The purpose of this article is to show how Cicero construct his argument in defense of the tribunatum plebis when thinking about the participatory justice and the constitution of the City in De Legibus . We shall see the argument in a broader context whose scope was to defend the autonomy of the Senate face of the threats of dictatorship that was hanging over the Roman Republic.

Political theorists have recently sought to replace the liberal, contractual theory of the firm with a political view that models the authority relation of employee to firm, and its appropriate regulation, on that of subject to state. This view is liable to serious difficulties, however, given existing discontinuities between corporate and civil authority as to their coerciveness, entry and exit conditions, scope, legal standing, and efficiency constraints. I here inspect these, and argue that, albeit in some cases significant, such discontinuities (...) fail to undermine the firm/state analogy, either because they are not significant enough to do so or because the particular trait on which they hinge is not decisive for how authority, in the state and in the firm, should be regulated to be legitimate. A pro tanto requirement exists, I thus argue, that corporate authority be held to regulatory norms comparable to those legitimate states abide by, including civil liberties, rule-of-law constraints, and accountability to subjects. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ _Red River_ and John Ford’s _The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance_ and _The Searchers._ Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore (...) classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected. Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy. (shrink)

Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, A Virtue for Courageous Minds examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. Aurelian Craiutu begins with classical thinkers who extolled the (...) virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. He then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. Craiutu looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Madame de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. He traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and he explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. Craiutu demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and he challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, A Virtue for Courageous Minds reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Law’s Virtue: Fostering Autonomy and Solidarity in American Society by Cathleen KavenyEric E. SchnitgerLaw’s Virtue: Fostering Autonomy and Solidarity in American Society By Cathleen Kaveny WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012. 304 PP. $29.95In Law’s Virtue, Cathleen Kaveny calls those in Western liberal countries to rethink their fundamental framework of ethics and law through the guiding principles of autonomy and solidarity, understood through the Catholic (...) context of Thomistic virtue. The law operates not as the fence of individual isolation as it does in Enlightenment rights theory, whereby liberty is preserved through negative restraint, but as the teacher of a limited form of the virtues of prudence and justice (52). The law teaches this thin form of prudence through autonomy, which Kaveny takes from Joseph Raz as “the capacity to be the ‘part-author’ of one’s own life” (53). Solidarity, pulling from Pope John Paul II, correlates to a learned justice, in that it “attend[s] to the unseen members” of the community (54). It recognizes that the good of the community and the good of individual members are inexorably intertwined.The opening epigram of the preface, which sets the tone for the whole work, is a quotation from Isidore of Seville found in Aquinas: “Law shall be virtuous, just, possible to nature, according to the custom of the country, suitable to place and time, necessary, useful; clearly expressed, lest by its obscurity it lead to misunderstanding; framed for no private benefit, but for the common good” (xi). Kaveny argues that the phrases “possible to nature” and “custom of the country” need more attention in pluralist, democratic societies, because law is morally formed by its constituent community and there are deep disagreements within those communities. This gives a direction for how Catholics, and all citizens, should attempt to influence laws in these democracies. Because the law is a form of consensus over time, it should use severe sanctions such as criminal law only to reinforce the consensus that it represents. Tort and tax law are less severe tools that can encourage the moral direction of society, which, when used well, maintain the consensus of the law but still allow it to be a moral teacher.Kaveny’s practical thinking in this text does have some seeds of radical change. When she moves to the practicalities of life issues in the law—such as abortion, euthanasia, and genetics—she argues that the “entire fabric of the Anglo-American legal system” needs to add the concept of the “vulnerable” person to the “reasonable person” (79). In addition, her reframing of life issues contends that the Catholic view of issues like abortion is too different from [End Page 212] the “custom of the country” to make a change to the virtues and practices of other citizens. Instead, attention to the support necessary for families and social difficulties of economic poverty represents a way of using the law as a moral teacher while recognizing its limits (89, 156, 209). The book concludes with an incisive look at voting, in which Kaveny argues that the idea of issues-based voting is wrongheaded; instead, she urges voters to consider that they are voting for an individual who will take a broad moral stance and make a broad set of decisions (197 ff.).The quality of Kaveny’s clear thinking and moral consistency makes this book a pleasure to read—even for those who may disagree about the nature of the law or the virtues that Christians should bring to political, legislative, and judicial systems. This text, from its depth of legal and theological commitments, sets a high bar for further dialogue.Eric E. SchnitgerFuller Theological SeminaryCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Tibor Machan's latest book The Virtue of Liberty represents the newest instance of an increasing trend toward naturalist defenses of libertarianism. This is a different sort of defense than the traditional natural-rights conception, such as might be found in Locke, or the various consequentialist approaches, such as might be found in Mill or Hayek. The sort of naturalist defense that has been becoming increasingly prominent is based on a neo-Aristotelian conception of human flourishing, and on the necessity of (...) political freedom to its realization. Actually, Machan has been toiling in these vineyards since the 1970s, and although this approach to defending classical liberalism is still a minority view in the academy, recent years have seen great growth in this area Human flourishing, the argument goes, depends on the use of particular human virtues in the development of self-directed behavior. Practical reason is seen as a necessary condition of human well-being. If the application of reason to self-directed behavior is the crucial element in human flourishing, then humans need to be free to develop and pursue their own ends, at least to the extent that this pursuit does not infringe on others' ability to do the same. Rights are then natural rights in the sense that they follow from the nature of human being. This differs from the Lockean tradition of deriving rights from God's laws, although the rights derived are similar in scope, namely, they are conceived as negative rights only, or freedoms. (shrink)

1Preface: Malthus the Utilitarian vs. Malthus the Christian moral thinker. The chapter aims at reconstructing the deadlocks of Malthus scholarship concerning his relationship to utilitarianism. It argues that Bonar created out of nothing the myth of Malthus’s ‘Utilitarianism’, which carried, in turn, a pseudo-problem concerning Malthus’s lack of consistency with his own alleged Utilitarianism; besides it argues that such misinterpretation was hard to die and still persists in Hollander’s reading of Malthus’s work. ● -/- 2 Eighteenth-century Anglican ethics. The chapter (...) gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown worked out a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number of possible sets of laws on the basis of a maximizing criterion, happiness for his creatures. ● -/- 3 Malthus’s meta-ethics. The chapter reconstructs the two ethical chapters of the second Essay. It argues that Malthus’s ethics is not dependent on Paley’s, but is derived from Cumberland, Butler, Gay, Brown. Besides, it argues that theodicy takes a new place in the 1803 Essays and ethics becomes a key to theodicy. The new solution is that, once it has been proved that passions can be mastered and that a world where passions are under control would be a comparatively happy place, a society where moral restraint prevailed would make the middling ranks more numerous, reduce dependence, and preserve liberty. ● -/- 4 Malthus’s early normative ethics: a morality of freedom. The chapter reconstructs young Malthus’s views on the foundations of ethics, proving his adhesion to voluntarist consequentialism. Then it reconstructs his treatment of political issues, whence a clear stance emerges in favour of traditional Whig concerns, such as political freedom, personal independence and dignity. Finally, it gives a fresh look at the theological argument in the two well-known final chapters, locating it in the context of consequentialism, voluntarism, and quasi-Leibnizian theodicy. ● -/- 5 Malthus’s intermediate normative ethics: a morality of prudence. Malthus’s normative ethics focuses on two main ‘natural’ virtues, benevolence and chastity, and three artificial virtues. These include love for equality and love for liberty. A special place is granted to another virtue, prudence, which is the link between natural and artificial virtues. This special virtue also provides an invisible link between the private and the public domains, in that it contributes to combine self-love with general happiness. This is granted by the unintended results mechanism, or “the happiness of the whole is to be the result of the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. No cooperation is required”. ● -/- 6 Malthus’s mature normative ethics: a morality of humanity. The chapter describes reactions by Evangelicals, such as Gisborne, Sumner, and Chalmers, to Malthus’s theory and Malthus’s transformation of his own system in order to pave objections. This amounts to incorporating The Evangelicals’ ideas into his own system. The friendly controversy with his Evangelical fellow-travellers yielded several important changes in 1806, 1817, and 1826 editions of the second Essay in the formulation of Malthusian ethics, in the adoption of moral improvement instead of happiness as the variable to be maximised, in the adoption of generalized education as the main weapon in the war on poverty. ● -/- 7 Malthus’s applied ethics. The chapter reconstructs Malthus’s treatment of a few issues in ‘applied ethics’, sexual morality, public morality, poverty, and besides, war and slavery. On the first issue, he argues the duty to marry only at a time when one is ready to carry the burden of six children as a moral duty imposed by prudence and rejects birth control because of its alleged effect of encouraging ‘indolence’. On the second issue, he defends a peculiar kind of Whiggism as anti-Machiavellian politics centred on rights, equality, and dignity. On the third issue, his final approach is a kind of Institutional approach to poverty, making room for generalized basic education, free markets for labour and allowing for a subsidiary role for private beneficence. The goal to be aimed at is bringing about circumstances which tend to elevate the character of the lower classes of society and offer them a chance of being respectable, virtuous and happy. ● -/- 8 Conclusions: strengthening the theological foundation. Malthus’s criteria for policy appraisal were not utilitarian ones. His normative ethics and his politics were sharply different from Bentham’s. Utility is just one element in Malthus’s ethics, going with laws of nature and rights, and ironically, far from being a Benthamite insertion, is the most markedly theological element in Malthus’s system of ideas. ● -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics by Paul SagarJames A. HarrisPaul Sagar. Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 229. Hardback, $37.00.Paul Sagar's invigorating book is a reconsideration of Adam Smith in the sense that it challenges much that is received wisdom in current scholarship. First (...) and foremost, it rejects the idea that Smith was preeminently a moral philosopher concerned with the threat to civic virtue posed by commercial society, and yet intent on giving commercial society a moral vindication nevertheless. Sagar—rightly, in my view—wants us to recognize Smith as having been a political thinker. Too much work on Smith still assumes that there is not much to say [End Page 323] about his political thought because he regarded all but the most minimal government as an obstacle to the proper functioning of markets. Smith is supposed to be a "classical liberal" bent on preserving as much natural liberty as possible in the face of government's relentless overextension of its powers of regulation. In Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Donald Winch rejected that approach to Smith in favor of a portrait of the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations as an eighteenth-century thinker with an eighteenth-century thinker's concerns. Sagar's project is quite different. This is a book on Smith's political thought that does not once deploy the term 'Whig.' Sagar's Smith does not wholly float free of his historical situation—the questions he addresses are those posed by the end of feudalism and the advent of modernity—but situating him in the particular circumstances of Britain in the age of revolutions is not Sagar's concern. As Sagar sees it, the fundamental issues addressed by Smith's political thought concern the distinctive form taken by commercial society in the modern era. Smith, according to Sagar, held that all advanced societies are commercial societies. Commercial society as such needed no vindication. The question, rather, was what kind of commercial society a modern state wanted to be. That was a political question insofar as it was a question about the kind of freedom that mattered and about the kind of institutions needed to make that freedom a reality.Defined in maximally general terms, freedom for Smith was the absence of domination, where domination is understood as a lack of security in respect of one's physical safety and possessions. The condition of the poor and powerless had always been one of subjection to the will of the rich and powerful. What changed that, according to Smith, was implementation of the rule of law. This is in itself not a new reading of Smith, but what distinguishes Sagar's version of it is the care with which he examines both the place of the rule of law in Smith's historical account of the emergence of liberty in modern Europe and the precise nature of the connection between the rule of law and freedom. First, on Sagar's view, there needed to be a comprehensive picture of domination and slavery, which had been the normal condition of almost everyone for almost all of human history. Then there needed to be an explanation of how it was that, at one particular historical moment, domination was slowly but surely challenged by the emergence of law and law courts considered as independent of political power. In England, this was the story of the common law and of judges who held office for life, rather than at the pleasure of traditional possessors of power. It was the story of security in property, of the backing of property by law, and it was a largely urban story, of burghers who managed to enlist monarchs on their side in the battle against the barons. It was, in other words, in large part a medieval story, and one consequence is that there was more to say about the rise of liberty in the modern age than that it was caused inadvertently by... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His ReadersSarah MortimerI.Few issues were more hotly contested by early modern theologians than the extent of human liberty and its implications for both religion and society. In the Protestant world, the sixteenth century saw increasingly strident statements of mankind's bondage to sin and the importance of God's eternal decree of predestination, but the concept (...) of human moral responsibility still had its defenders. One influential proponent of human liberty was Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), the Italian scholar known most commonly today for his denial of the trinity. Yet the central theme of his theology was his insistence that Christian virtues must be carried out voluntarily; it was from this principle that his more heterodox ideas flowed. He made a sharp distinction between natural and voluntary action, and argued that the practice of Christianity must be an act of human will, not one to which men were drawn by nature. Separating Christianity from the natural order, Socinus argued that eternal life awaited those who chose to follow the law of Christ rather than the natural law. His argument challenged the Protestant commitment to the unity of natural and divine law and it opened up conceptual space for voluntary action outside the natural law. In this article, I shall sketch the Socinian position on human liberty and Christianity, and suggest how and why the Italian's ideas were developed by Protestants in the early seventeenth century. His readers included the eminent Dutch scholar Hugo [End Page 191] Grotius (1583–1645), and the exchange between Grotius and the Socinians reveals the concern on both sides to explain the relationship between human liberty, Christianity, and natural law.Socinus' life, like his theology, began within the reform movement in Italy and ended among the marginalised anti-trinitarians in Poland. Born of a long line of Italian jurists, he shared both his family's legal interests and their critical approach to the Catholic Church. In his youth he had been a courtier in Florence but his increasingly critical attitude towards Catholicism—and the death of his patron Grand-Duke Cosimo I—resulted in his departure from Italy in 1574. After a period in Basel he found a home among the Polish Anabaptists at Rakow, a young and precarious community which he helped to sustain through his advice and through the tracts which he penned on their behalf.1 During these years, he was also able to develop his own interpretation of Christianity, and to explain it in numerous works issuing from the community's press. Although his ideas generated a lively debate from the start, both in Poland and Germany, it was only after his death that they began to be absorbed into the mainstream of European intellectual discussions. Socinus' theological ideas had their attractions for some Protestant readers, but they became entangled with more political questions and their implications for civil life began to cause serious alarm. For this reason my focus will be upon the responses of Dutch and German readers, particularly Hugo Grotius and Johan Crell (1590–1633), both of whom addressed the civil as well as the theological aspects of Socinus' legacy. First, however, I shall draw out the salient points from Socinus' rich and complex theology, paying particular attention to his understanding of human liberty. Unlike his orthodox Protestant contemporaries, Socinus believed that liberty was the precondition for virtue.Socinus shared with the broader Christian humanist tradition the belief that Christ demanded works as well as faith from his followers. Christians must follow the pattern of ethical living laid down by their master; like Erasmus before him, and like the Italian exiles he met in Basel, Socinus saw Christianity as a religion of action.2 For this reason, he was determined to protect the liberty and capacity of each individual to act virtuously, and therefore to defend what he understood as human free will. It was, he felt, [End Page 192] a pressing task, for these qualities were being undermined by his contemporaries and particularly by those on the Protestant side. Most Protestants followed Luther's belief, expressed most forcefully in De Servo Arbitrio (1525... (shrink)

Is Rousseau an advocate of natural law or not? The purpose of Rehm’s paper is to suggest a positive answer to this controversially discussed question. On the one hand, Rousseau presents a critical history of traditional natural law theory which in his view is based on flawed suppositions: not upon natural, but on artificial qualities of man, and even rationality and sociability are counted among the latter. On the other hand he presents the self-confident manifesto for a fresh start in (...) natural law theory, founded on what to Rousseau’s mind is the true idea of human nature. The paper intends to show that the only natural qualities which can be seen as anthropological constants are those that keep man flexible, namely perfectibility and freedom of will. It is argued that these are exactly the qualities which according to Rousseau serve as the standard of natural law for the system of politics and its laws: Only a state based upon the free consent of individuals can do justice to man’s perfectibility and freedom of will. Rehm stresses that because of perfectibility and freedom of will, this self-commitment has to be revisable, which is why the republic of the “Social Contract” should not have a constitution, or any law that the citizens cannot alter. It is demonstrated that in Rousseau’s view, this republic is the enabling condition of natural liberty. -/- . (shrink)

Virtue has been rediscovered in the United States as a subject of public debate and of philosophical inquiry. Politicians from both parties, leading intellectuals, and concerned citizens from diverse backgrounds are addressing questions about the content of our character. William Bennett's moral guide for children, A Book of Virtues, was a national bestseller. Yet many continue to associate virtue with a prudish, Victorian morality or with crude attempts by government to legislate morals. Peter Berkowitz clarifies the fundamental issues, (...) arguing that a certain ambivalence toward virtue reflects the liberal spirit at its best. Drawing on recent scholarship as well as classical political philosophy, he makes his case with penetrating analyses of four central figures in the making of modern liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill.These thinkers are usually understood to have neglected or disparaged virtue. Yet Berkowitz shows that they all believed that government resting on the fundamental premise of liberalism--the natural freedom and equality of all human beings--could not work unless citizens and officeholders possess particular qualities of mind and character. These virtues, which include reflective judgment, sympathetic imagination, self-restraint, the ability to cooperate, and toleration do not arise spontaneously but must be cultivated. Berkowitz explores the various strategies the thinkers employ as they seek to give virtue its due while respecting individual liberty. Liberals, he argues, must combine energy and forbearance, finding public and private ways to support such nongovernmental institutions as the family and voluntary associations. For these institutions, the liberal tradition powerfully suggests, play an indispensable role not only in forming the virtues on which liberal democracy depends but in overcoming the vices that it tends to engender.Clearly written and vigorously argued, this is a provocative work of political theory that speaks directly to complex issues at the heart of contemporary philosophy and public discussion.New Forum Books makes available to general readers outstanding, original, interdisciplinary scholarship with a special focus on the juncture of culture, law, and politics. New Forum Books is guided by the conviction that law and politics not only reflect culture, but help to shape it. Authors include leading political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, historians, and economists writing for nonspecialist readers and scholars across a range of fields. Looking at questions such as political equality, the concept of rights, the problem of virtue in liberal politics, crime and punishment, population, poverty, economic development, and the international legal and political order, New Forum Books seeks to explain--not explain away--the difficult issues we face today. (shrink)

As its title suggests, this work provides a wide-ranging discussion and interpretation of David Hume’s political philosophy. McArthur’s main arguments are threefold. First, the watershed between civilized and barbarous societies for Hume lies in the establishment of the rule of law. According to the author, what Hume called a “civilized monarchy,” though falling short of the ideal republic, can be regarded as a civilized form of government. This is because Hume believed that, with the exception of the monarch him- (...) or herself, people could be governed by the rule of law in such a political system. Second, McArthur coins the term ‘precautionary conservatism’ to define Hume’s political standpoint. This is an attempt to bridge the division between those commentators who define the philosopher as liberal, on one hand, and those who style him a conservative, on the other. The author notes that Hume regarded liberty as a universal ideal and espoused a doctrine of mankind’s natural rights, an element of Hume’s thought that has often been underplayed in conservative interpretations. Finally, McArthur not only pays due attention to the significance of commerce for Hume as a driving force of civilization; he also makes it clear that Hume’s support for luxury is backed up by his keen awareness of the importance of constitution in preserving manners. Unlike what. (shrink)

In this article, I combine political philosophy and film to examine the problematic of the ‘mystical’ foundation of authority and democracy as represented in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Ford’s filmic vision is interpretable as a parable of the passage from the state of nature to the modern republic and the deconstruction of American democratic progressivism. To analyse it, I proceed in two steps: first, I defend a middle-way critical Enlightenment perspective between the democratic-progressivist and the (...) deconstructive approach to the question of foundations. Second, in dialogue with this critical Enlightenment perspective, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision of the foundation remains ambivalent, given that its deconstruction of the mythology of American democratic progressivism is premised on the nostalgic mythologizing of the pre-democratic age. Moreover, I take issue with Robert Pippin’s interpretation of the movie as a cautionary tale against Enlightenment rationalism, and which poses at its center the key psychological role of myths in politics (2011). In contrast, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision cautions against decoupling the socio-political and personal life from the vital connection to truth and acting upon truth. From this standpoint, a “politics of truth” is, against Pippin’s interpretation of Ford’s vision, compatible with taking into account the constitutive role of narratives in building political legitimacy and authority. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 141-160 [Access article in PDF] The Politics of Character in John Milton's Divorce Tracts David Hawkes nunquam privatum esse sapientum --Cicero I. There has recently been a great deal of debate over the relative influence on Milton's politics of two discordant revolutionary ideologies: classical republicanism and radical Protestant theology. 1 In the mid-seventeenth century the search for intellectual precedents (...) and rationalizations of the English revolution brought these two traditions into an uneasy alliance, and Milton, like many other revolutionary apologists, drew on both of them. Of course the two schools of thought are not necessarily incompatible. J. G. A. Pocock notes one point of connection between them: The context in which men attain their final end--or recover their prima forma, though this concept might not have been antinomian enough for the radical saints of the New Model--is that of apocalypse; the "end" of Aristotelian teleology is still united with the eschatological "end" of prophetic time. 2The Aristotelian "end" of man is the good, defined as "an activity of soul in accordance with virtue," and the belief that one can or has fulfilled that end is [End Page 141] certainly amenable to Protestant antinomianism. 3 Furthermore, as Sharon Achinstein points out, Milton's "conception of virtue... melds the religious notion of conscience with a classical sense of civic duty." 4 On the other hand there are significant differences between the classical and the Christian notions of "virtue" and the "good," which dictate that, as Nigel Smith puts it, "[c]lassical republicanism, properly conceived, would in many ways be in conflict with the millenarian, chiliastic and perfectionist Protestantism of the sects." 5 The problem faced by Milton as a Protestant Republican is that the definition of the "good" offered by millennial sanctification and that attainable through Aristotelian virtue are in many ways mutually exclusive and contradictory. They have been characterized as such ever since Augustine's City of God asserted that pagan ethics are incompatible with true, Christian virtue. 6 Millennialism relies on faith; civic humanist virtue relies on works. Antinomianism abolishes the law; republicanism institutes the rule of law. The saints are sanctified by grace; the virtuous are distinguished by their own strength of character. Radical Protestant freedom is negative and private--it is the ability to speak and worship according to the dictates of conscience; civic humanist liberty is positive and public, the ability to participate fully in the government of the res publica. While daunting, however, these contradictions are not quite insuperable. I believe that Milton finds a common denominator in the accounts given by these two traditions of psychological objectification and that the agreement of Roman and Christian morality on this point leads him to make the tendency to objectification (or rather the ability to resist that tendency) the central issue of his mature political theory.The political ideas of the classical republicans and their descendants, the Renaissance civic humanists, were based upon Aristotle's Politics and Nico-machean Ethics, while the intellectual sources of radical Protestantism can be traced to Luther's commentaries on Paul's epistles. During the English revolution the Pauline exegesis of the relationship between the old and the new covenants provided intellectual ammunition against custom and tradition, as well as inspiring the antinomianism of the radical fringe to which Milton was falsely accused of adhering during the divorce controversy. In the divorce tracts Milton points out that Aristotle and Paul share one fundamental tenet: they argue that interior and exterior slavery are of the same nature and therefore concomitant [End Page 142] and inseparable. Furthermore, Milton notes, Aristotle and Paul both claim that exterior and interior slavery consist in "carnality," the subjection of the spirit to the flesh. This identification of carnality with servility becomes a constant strain which runs throughout Milton's career and provides the consistent element in his apparently vacillating theories of politics and religion.II. Although this argument recurs throughout Milton's career, it is first hammered into shape during the divorce controversy... (shrink)

The thesis demonstrates the underlying coherence of Machiavelli's political thought by deriving his manifold maxims from an unified set of psychological assumptions. In so doing, it bridges the two principal cleavages of the interpretive literature: whether Machiavelli explored only autocratic power politics or classical republicanism as well, and whether he had a normative purpose or gave merely technical advice; also, it determines the meaning of such widely debated Machiavellian concepts as virtu, ambition, the great, the people, liberty, etc. (...) ;At root, Machiavelli assumed human beings to be individuals that have a first and second nature. In first nature, imagination and ingenuity stimulate the passions to grow into an insatiable ambition for glory, domination, wealth, and sexual pleasure. In second nature, coercive constraint may habituate individuals to cooperate in the pursuit of these ends. Regarding the first cleavage, individuals can thus be said to exist originally in a violent condition of licence, wherein political order springs from the power of an autocrat. The institutional order of a republic arises when such an autocrat habituates individuals to the "civil life"--non-exclusive government through laws. However, this civil life merely enables citizens to spare one another in order to satisfy their ambitions more effectively by jointly making war on foreigners; accordingly, J.G.A. Pocock's prominent claim that Machiavellian republics actualize Aristotelian virtue is mistaken. ;Regarding the second cleavage, Machiavelli's thought can be shown to proceed on two levels: instrumentally, it gives technical advice to rulers on how to satisfy their own ambition best; normatively, it constructs political order so that their self-seeking deeds redound to the security, greatness, empire, and treasure of the whole. ;Finally, Machiavelli's dual psychology engenders two kinds of foreign affairs. Fundamentally, states are locked into a violent struggle for domination which arises not only from ambition but from fear for preservation as well; since defensive alliances tend to fail in Machiavelli's view, this struggle leads recurrently to the formation of encompassing empire. Secondarily, habituation to peace under such an empire may temporarily enable its successor states to maintain a foreign institution that attenuates conflict among them. (shrink)

The language and ideals of Greek political life identified citizenship with manliness. Plato saw this engendering of politics as a threat to the unity, stability, and excellence of a city, for the unmoderated manliness of actual cities, he claimed, fosters bigoted patriotism, female dissipation, and unnatural vice. Moreover, these cities' civic pieties could not match the egoistic appeal of tyranny, for the Greek ideal of masculinity itself points to tyranny as the most manly life. ;Plato's project, as I will (...) argue through a study of the Republic and the Laws, is to harness spirit and desire to reason in order to rescue cities from these tragedies of engendered politics. Such a rationalization requires a proper understanding of the "male" passions and their subjugation to a disgendered reason. Plato argues not only that the engendered politics of Greek cities treats women unjustly, but also that by excluding females and the feminine these cities make their male citizens vicious and unhappy. ;Since Plato apparently contradicts the egalitarian views of the Republic in his later dialogue, the Laws, I aim to recover the single intention behind two political proposals differing widely in detail. Plato's teaching on gender and politics has been subject to a wide variety of criticism in recent years, but both his feminist and anti-feminist interpreters have generally failed to appreciate the thick and profound political psychology which stands behind his radical views on gender and politics. Plato describes both soul and city as complexes of frequently contradictory desires for whom unity of purpose must be achieved. The lives of men and women in actual cities display distinct and apparently incompatible virtues, but the rationalization of politics requires that these virtues be reconciled in a single regime for both soul and city. ;In conclusion, I will argue that arguments for gender justice, that, like Plato's, are founded in a critique of the pretensions of masculinity, provide more powerful arguments for sexual egalitarianism than more "feminist" arguments that attack patriarchy simply as unjust toward women. (shrink)

Republicans have traditionally opposed democracy, arguing that rule by a majority is a form of despotic or lawless rule, and liberalism due to its emphasis on private goods over public projects and shared or public interests. Today, however, republicanism is associated with certain kinds of ‘democratic’ institutions and deliberative practices, whereas democracy is considered a means of assuring significant liberal protections for individual freedom. This chapter examines the link between republicanism and the nature of law. It describes at least (...) two separate complexes of constitutional prescriptions that can be found in republican thought: the classical complex that can be seen in various forms in Rome and Athens. It argues that modern republicans endorse institutions that are different from those advocated by their classical forbearers because they have a different understanding of society and social conflict, and traces this difference to ‘social ontology’. The chapter also contends that a republican notion of the common good depends at least in part on what is believed to be the greatest danger or threat to the republic. (shrink)

It can be argued that political philosophy begins with the question “What is justice?” raised by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. The debate about justice that takes place in the dialogue leads to two opposing positions: the position represented by Socrates, according to which justice is a universal and timeless moral value that provides the foundation for order in any human society, and the position represented by Thrasymachus, according to which justice is purely conventional and relative to human laws that (...) vary according to times and customs: “nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” This debate, initiated by Plato, continues throughout the history of political thought. Already in the Republic, it inspires additional questions: Do moral values hold in politics? What is human nature? What are the origins and the end of the state? Can a war be just? What are the limits of governmental power? How much liberty should citizens enjoy? Who should rule? What is the best form of government? Answers to these questions, posed in a single work written more than twenty-four centuries ago, have served in one way or another as the basis upon which the main themes of political and international relations theory have developed. This book provides a fresh, historical introduction to Western political philosophy from its beginning in ancient Greece to modern times. It is designed for students of philosophy, politics and international relations, and other fields, individuals taking courses in the history of political thought, and for general readers who have an interest in the subject. It is written simply and candidly, but without sacrificing intellectual depth. This book demonstrates the continuing significance of centuries old political and philosophical debates and problems. Recurring themes include discussions concerning human nature, different views of justice, the origin of government and law, the rise and development of various forms of government, idealism and realism in international relations, the distinction between just and unjust war, and the nature of legitimate sover-eignty. It explores tensions between ancient and modern ideas and presents the history of political thought as a great debate about politics and ethics in which political thinkers of various eras expound on their views in turn. (shrink)

SUMARIO Artículos ¿Por qué democracia? Referencia a los derechos humanos y a la ciudadanía. Why democracy? Reference to human rights and citizenship. Bozo de Carmona, Ana Julia Libertad de expresión y "libertad cómica". Free speech and "comical liberty".Calvo González, José La justicia según J. Finnis. Justice according to John Finnis. Hocevar G., Mayda G. El lenguaje sagrado y su escritura. The sacred language and its writing. Lizaola, Julieta Del carácter coactivo de la μετηνεστασζ en Tucídides. On cornening to compelling (...) nature of Thucydides' μετηνεστασζ. Meabe, Joaquín E. Apuntes para una filosofía crítica de la historia regional. Notes for a critical philosophy concern to the regional history. Mora García, José Pascual Competencia política partidista en los textos de Simón Bolívar . The defender political competition in the Simon Bolivar’s writings . Ortiz Palanques, Marco Fundamentación socio-jurídica de los procesos normativos. Social and juridical reasoning about the normatives changes. Pavó Acosta, Rolando Filosofía y psicopatología en Karl Jaspers: los entramados de la existencia. Philosophy and psychopathology in Karl Jaspers: the studworks of the existence. Portuondo Pajón, Gladys L. La doctrina platónica del alma en la «república». The platonic doctrine of the soul in the «republic» dialogue. Suzzarini, Andrés Una aproximación a la concepción romana del derecho. An estimate study to the roman concept of law. Terán Pimentel, Milagros Interdisciplinares Lo dionisíaco y lo apolíneo en Don Juan Tenorio. The dionysiac and the apolline in Don Juan Tenorio. Pérez Lo Presti, Alirio. (shrink)

Argues that natural law theory provides no credible basis for objecting to the legal recognition of same-sex marriage and offers a two-fold defense of marriage equality: natural-law arguments against marriage equality are unsuccessful; and, even if they are; proponents of new classical natural law theory should still see legally recognizing same-sex marriages as reasonable.

With this new book the gap between Straussian and analytic approaches to Plato’s dialogues begins to look like it is unbridgeable. While the analytic side has been furiously fussing over the critical minutia regarding the dating and authenticity of the Platonic dialogues in order to determine what we can know of Socrates through Plato, Lutz without so much as a nod toward that project simply takes any Platonic dialogue to be a reliable guide to “Socrates” and his thought. This will (...) sit poorly with those who think that we can no more know about Socrates from reading Platonic dialogues than we can about Jesus from reading the Gospels. Further, in the drama-versus-doctrine debate that is the great divide among Anglo-American scholars today, Lutz, like many a Straussian, opts for drama in the dialogues, rather than arguments in them, as the “least arbitrary and most revealing way” to philosophy. Lutz’s thesis is that Plato uses drama to support substantive Socratic theses, one of which is, according to Lutz, that “by nature we are moved by an erotic need to know we are ‘noble and good’”. Also according to Lutz, the recognition of this need is Socrates’ meaningful insight into human motivation, that of philosopher and scientist alike. He warns, however, that Socrates never decisively refutes his interlocutors’ rival conceptions of nobility and goodness. This is especially evident in the ongoing dialectic among the interlocutors in Plato’s Republic, which Lutz believes is dedicated to an examination of civic virtue. In addition, the dramatic portrayal of Socrates’ inability to educate Alcibiades shows, according to Lutz, “a fundamental limit on the power of reason to reform political life”. The value of Socratic education therefore consists in the idea that the content of virtue and efficacy of rationality are open to interpretation and must necessarily remain so. This essentially searching education, Lutz believes, may thus help us in our fragmented postmodern world, especially in bringing together competing conceptions of virtue in literature, politics, law, and science, and perhaps even Straussian and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The radical Democratic-Republican Societies that emerged during the 1790s not only challenged conventional interpretations of the civic republican tradition, they also adopted Enlightenment principles in their advocacy for universal public education. Brian W. Dotts’ The Political Education of Democratus: Negotiating Civic Virtue during the Early Republic shows that, unlike mainstream educational philosophy of the period, radical democrats supported universal political education as essential in protecting liberty and political equality.

Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Thought explores the relation between Plato's Republic and Laws on the set of issues that the Laws itself marks out as fundamental to the comparison: the unity of the virtues, the role of women, and the place of the family. Plato aims to persuade men to abandon the view of the good life that Greek cities and their laws inculcate as the only life worth living for those who would be real men and not (...) effeminate weaklings. What we can learn about Plato is the importance for him of understanding the nature of persuasion in order to come to terms with gender justice and the apparent plurality of human goods. What we learn from Plato is that to tackle the issues that arise in our new political community of men and women we must comprehend the proper bases and limits of persuasion. (shrink)

Some of the founding documents of our modern human rights culture assert that, by virtue of natural law, the will of God, the will of a Supreme Being, or some kind of natural world order, all humans have a right to civil liberties. In Areopagitica, Milton rejects this way of grounding the claim to civil liberties. Instead, he argues for civil liberties on pragmatic grounds, but also on the premise that members of political societies are entitled to civil liberties (...) from their governors only insofar as those members are rational and virtuous. His argument for civil liberties is also grounded in the view that the proper function of government includes propagating virtue in those it governs, assessing their rationality and moral virtue, and extending civil liberties to them in accordance with this assessment. Arguing in this way, Milton opposes the notion that, simply by virtue of being human, all members of political societies have a specific set of rights which their governments, and indeed all other people on earth, are bound to respect. He thus has more in common with Isocrates and Renaissance humanists than he does with the defenders of our modern human rights culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Utilitarianism in the Early American Republic by James E. CrimminsAndrew GustafsonUtilitarianism in the Early American Republic James E. Crimmins. Routledge, 2022.There are many important influences on American Pragmatism, but one which is frequently overlooked is the influence of Utilitarianism, both on American thought in general, and American Pragmatism in particular. It is difficult to imagine anyone better to write this book than James Crimmins. As a (...) leading Bentham scholar, among his twelve previously published books on utilitarianism, he is editor of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the four-volume set Utilitarians and Their Critics in America, 1789–1914 (Thoemmes Continuum, 2005). His vast knowledge of the history of utilitarianism, which he has spent his entire career investigating, makes him the perfect author for this very helpful book on the influences of utilitarianism in early American thought. It is a rich sourcebook that can help direct anyone looking to do more research in this area. Here, Crimmins provides a thorough historical account of the influence of utilitarianism on the development of early American thought and the rise of pragmatism, giving reason to believe that utilitarianism was more impactful on American pragmatism than is often realized.The first chapter highlights why utilitarian influence on American law and politics is overlooked and why it should not be. Chapters 2 and 3 explain how American thought leaders came to know of Bentham's work, and chapters 4–7 discuss concrete examples of thinkers who brought utilitarianism to bear on issues in America (for example, Hoffman on legal studies in chapter 4, Livingston on legislative law in chapter 5, the death penalty debate in chapter 6, and Thomas Cooper's wide-ranging influences in chapter 7). The epilogue provides a specific set of arguments for why the utilitarians' influence on American Pragmatism should be more widely recognized and investigated.Crimmins begins the book by explaining why utilitarianism, as an influence in early American politics, is typically excluded and ignored by thinkers from John Dewey to Élie Halévy. One reason is that William Paley's Principles of Political and Moral Philosophy (which was used widely as a moral text in US universities throughout the 1800s) was published in 1785, and Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was published in 1789, and even then Bentham's ideas didn't gain public circulation (and then only in French) until Etienne Dumont published the three-volume Traités de législation civile et pénale in 1802. But the more important reason utilitarianism [End Page 106] has not received attention, according to Crimmins, is due to the dominant focus placed on Locke's natural law and rights view being the lens by which American politics has been understood. Some have challenged this Lockean consensus and pointed out that republican virtues drawn from the ancient Greeks and others show up in ideas such as the "right to happiness" (which is a right that is found nowhere in Locke) (20). Crimmins shows that there was a very strong emphasis on "public utility," "general welfare," and happiness, and this frequently outweighed concerns for natural rights for thinkers like Thomas Paine, John Adams, Nathaniel Chipman, Joseph Haven, and many other early American thinkers. Furthermore, utilitarian considerations can be found in the Constitution and federalist papers, and even Tocqueville explained American thinking through the lens of utilitarian concerns.Bentham was ambitious in attempting to promote codification of law in many countries worldwide. While Bentham had made offers (some accepted, some rejected) to help in the codification of law to various countries, ranging from Catherine the Great's Russia to France, Portugal, Spain, and numerous South American countries, he spent much of the last quarter of his life focused on trying to provide his services to the new United States. In chapter 2, Crimmins provides a history of the dissemination of Bentham's ideas in the United States, highlighting some of the key promoters of his ideas in the United States, including Richard Hildreth and John Neal, as well as John O'Sullivan, Gilbert Vale, and, of course, Thomas Cooper. Crimmins also provides a meticulous account of Bentham's personal attempts... (shrink)

The system of free expression John Milton defends in Areopagitica, a pamphlet against prior restraint in publishing, is often characterized as merely a proto-liberal, truth-based marketplace of ideas theory. But this represents a misunderstanding of Milton’s views on the freedoms of conscience, speech, and the press. The tendency in political theory, philosophy, and law to reduce the “free speech Milton” to Areopagitica, and the reduction of that essay to several soundbites, has meant sidelining both the significant exceptions to expressive liberties (...) that Milton calls for and also the role of the social in his theory. This incomplete characterization has enabled Milton’s misuse in First Amendment discourse and jurisprudence, where he is made to support hierarchical approaches to free speech that privilege public political speech and are therefore ill-equipped to address the full range of communicative experiences. More comprehensive readings of Milton, however, reveal both certain limits to free expression, and also deep consideration for a wide range of speech acts. By reading Milton’s theory of expressive liberties in light of the justifications he provides for those freedoms—i.e., virtue-building and Truth-seeking—this essay provides a fuller account of his views. What emerges is a distinctly Miltonian, virtue-driven “political theory of everyday talk” that locates value in even the most ordinary communicative acts. This theory—embracing both verbal and nonverbal expression—not only complements existing political theories of the everyday but can also help illuminate contemporary free speech concerns, many of which stem from the libertarian approach to expressive liberties that Milton (inadvertently) helped inspire. (shrink)

Is Machiavelli an Epicurean in his political and religious thought? Recent scholarship has identified him as the foremost representative of Epicureanism in Renaissance Florence. In particular, his incomplete epic poem, The Ass, is read as an expression of his adherence to Lucretian naturalism. This article offers a new reading of the poem and shows that its teaching reveals that Machiavelli is closer to a Platonic variant of classical naturalism linked with the idea of a natural virtue modelled on the (...) lives of animals which has been lost through human civilization and progress and to which it is necessary to return periodically. The article focuses on the poem’s claim that civil religion is a necessary component for good laws that maintain a free republic and argues that Machiavelli offers a poetic reflection on the role of Numa as the founder of Roman religion on the model of a neo-Pythagorean philosophical religion that was instrumental in the rise of constitutional government. More than Lucretius’s critique of religion, Machiavelli’s poem can be read as an extended reflection on Plutarch’s texts – above all, his Life of Numa. (shrink)

Law, often neglected in treatments of the Republic, is essential to the philosopher-kings’ rule. Only law accomplishes the partial divinization of citizens at which philosophical politics aims. Socrates’ interrogation of Thrasymachus and Glaucon reveals law to be a command whereby citizens participate in philosophical knowledge and limit the pleonexia congenital to humanity. Law does so primarily by instilling in souls a true opinion resistant to pleonectic passion, producing a state of political virtue. This primary work is supported (...) by the musical and poetical education, itself shaped by law for the sake of law. Law persuades and compels the soul by appealing to both reason and spiritedness, enabling them to overcome the appetites. The soul’s consequent acceptance of truth and resistance to the passions indeed makes it resemble divinity. In so transforming the citizens through the law, the philosopher-king also unifies the city and makes it happy under his rule. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato's Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and PoliticsGeorge HarveyChristopher Bobonich. Plato's Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 643. Cloth, $49.95.In tracing developments in Plato's views between his middle- and late-period dialogues, Plato's Utopia Recast focuses on the differences between philosophers and non-philosophers with respect to their capacities to become genuinely virtuous. The central thesis of (...) this extensive work is that the Laws reveals a degree of optimism about the prospects for non-philosophers in attaining virtue and happiness not found in dialogues of the middle period. Specifically, Bobonich describes this development in terms of four claims that he thinks Plato denies in the Phaedo and Republic but later affirms in the Laws: first, that at least some non-philosophers are capable of being virtuous; second, that they can value virtue for its own sake; third, that they can value the virtue and happiness in others for its own sake; and fourth, that these non-philosophers are capable of living happy lives.Bobonich devotes most of the first chapter to describing Plato's pessimism about non-philosophers in the middle period. The cause for this pessimism is both epistemic and psychological. In the Phaedo, non-philosophers are incapable of knowing what is genuinely valuable. Failure to grasp non-sensible value properties means that in non-philosophers, reason simply takes over the ends defined by bodily impulses. The Republic is less pessimistic, but even here, Plato's tripartitioning of the soul makes clear that the rational part of the soul in non-philosophers fails to fulfill its proper ruling function. Bobonich's claim is that the more optimistic view presented in the Laws is indicative of developments not only in Plato's political theory, but also in the areas of psychology and epistemology.The central feature of the political theory advanced in the Laws is that the proper goal of legislation is not victory in war, but the cultivation of virtue in all citizens. More importantly for Bobonich, it suggests that all citizens, both philosophers and non-philosophers, are capable of attaining some degree of genuine virtue. For evidence of this, he points to the preludes that accompany each piece of legislation designed to provide a rational justification for what the laws command. In identifying virtue as the aim of legislation, Bobonich observes that the Laws endorses a dependency thesis about goods, making the value of a dependent good such as wealth, honor or military victory dependent upon its possessor being virtuous. His position is that Plato's endorsement of this dependency thesis in the Laws implies that ordinary citizens are capable of at least a partial grasp of what is genuinely valuable, making some degree of virtue and happiness attainable.Bobonich's view that this optimism about non-philosophers has implications for Plato's later epistemology and psychology is developed in the third and fourth chapters. He argues that the Republic's partitioning of the soul into three distinct, agent-like parts is abandoned in the later dialogues in favor of a more unified conception. This approach in the [End Page 334] middle period served to account for akratic action and the formation of non-rational desires, but Bobonich believes that Plato came to see this doctrine as ultimately flawed. By contrast, the Laws offers an account of akratic action and non-rational desire that maintains a unified subject and avoids the problems found in partitioning. In chapter four, Bobonich considers how the Laws' unified conception of the subject, supported by the Phaedrus, Philebus and Timaeus, reveals how all human aims and desires, both rational and non-rational, are structured and conceptualized through the soul's rational faculty. In this unified conception of the subject, Bobonich sees important implications for the role of non-rational elements in the ethical education of even ordinary human beings.In the fifth and final chapter, Bobonich returns to politics, and considers how Plato's conception of citizenship in the Laws reflects the more optimistic view of human nature. He examines how citizens in the Laws develop non-instrumental concerns for the happiness... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Price, the Debate on Free Will, and Natural RightsGregory I. MolivasWhen Richard Price projected metaphysical assumptions onto his ethical theory, he elaborated a conception of man as a normatively self-regulating being. Endowed with rationality, man is a “law unto himself.” Price’s political writings postulated accordingly that man should be his own legislator. The first proposition appeared in his ethics in the context of man’s identification with his higher (...) faculties, and the second in the context of man considered as a member of civil society. Crucial to the transition from the first context to the second was Price’s notion of man’s inward constitution as permeating his conception of practical virtue, a view he expanded in his discussion on free will. This conception was built on a sharp contrast between reason and passion, which he described in terms of a relationship like that of sovereign to subject. The contrast is between those faculties which are destined to command, and those who ought to obey. This analogy facilitated comparison with normative relationships obtaining in civil society, where Price identified subservience to passion with obedience to an external-to-the-“self “ power, which in a political context manifested as the wishes of other people.These successive steps from ethical supposition to political claims, formed a body of assumptions underlying beliefs that were shared by many of his contemporaries. They did not constitute a unified system of principles, and it is vain to seek theoretical consistency in all those who seemed to have espoused ideas similar to those of Price. His assumptions do, however, help to explain why some of his contemporaries found his ideas familiar or self-evident, while to others they were incomprehensible. Nor is it a coincidence that Price’s most able critics happened to be psychological determinists (Richard Hey, John Lind, Edmund Burke), who attacked his conception of political liberty after undermining, or disputing, Price’s conception of man. [End Page 105]I. In the writings of all those who inveighed against the rights of man, the words “natural rights” and “metaphysics” are often found together. Thomas Paine was accused of having “crudely stolen” his “crazy metaphysics” from others, 1 and studies of Edmund Burke have continuously pointed to his dislike of the “professor of metaphysics.” Burke’s aversion to abstract speculation and metaphysics has often been interpreted as the natural reaction of an English politician confronting the generalities of continental writers. Frederick Dreyer, however, argues that when Burke wrote his Reflections, he had in mind Price’s philosophical arguments rather than the events of the French Revolution. 2 According to him, the anonymous “metaphysician” whom Burke so often and so vehemently denounced was, in fact, Richard Price.In substantiating his position Dreyer quotes, among other things, a revealing passage from Burke: “There are people who have split and anatomized the doctrine of free government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity, and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling.” 3 Although Dreyer does not pursue the full implications of the evidence he presents, this is a remarkable statement, because it indicates what Price had undertaken in his political writings. In his philosophical works Price had defended the idea of metaphysical or philosophical liberty as a precondition of moral agency. In the first and most important theoretical section of his influential Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 4 which set out to analyze the nature of liberty, Price summarized his earlier philosophical views. As William King noted in this section of his political pamphlet Price was “totally out in his philosophy.” 5Price defined liberty as the power of self-government and approached it through its four general divisions: physical liberty, moral, religious, and civil liberty. Commentators on Price have often acknowledged that his conception of liberty, as expounded in his political pamphlet, is indebted to his earlier philosophical work and notably his Review of the Principal Questions in Morals; 6 but they have not followed up with a clear exposition of how the divisions of liberty Price put forward in his Observations are related. [End Page 106]Although J. C. D. Clark claims that... (shrink)

Some critics question new natural law theorists’ conception of the common good of the political community, namely, their interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas and the conclusion that the political common good is primarily instrumental rather than intrinsic and transcendent. Contrary to these objections, the common good of the political community is primarily instrumental. It aims chiefly at securing the conditions for human flourishing. Its unique ability to use the law to bring about justice and peace and promote virtue in (...) individuals may make the common good of the political community critically important. Nevertheless, it is still not an intrinsic aspect of human flourishing. Unlike the family or a religious group, membership in a political community is not an end in itself. (shrink)

This article presents the dual conception of legal regulation of funding of political parties. In general, funding of political parties is considered as part of public law, however, this article explains that it also could be understood as an institute of private law. When funding of political parties is analysed not only through the conception of public law, but also taking into consideration the idea of private law, it is possible to apply different (than usual) principles of legal regulation of (...) such relations. Those principles are followed in this article in order to reveal different practical problems pertaining to legal regulation of political party funding. A conclusion is made that the legal provisions on funding of political parties form an integral system that consists of both public law and private law provisions. The relations when natural and legal persons assign property to political parties are considered as part of private law and those property relations that are based on state subsidies to political parties or other financial support by the state are the object of public law regulation. In the case of Lithuania, all such relations are regulated by the Law on Funding of, and Control Over Funding of Political Parties and Political Campaigns, which is an act of private law and also a source of public law. The legal regulation that stems from this law is supplemented by the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania and other related laws. The legislator, while regulating the legal relations pertaining to the funding of political parties, and the courts, when dealing with disputes related to those relations, are advised to take into consideration the general principles of civil law. It is important to point out that some legal provisions of the Law on Funding of Political Parties that are in force as of 1 January 2012 are against those principles. A prohibition for legal persons and limitations for natural persons to fund political parties should be critically considered, since those restrictions limit the possibilities for private persons to dispose their property and for political parties – to acquire it. Moreover, it is important to point out that such restrictions can be circumvented by assigning property through a third party and by other legal means. In order to avoid such cases, it is recommended to provide an opportunity for natural and legal persons to fund political parties, but with reasonable limitations for such donations. (shrink)

A prolific philosopher who also held Rome's highest political office, Cicero was uniquely qualified to write on political philosophy. In this book Professor Atkins provides a fresh interpretation of Cicero's central political dialogues - the Republic and Laws. Devoting careful attention to form as well as philosophy, Atkins argues that these dialogues together probe the limits of reason in political affairs and explore the resources available to the statesman given these limitations. He shows how Cicero appropriated and transformed Plato's (...) thought to forge original and important works of political philosophy. The book demonstrates that Cicero's Republic and Laws are critical for understanding the history of the concepts of rights, the mixed constitution and natural law. It concludes by comparing Cicero's thought to the modern conservative tradition and argues that Cicero provides a perspective on utopia frequently absent from current philosophical treatments. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Laws Conclusion Bibliography.

Inspired by the work of prominent University of Notre Dame political philosophers Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, this volume of essays explores the concept of natural right in the history of political philosophy. The central organizing principle of the collection is the examination of the idea of natural justice, identified in the classical period with natural right and in modernity with the concept of individual natural rights. Contributors examine the concept of natural right and rights in all the manifold and (...) interdisciplinary dimensions associated with the Zuckerts’ oeuvre. Part I explores the theme of natural right in the ancient and medieval political philosophy of Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and St. Augustine. Part II examines the early modern break from the classical tradition in the work of Montaigne, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Locke, and Hegel as well as the legacy of the modern natural rights tradition as explored by Leo Strauss and Pope John Paul II. Part III treats the theme of natural rights from the Puritans through the Founding period in such figures as Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris and up to the Progressive era with Booker T. Washington and Theodore Roosevelt. Part IV addresses questions of natural justice in literature, including works of Euripides, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Edith Wharton, and Tom Stoppard. "In this collection compiled in honor of Catherine and Michael Zuckert, the contributors address a wonderful variety of serious issues in important literary and philosophic texts. Their topics range from Plato on piety to Stoppard on socialist utopianism, and from Aristotle and Augustine to Euripides, Locke, Hegel, Shakespeare, and Booker T. Washington. The volume stands as an impressive introduction to the liberal arts and a lively introduction to many great issues of liberalism, Christianity, justice, and liberty; it is also a tribute to the Zuckerts' breadth of study, teaching, and influence." —_Robert K. Faulkner, Boston College_. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, (...) but instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

Recent scholarship on Stoic political thought has sought to explain the relationship between Zeno’s Republic and the concept of a natural law regulating a cosmic city of gods and human beings that is attributed to later Stoics. This paper provides a reassessment of this relationship by exploring the underappreciated influence of Plato’s Laws on Zeno’s Republic and, through Zeno, on the subsequent Stoic tradition. Zeno’s attempt to remove perceived inconsistencies in Plato’s treatment of ‘law’ and ‘nature’ established (...) a philosophical framework that overturned the republicanism of Plato and Aristotle; this same framework established the preconditions for the cosmic city of gods and human beings regulated by natural law. Thus, the early Stoic tradition on the topic of natural law is characterized by continuity rather than by discontinuity. (shrink)

Roman property law and Roman contract law as well as the property centered Roman ethics put forth by Cicero in several of his works were the traditions Grotius drew upon in developing his natural rights system. While both the medieval just war tradition and Grotius's immediate political context deserve scholarly attention and constitute important influences on Grotius's natural law tenets, it is a Roman tradition of subjective legal remedies and of just war which lays claim to a foundational role with (...) regard to his conception of subjective natural rights. Grotius made use of Roman law and Roman ethics in order to submit a normative case for a rights-based just war in the East Indies. His conception of a law of nature was originally conceived to apply a theory of compensatory justice to the high seas of Southeast Asia, envisaged as a natural state lacking political authority. Eventually, however, this argument was to reveal its anti-absolutist implications, and contributed—by virtue of its applicability to individuals, private entities and commonwealths alike—to the emergence of a rights-based constitutionalism. This article discusses Grotius's early treatise De iure praedae commentarius and its offshoot Mare liberum, which already contained an inchoate version of subjective natural rights, as well as the elaborate natural rights doctrine which can be found in Grotius's early Theses LVI and in the Defensio capitis quinti maris liberi, a defense of the fifth chapter of Mare liberum, written around 1615 and directed against the Scottish jurist William Welwod's attack on Mare liberum. (shrink)

Three recent books?Richard Posner's Law and Literature, Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally, and James Boyd White's Justice as Translation? struggle over the relationship of law and literature. Fish and White defend the relevance of literature to law; Posner tries to kill the nascent law and literature movement by hugging it to death. Posner's literary criticism is belles?lettristic, concerned chiefly with how?great? a work is. Fish's is social, emphasizing the interpretative community. White attempts to make a new community, in which (...) we come to understand one another by an effort of translation. White's vision is attractive, though it surrenders Science to non?translation. As the sage said, even in science it is translation, and rhetoric, all the way down. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Declaration of Independence:Inalienable Rights, the Creator, and the Political OrderChristopher KaczorPierre Manent puts his finger on numerous problems that arise from an emphasis on human rights that is detached from any consideration of human nature, the Creator, or the traditions that inform human practice. In his book Natural Law and Human Rights: Towards a Recovery of Practical Wisdom, Manent writes: "Let us dwell a moment on the (...) proposition in which so much passion is invested today: man is the being who possesses rights. It resonates as our self-definition and our perspective on humanity, one that we take to have fortunately replaced other definitions and perspectives, such as that man is God's creature or that man is a political animal."1 Contemporary political discourse has arrived, so he thinks, at an impasse of contradiction, incoherence, and self-defeating beliefs.Manent finds a vital help for thinking through these issues in Thomas Aquinas,2 but perhaps also a useful resource is the work of Thomas Jefferson. In Natural Law and Human Rights, Manent cites the first article of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: "Human beings are born and remain free and equal in rights."3 But Manent does not cite the Declaration of Independence drafted by Jefferson. The 1776 Declaration provides a way of addressing many of Manent's concerns about human rights, human nature, and equality because it combines an appeal to the Creator [End Page 249] with the establishment of rights grounded in human nature and defended by limited government. In order to approach some of the important political, religious, and philosophical questions raised in Natural Law and Human Rights, we can reconsider the famous "American proposition": "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." What exactly does this famous American proposition mean? Can it help us to address some of the concerns about incoherent political discourse that Manent highlights?We Hold These Truths to Be Self-EvidentWhat does "we hold these truths to be self-evident" mean? The interpretation of this phrase has generated no small amount of speculation.4 As Manent notes, appeals to self-evidence arise also today in disputes about same-sex marriage.5 Even if we cannot perfectly trace the remote or proximate historical origins of the phrase in 1776, we might still examine some possible meanings.For John Locke, a self-evident truth is akin to what later philosophers called an analytically true proposition.6 Such propositions are true in virtue of the agreement of the ideas that make up the proposition. "A bachelor is an unmarried man of marriageable age" is self-evidently true, since the idea of "bachelor" agrees with the idea "an unmarried man of marriageable age." It does not seem plausible that the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence were meant in this sense. The assertions of the Declaration are not true simply by agreement of ideas or by definition in a way that is obvious to anyone who is a native speaker.Thomas Reid suggests a different sense of self-evidence. On his view, [End Page 250] self-evidence does not mean obviousness to everyone, but rather clear to those with the requisite education and maturity: "Moral truths... are self-evident to every man whose understanding and moral faculty are ripe."7 If a person is conscious of no moral obligation whatsoever, then reasoning with such a person will not bring the person to understand his or her obligations. Just as mathematical calculations cannot begin without acceptance of basic axioms of mathematics, so too ethical reflection presupposes but does not establish its first principles. As Reid says, "the man who does not by the light of his own mind, perceive some things in conduct to be right, and others to be wrong, is as incapable of reasoning about morals as a blind man is about colours."8 Just as there are people who cannot see colors, so too there are people lacking the requisite moral... (shrink)

Modern virtue ethics is commonly presented as an alternative to Kantian and utilitarian views—to ethics focused on action and obligations—and it invokes Aristotle as a predecessor. This paper argues that the Nichomachean Ethics does not represent virtue ethics thus conceived, because the discussion of the virtues of character there serves a quasi-Platonic psychology: it is an account of how to tame the unruly (non-rational) elements of the human soul so that they can be ruled by reason and the (...) laws it imposes. This is explicitly stated in Book X, where it is also affirmed that the question of which laws reason should impose is addressed in The Politics. The Ethics and Politics can therefore be seen as a unity—as Aristotle's version of Plato's Republic—and it is the failure to recognize this that explains Aristotle's misappropriation by the modern virtue ethicists. (shrink)

The essay replies to comments by Finnis, Gardner and Endicott, on my book, Law as a Moral Idea. It is questioned whether Finnis is right to suggest that governance by law is a requirement of justice. It is suggested that Hart's positivism may have rested upon an unduly private conception of morality. Gardner's suggestion that Law as a Moral Idea falsely manufactures disagreement with Hart is rejected, principally by pointing out that Gardner focuses upon only one issue, where the book (...) already acknowledges that Hart might conceivably agree, and ignores other issues where the disagreement with Hart seems indisputable. In response to Endicott, it is acknowledged that 'politics' could be understood as a moral idea comparable to the idea of 'law', but denied that this robs either thesis of interest. The nature of doctrinal reasoning and law's justificatory force is then discussed. (shrink)

This book argues that political philosophy is central to early Stoic philosophy, and is deeply tied to the Stoics' conceptions of reason and wisdom. Broad in scope, it explores the Stoics' idea of the cosmic city, their notion of citizen-gods, as well as their account of the law.

The first full-length study of Francesco Patrizi, the greatest political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance prior to Machiavelli. Patrizi was a humanist whose virtue politics-a form of values-based political meritocracy-sought to reconcile the conflicting claims of liberty and equality in service of good governance. He wrote two major works, On Founding Republics (1471) and On Kingship and the Education of Kings (1483/84), both of which were hugely influential when printed in the sixteenth century, but later forgotten.

The concluding volume of Francis Oakley's authoritative trilogy moves on to engage the political thinkers of the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Reformation and religious wars, and the era that produced the Divine Right Theory of Kingship. Oakley's ground-breaking study probes the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern modes of political thinking and dwells at length on the roots and nature of those contract theories that sought to legitimate political authority by grounding it in the consent (...) of the governed. (shrink)

In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence appealed to "the Laws of nature and of Nature's God" and affirmed "these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...." In 1935, John Dewey, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, declared, "Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology." These (...) opposing pronouncements on natural rights represent two separate and antithetical American political traditions: natural rights individualism, the original Lockean tradition of the Founding; and Progressivism, the collectivist reaction to individualism which arose initially in the newly established universities in the decades following the Civil War. (shrink)

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and (...) unity. Section 2 argues that in the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity. (shrink)

Pierre Manent is one of France's leading political philosophers. This first English translation of his profound and strikingly original book La loi naturelle et les droits de l'homme is a reflection on the central question of the Western political tradition. In six chapters, developed from the prestigious Étienne Gilson lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and in a related appendix, Manent contemplates the steady displacement of the natural law by the modern conception of human rights. He aims to restore (...) the grammar of moral and political action, and thus the possibility of an authentically political order that is fully compatible with liberty rightly understood. Manent boldly confronts the prejudices and dogmas of those who have repudiated the classical and (especially) Christian notion of "liberty under law" and in the process shows how groundless many contemporary appeals to human rights turn out to be. Manent denies that we can generate obligations from a condition of what Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau call the "state of nature," where human beings are absolutely free, with no obligations to others. In his view, our ever-more-imperial affirmation of human rights needs to be reintegrated into what he calls an "archic" understanding of human and political existence, where law and obligation are inherent in liberty and meaningful human action. Otherwise we are bound to act thoughtlessly and in an increasingly arbitrary or willful manner. Natural Law and Human Rights will engage students and scholars of politics, philosophy, and religion, and will captivate sophisticated readers who are interested in the question of how we might reconfigure our knowledge of, and talk with one another about, politics. (shrink)

Natural law theory has been undergoing a revival, especially in political philosophy and jurisprudence. Yet, most fundamentally, natural law theory is not a political theory, but a moral theory, or more accurately a theory of practical rationality. According to the natural law account of practical rationality, the basic reasons for actions are basic goods that are grounded in the nature of human beings. Practical rationality aims to identify and characterize reasons for action and to explain how choice between actions (...) worth performing can be appropriately governed by rational standards. These standards are justified by reference to features of the human goods that are the fundamental reasons for action. This book is a defence of a contemporary natural law theory of practical rationality, demonstrating its inherent plausibility and engaging systematically with rival egoist, consequentialist, Kantian and virtue accounts. (shrink)

This study constitutes an ethical analysis through the lens of distributive justice in the case of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was enacted in the midst of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. It begins by engaging with the visions of justice constructed by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, using their insights to locate the injustices of TARP according to their moral imaginations. However, this study argues that Rawls’ and Nozick’s theories of justice primarily envision the nature of (...) law as being restrictive of vice, not as instructors of virtue. Thus, it resources the legal philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to demonstrate how the positive pedagogy of law can enable a more just construction of economic rescue legislation, one that not only prevents future repetitions of economic vices and injustice, but is also formative for a society that prizes economic justice and virtues. In doing so, the study proposes two criteria for a more just consideration of economic rescue legislation that embraces law’s positive pedagogy. (shrink)