Harry V. Jaffa has inspired a generation of students in American political thought by defending the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence and of Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa is also a defender of Leo Strauss's idea of a “political science of natural right,” which Strauss drew primarily from classical Greek political philosophy. Jaffa's efforts to defend the several strands of the Western natural right tradition led him to develop a grand synthesis of “Athens, Jerusalem, and Peoria,” which I argue is a noble but untenable way of upholding the moral order of the West—and a departure from the intentions of Leo Strauss.

In his literary masterwork, the Decameron, Boccaccio undertakes a thorough examination of human values along the lines he had drawn in his history of the origins of the gods, the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, on the assumption that values, in a world emptied of the gods, retain a similarly normative and aggregating function. To Boccaccio both gods and values are transient items in a moral ontology that acknowledges only one set of perennial items: natural impulses and dispositions. Boccaccio adopts a particular stance towards the emergence of values: genealogy is, for him, a distinctive way to examine the processes whereby beliefs, attitudes, and values come about.

In this issue we are proud to present eight essays celebrating the lives and works of some of the most pre-eminent political philosophers who wrote in the twentieth century. These essays are authored, moreover, by some of these philosophers' most distinguished students. Their readings can and, no doubt, will be contested; it is characteristic of political philosophy that its materials – textual as well as phenomenological – are subjects of debate.

This paper examines what is involved in using comparative methods within political theory and whether there should be a comparative political theory subfield. It argues that political theory consists of multiple kinds of activities that are either primarily “scholarly” or “engaged.” It is easy to imagine how scholarly forms of political theory can be, and have been, comparative. The paper critiques (not rejects) existing calls for the creation of a comparative political theory subfield focused on the study of non-Western texts. Comparative political theory needs to explain why it is not merely expanding the canon to include non-Western texts and why a certain non-Western text is “alien,” thus justifying the moniker comparative. Ten discrete theses are presented that argue that the strongest warrant for an engaged comparative political theory is the first-order evaluation of the implication of the contestations of norms, values, and principles between distinct and coherent doctrines of thought.

For Dewey education is the growth of mental powers, where “growth” has no fixed content but involves the increasing harmonization of individuals with society. That harmonization must respect the uniqueness of each person and his capacity for intelligence. Education aims to develop a model democratic society, which Dewey sees as similar to an ideal community of scientific inquirers. That comparison is highly questionable, however. Dewey's curricular emphases include science, geography, history, literature, and fine arts, the last two of which promote a greater appreciation for all of human life—provided society is not too separated into classes. Related to social division is what he considers the false problems of epistemology, with its separation between mind and world. But Dewey's failure to think more rigorously about the relation of philosophy to science makes his philosophy a poor bulwark against postmodernism.

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the founders of the modern technological world, Francis Bacon, has a penetrating and sustained lifelong engagement with the phenomenon of love or eros. Bacon's reflections on eros come in two stages. He first examines the human and moral meaning of love. Bacon attends to the exorbitant promises of love—to bring us into a perfect condition, to grant us eternity—and finds them confused or unreasonable. Bacon then moves away from an engagement with the simple experiences of love and their promises. Departing from the human perspective, he proceeds to examine love, from the point of view of natural science or cosmology, as a fundamental property or principle of matter. This departure tends to lead, at least in the case of Bacon's followers, if not in Bacon's own case, to an obliviousness to both his cynical and appreciative insights into love.

With the publication of Harry Jaffa's New Birth of Freedom, it is possible to see the overall trajectory of his thinking and to come to some assessment of it. New Birth redeems a forty-year-old promise for a sequel to Crisis of the House Divided. One problem, however, is that the sequel contradicts many of the claims in Crisis. These differences provide an ingress for reconsidering Jaffa's overall project and, in particular, his relation with his teacher, Leo Strauss.

This essay provides an overview of the life and theoretical concerns of Hannah Arendt. It traces the way her experience as a German Jew in the 1930s informed her analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism and her idea of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The essay takes issue with those of Arendt's critics who detect a lack of “love of the Jewish people” in her writing. It also traces the way Arendt's encounter with totalitarian evil led to a deeper questioning of the anti-democratic impulses in the Western tradition of political thought—a questioning that finds its fullest articulation in The Human Condition and On Revolution. Throughout, my concern is to highlight Arendt's contribution to thinking “the political” in a way friendly to the basic phenomenon of human plurality. I also highlight her recovery and extension of the main themes of the civic republican tradition.

I am indebted to Professor Kraynak for the generous things he says about my career as teacher and scholar. I have had vague hopes for some such recognition in a distant future, but not in my lifetime. Leo Strauss, who had virtually no recognition in his lifetime except from the circle he created around himself, is having a veritable renaissance, some thirty or more years after his death. I believe that, in the last several years, there may have been more new books about Strauss than about Lincoln (the most written about of all time!).

The essay examines Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, which portrays the love of honor animating political life in early Rome. Demonstrating the relation of the soul and the city, the poem depicts the psychology of honor, envy, and shame; the near identity of moral worth and public reputation; the close connection between deeds and truth, action and speech; the insufficiency of moral intention; the city as an association of fathers; the relation between the inner and the outer man, soul and body; manly courage as proof of feminine chastity; the private effects of a fully public life; and, generally, the simultaneously self-denying, self-affirming core of Rome's political life. The essay concludes by considering why Shakespeare, in presenting a historically accurate portrait of early Rome, puts it in the mouth not of a Roman, but of a medieval or Renaissance narrator.

An increasing concern for the place of religion in global politics in the past decade is reflected in the work of William Cavanaugh, a political theologian coming from the radical orthodox movement of the Roman Catholic tradition. Taking aim at key tropes in international relations, Cavanaugh introduces a strong critique of the legitimacy of the state and against its martial attitude. This review questions the historicity and generalizability of Cavanaugh's analysis. It also challenges Cavanaugh's exaltation of the church from both an internal and external perspective. Finally, it considers the expanded role of the state as compared to Cavanaugh's vision of the martial state. By way of conclusion, it questions the extent to which Cavanaugh provides an alternative to consigning religious groups to civil society or a workable role for Christian engagement with global politics, even though he provides us with a strong critique of the state.

Locke's political philosophy, like any that centers on individual rights such as property rights, raises the question whether human beings have any duty to charity, or economic assistance, to the needy. Locke's works contain some strong statements in favor of such a duty, but in his definitive treatment of property, chapter 5 of the Second Treatise of Government, he is conspicuously silent on charity. Based on a reading of that chapter and other texts, I conclude that the basis of Lockean morality is not individual right per se, but concern for the common good. I compare Locke's theory of property to those of Aquinas, Grotius, and Pufendorf in order to shed light on Locke's view of property and charity. Finally, I argue that Locke has a tiered moral theory that separates justice from charity. His economic and political theories focus on justice, masking Locke's actual devotion to charity.

I must begin by expressing my deep appreciation to Paul Rowe for bringing my work on theopolitics before a different audience than the ones to which I am accustomed and for bringing his own expertise in political science and political theory to bear on my writings. The depth and incisiveness of his critique provide me an opportunity to rethink and clarify my ideas. It also gives me the opportunity to prove that I do not deserve being mentioned in the same sentence as Che Guevara and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!

In this paper I consider Strauss's case for philosophy as a “way of life.” Strauss's case rests, I believe, on a view of philosophy first as a quest—an erotic aspiration—for knowledge of the whole and second as committed to a skeptical view of our ability ever to attain to such knowledge. Moreover, can the philosophic life defend itself against its most powerful alternative, namely, the case for revealed religion or does philosophy itself rest upon an act of faith of its own? I argue that philosophy has the resources to defend itself but only once it is understood as an open-ended (“zetetic”) search for truth. Only by returning to a conception of philosophy as “skeptic in the original sense of the term” can philosophy avoid the twin dogmatisms of faith and unbelief.

I am grateful to Michael Zuckert for his kindness in remembering my birthday—something that I am trying hard to forget—but I am still more grateful for the seriousness and competence with which he has subjected my work to analysis and scrutiny.

From the beginning of his career in the First Discourse to its end in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau makes clear that the problem of self-knowledge is a central problem—perhaps the central problem—that his thought seeks to address. This essay studies Rousseau's thought in the light of that problem. I argue that attention to the problem of self-knowledge is essential to understanding the rank order of Rousseau's five major human types—the citizen, natural man, the bourgeois, Emile, and Jean-Jacques. I further argue that self-knowledge remains stubbornly problematic even for Rousseau's most exemplary figures—the solitary walker of the Reveries and Emile. The persistence of the problem of self-knowledge in Rousseau's thought makes it clear that he was more concerned with presenting a comprehensive depiction of human problems than he was with teaching us how to solve them.

The philosopher is first and foremost a human being whose humanity must be served by his academic profession if it is not to be irremediably pretentious, farcical, and corrupt. This is the Voegelinian paradigm. The present essay argues that anybody who is seriously interested in understanding Eric Voegelin as he understood himself is obliged to come to grips with the issues evoked by the perspectives this statement suggests. It is further argued that several general consequences follow: (a) underlining the loving tension toward divine Reality in open existence as central; (b) abandoning doctrinal fixation of separating faith and reason as supernatural and natural, respectively; (c) discarding as egophany the arrogant pretense of autonomous reason as its originator in self-sufficient human speculators; and (d) constantly remembering that devotion to the discipline and conventions of inquiry and of society must ever defer to devotion to the truth of existence.

The Roman Catholic Church was famously late to embrace the right to religious freedom. Some have plausibly maintained that when, in 1965, the cardinals and bishops at the Second Vatican Council overwhelmingly adopted the Declaration on Religious Freedom—known by the first two words of its official Latin version: Dignitatis Humanae—the church betrayed one of its most traditional and established theological teachings. The right to religious freedom, according to international law, rests in part on respect for human dignity. Thus there is a prima facie link between the liberal democratic justification and the church's 1965 justification. But, as I will argue, the appeal to human dignity is not a preserve of modern liberal democracy. Indeed, we can imagine a government that limits religious freedom because it wishes to save souls, and this precisely out of a respect for human dignity. A similar view was held by the pre-Vatican II church. Thus the appeal to human dignity is not evidence of a fundamental shift by the church. What then does account for the church's undeniable change of direction? Human dignity by itself cannot provide the fundamental justification for the right to religious freedom. Another ingredient is needed: distrust, born of long historical experience, of government authority to adjudicate questions of religious truth. The church in Dignitatis Humanae accepted this lesson of history, a lesson available to believers of a variety of stripes as well as nonbelievers.

Constructivist political theory, championed most prominently by John Rawls, builds up a conception of justice from the minimal requirements of political life. It has two powerful attractions. It promises a kind of civic unity in the face of irresolvable differences about the good life. It also offers a foundation for human rights that is secure in the face of those same differences. The very parsimony that is its strength, however, deprives it of the resources to condemn some atrocities. Because it focuses on the political aspect of persons, it has difficulty cognizing violence done to those aspects of the person that are not political, preeminently the body. Constructivism thus can be only a part of an acceptable theory of justice.