One of the most difficult features of the Declaration of Independence is the assertion within it that “we hold these truths to be self-evident.…” Careful examination of the text of the Declaration reveals, however, that the truths are not in fact said to be “self-evident” but are rather, as a matter of healthy political practice, to be treated as if self-evident. Appreciating the status of the so-called self-evident truths above all brings into focus the problem of politics as civic education in this regime, especially as seen by Jefferson. It also helps focus attention on the structure of the Declaration and clarifies some recent scholarly disputes over the meaning and sources of the Declaration.

This study questions a prevalent view of the First Amendment religion clauses which maintains they were intended to establish neutrality of the federal government between religion and nonreligion and thereby to establish not merely governmental religious pluralism but governmental secularism. Since the Bill of Rights is said to have been adopted to satisfy anti-Federalist objections to the original Constitution, what they said about religion in the ratification debates is comprehensively examined. They turn out to have been primarily concerned that the unamended Constitution was particularly dangerous to and tilted against religion. Hence they wanted not simply to prevent the new government from infringing on “religious liberty” (of individuals or states) but to redress the unamended Constitution's actual or potential tilt against religion. The First Congress debates are then examined from this rather different perspective to see what effect this concern may have had on the First Amendment religion clauses. It is argued that this concern produced a more complex constitutional position on religion and religious liberty than is commonly maintained. This position is not simply Madison/Jefferson separationism but a compromise which to some extent redressed the original Constitution's tilt against religion.

This article explores a hitherto unexamined aspect of John Locke's political thought, his advocacy of general naturalization. It is based upon an unpublished manuscript of Locke's which appears in the Appendix. Although naturalization was supported by a number of Locke's contemporaries, the arguments for naturalization which rely on the tradition of classical republicanism must be distinguished from those such as Locke's which rely on the new political economy. The classical republicans ground naturalization in the need for increasing the number of citizens available for a civic militia; this need, in turn, is intertwined with a vision of imperialistic conquest on the Roman model. Locke's arguments are based on a theory of an expanding commercial society and the productive power of labor. They reflect a new concept of individualistic voluntaristic citizenship which provides an alternative to the common law notions of natural allegiance of Locke's day.

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

This article asks why new protest movements have recently emerged in Western Europe by focusing on the British postwar race and anti-nuclear movements. Contrary to “subjective” propositions which have attributed their emergence to inter-generational value change, this article instead proposes a “structural” explanation. It is argued that the failure of the major British political parties to articulate citizen concerns on a number of salient issues has generated extra-party initiatives whose willingness to “voice” citizen anxieties primarily explains their popular support. Once in existence, these groups further politicize the conflict over public policy through various unconventional activities.