses challenging the legitimacy of compromise in democracy of a valuable source. In this article, I systematize Schmitt's multifaceted grievances to compromises, especially as expressed in the 1920s and early 1930s. If the Weimar Constitution is fertile soil for observing and contesting compromises, the Third Reich constituted, for Schmitt, a paradigm reversal on this subject, as it managed to rid itself of pluralism and compromises. Schmitt has been portrayed as an authoritarian populist: the systematic reconstruction of his critique of compromise allows for a finer elaboration of the points of convergence and divergence between his democratic theory and populist views of democracy.

Referendums are usually conceptualized as expressing “constituent power” in obvious settings of constitutional foundation and rupture. However, I argue that if constituent power can be understood as “active” and relational within a political order—and not merely present in political foundings—then it is arguably present in “routine” referendums that have a function neither of foundation nor rupture, but rather of integration, and particularly in the sense of identity formation or consolidation.

Political theory scholarship tends to resist guilt, and especially collective guilt, as a framework for thinking about wrongs committed in the past or still enduring. The voices and experiences of those wronged, however, often imply that they are attributing guilt, and they are attributing it to a collectivity. I follow their lead and think through the potential of political guilt in motivating reparation and redress. Drawing on insights that Karl Jaspers fails to fully develop, I appropriate his notion of political guilt as situation, and read it as something that is contested among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Through contestation political guilt creates political spaces for reckoning with the past, and can be instrumental in making space for marginalized voices. I apply my framework to race relations in the contemporary United States, but guilt could be a catalyst to rethink postcolonial relations as well.

Liberal views of civil disobedience that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s can only be properly interpreted with recourse to the complicated history of the early civil rights movement's selective appropriation of the labor sit-downs of the 1930s. This essay addresses the messy but basically successful effort by civil rights sit-inners and the lawyers who defended them to circumvent the repressive state and legal response—especially the US Supreme Court ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation (1939)—that the 1930s sit-downers garnered. My reexamination of the sit-ins places influential liberal ideas about civil disobedience in a fresh light. In his influential theory of civil disobedience, John Rawls mirrored key features of the politically and legally savvy strategy of delinking the lunch counter sit-ins from the workplace sit-downs. The result was a somewhat restrictive view of civil disobedience that sidelined matters of economic justice.

Style is easy to dismiss but crucial to understand, and Goodman's explanation of why style matters politically is one of the reasons that I, as a specialist in Roman rhetoric and political thought, appreciate his book. The absence I see in Goodman's book haunts my own work too; I have only just begun seriously applying myself to the task of rethinking and redress.

In the years since the onset of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—and especially since the Ferguson uprising—scholars have tried to understand how the movement has affected public life in the United States. The scholarship overwhelmingly shows that periods of intense BLM protest have generated high levels of public awareness about systemic racism and increased support for criminal justice reform.1 Police homicides have declined in areas with BLM protests.2 And liberals exposed to BLM protests were more supportive of candidates who condemned systemic racism and supported criminal justice reform in the 2020 elections.3

From the Freedom Rides to the students’ lunch counter sit-ins, the campaigns of the civil rights movement are seen as the archetypes of civil disobedience. Pineda's wonderful and brilliant book draws on rich archival and historical research to peel the layers of idealization, romanticization, and ideology that have turned the classical phase of the civil rights movement (1954–1965) into both myth and protest template. This illuminating, insightful, and beautifully written book is a must-read for anyone interested in civil disobedience.

Between fifteen and twenty-five million Americans took to the streets in the summer of 2020 to march, mourn, occupy highways, clash with police, and be together in grief and rage. Municipal and state police forces responded with a national campaign of excessive force. Demonstrators were clubbed, tear gassed, sprayed with chemical agents, kettled and trampled, illegally detained, and mutilated by “less-than-lethal” munitions. Internal police reviews and municipal leaders blamed the violence on insufficient training but the scale and intensity of repression suggest a more profound democratic crisis surrounding the criminalization of dissent.

In the wake of the Trump presidency—with its endemic corruption, norm-breaking, and open subversion of the rule of law culminating in an attempted insurrection and ongoing false claims of election fraud—an overdue national conversation about the health of US democracy is taking place. For many, this was their first conscious experience of US democracy as imperiled or in crisis, and it raised pressing questions about whether there was cause to hope rather than despair, and of what the sources of such democratic faith might be. Black political thought has long grappled with the foundational deficits of US democracy; even as Black activists have worked tirelessly to bring about such alternative futures the persistence of white supremacy has made it difficult to hope in the possibility of radical transformation. Reckoning provides rigorous, complex answers to the question of how to practice democratic hope and refuse despair without trafficking in easy answers or simple prescriptions. According to Woodly, social movements: