Is statesmanship still compatible with democracy? Democratic theorists once viewed democracy as a partnership between citizens and statesmen, to which each brought complementary virtues. Statesmanship has come to be condemned by many contemporary democratic theorists, however, as inimical to democracy. By turning statesmen into “facilitators,” they seek to displace statesmanship with an expanded concept of citizenship. In response, and stung by charges of elitism, embattled liberal defenders of statesmanship have begun to recast it in light of this line of attack. Most notably, the liberal Bruce Ackerman has sought to advance a new concept of nonelitist, “neutral” liberal statesmanship that is compatible with democracy. This study examines both the criticisms that led to this rethinking of statesmanship—especially in the thought of Benjamin R. Barber, liberal statesmanship's leading critic—and Ackerman's success in meeting them. Our study tries to demonstrate that Ackerman actually reconstructs liberal statesmanship on the basis of Barber's arguments and thereby further undermines the statesmanship he purports to defend. I conclude with an effort to rehabilitatean older understanding of liberal statesmanship.

Systematic analysis shows the psychological premises of Machiavelli's political theory to be fairly consistent and to transcend historical circumstance. Above all, the apparent contradiction between its rapacious and consensual sides can be resolved by unearthing his distinction between necessary properties and contingent attributes qua habits. Following medieval medical theory, necessary properties include: spirit that animates the body; mind with faculties of ingenuity, imagination, and memory; desires for preservation, glory, power, freedom, wealth, and sexual pleasure; and four humors received from the stars. While serving the desires, mind stimulates them to expand into the limitless ambition characteristic of Machiavellian individuals. Habituation to laws and gods makes possible the institutional life of republics, in that cooperative habits solve the collective-action problem faced by a multitude of self-ruling citizens. However, such republics are ultimately alliances for joint gain rather than structures of virtue—challenging the ascendant view of Machiavelli as a “civic humanist” and Aristotelian.

In this article, the venerable but still not entirely resolved issue of Hegel's relationship to liberalism is discussed. In contradistinction to recent communitarian accounts, the Kantian and Enlightenment idea of rational freedom in Hegel's political philosophy is shown to be the basis for Hegel's critique of traditional liberalism. While the Hegelian state incorporates most of the rights and freedoms ordinarily associated with liberalism, Hegel's rationale for these rights and freedoms is never the traditional liberal one. In conclusion, the relevance of Hegel's ideal of the rational state to our understanding of contemporary liberalism and its discontents is assessed.

John Hilton, Noel Reynolds, and Arlene Saxonhouse have employed statistical authorship analysis to claim that Hobbes authored three anonymously published works. But the authors of the study were not aware of close textual parallels between one discourse and a recently discovered work of Francis Bacon which argue against this attribution and call attention to deficiencies in the method of proof. Compounding this difficulty, they could not determine the stylistic pattern of Bacon, who is a candidate for authorship of the three discourses. It can be concluded that the authorship of at least one of the discourses is still a mystery, and that while the science of statistical wordprint analysis has advanced significantly over the past thirty years, it still has limitations which must be taken into account in any authorship study.