Lee Ward

John Locke and modern life

Introduction 1. The democratization of mind 2. The state of nature 3. Constitutional government 4. The natural rights family 5. Lockes liberal education 6. The church 7. International relations Conclusion.

Modern democracy and the theological-political problem in Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson

Acknowledgements Introduction: A Pre-history of Democracy 1. Spinoza and Democracy as the Best Regime 2. Rousseau and Democratic Civil Religion 3. Thomas Jefferson: Bringing Democracy Down from the Heavens Conclusion References

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on a Liberal Right of Secession

Contemporary political theorists remain divided over (1) whether a right to secede exists, and (2) under what conditions such a right could be legitimately exercised. This study seeks to shed light on this complex issue by examining the works of two of the philosophical founders of liberalism: Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. I will argue that while neither Hobbes nor Locke discussed secession directly in terms of the categories political theorists use today, we can discern important elements of their political teaching that contribute toward the formulation of two distinct forms of a secession right. In Hobbes’ preservationist and Locke’s institutionalist argument, we find a distinctively liberal conception of a secession right that can help us frame the parameters of our thinking about secession in the twenty-first century.

Reconsidering C. B. Macpherson: From Possessive Individualism to Democratic Theory and Beyond: by Phillip Hansen, Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, pp. 376. ISBN: 978-1442630598, Publication Date: 2015

bar of revelation” (PL, 81; italics added). From this statement one sees that the Islamic and Jewish thinkers that Strauss deals with—Alfarabi and Maimonides—are unbelievers. As a result, any mention of revealed truth and prophecy should be understood within the theologico-political context in which they occur—as a defense of philosophy before the bar of revelation. For this reason, I question whether Strauss’s reference to Maimonides’s “aristotelization” is as straightforward as it seems. Clearly, Maimonides had an interest in cosmological matters. But even for the Strauss of 1935 this interest is involved in the dialectic between the philosopher and the divinely grounded city. I would give the honor of comparison with Meet The Beatles to Strauss’s Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, or perhaps his earlier essays from the 1920s. It seems to me that Philosophy and Law is more adequately compared to Revolver; it contains in germinal form almost all of the developments that come later. Whether we speak of the Ancients and the Moderns, Platonic political philosophy, the political function of prophetology, philosophy and revealed law, or Islamic/Jewish medieval philosophy as the themes that most clearly expose (what Strauss would, in the 1940s, refer to as) the relation between Jerusalem and Athens, one finds it being developed and carefully thought through in Philosophy and Law. Thanks to Parens’s provocative work, it may be time for a full-scale reevaluation of the underappreciated elements of Strauss’s 1935 text.

Republican Political Theory and Irish Nationalism

Abstract Republicanism has enjoyed something of a revival in recent times among political theorists. This article examines the way in which republican strains of democratic political philosophy impacted political thinkers and leaders in the case of modern Ireland. Although the Republic of Ireland was officially established in 1949, the question of its origins was a source of contention throughout the first part of the twentieth century. I argue that the intellectual origins of Irish republicanism lay in the impact of French revolutionary thought on Irish nationalist leaders in the 1790s, and then trace these republican ideas through the public debates and tracts that marked the major stages in the development of the Irish Republic. In particular, I focus on the principles informing the 1916 Declaration of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, as well as the central arguments employed in the debates surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948. My aim is to demonstrate that republican ideas affected nationalism to such an extent that in Ireland republicanism and nationalism became, and in some respects still are, practically synonymous.

James Otis and the Americanization of John Locke

James Otis has long been seen as one of the most important proponents of the American cause in the early phase of the imperial dispute with Britain in the mid-1760s. While Otis’s use of natural law principles drawn from John Locke is well known, Otis’s sophisticated treatment of Locke’s constitutional principles of ‘subordination’ and ‘delegation’ of powers has received much less attention. This study will argue that Otis’s importance rests in part on the way in which he employed, but also crucially modified, aspects of Locke’s constitutional theory in order to draft this venerable philosophical source into the service of a nascent American account of the British Empire. In the process, Otis not only made Locke a champion of colonial self-government but also drew theoretical materials from Locke that would be the seedbed for the later distinctively American conception of federalism.

“Gods Would Be Needed to Give Men Laws”: Rousseau on the Modern Republican Legislator

Abstract Rousseaus account of the legislator of “superior intelligence” in Book II of On the Social Contract is often viewed as one of the most inegalitarian and undemocratic features of his entire political theory. I argue that, on the contrary, his treatment of the legislator is a central element of Rousseaus effort to construct a viable theory of popular sovereignty in modernity. I focus on two main aspects of Rousseaus legislator account. First, I demonstrate how Rousseau attempted to establish a popular normative foundation for his legislator to, in effect, democratize the more traditional notion of political founding and statesmanship associated with his predecessor Montesquieu. Second, I argue that Rousseau presents the legislator as an agent for future change in the relation of politics and religion, especially for the establishment of civil religions that promote tolerance and social peace. Rousseaus legislator thus embodies democratic principles of legitimacy for a modern republican founding narrative designed for post-feudal, secular Europe.

A Note on a Note on Locke's “Great Art of Government”

“A Note on Lockes ‘Great Art of Government’” presents a valuable and provocative argument that scholars have hitherto paid insufficient attention to an important ambiguity in John Lockes frustratingly brief account of the “great art of government” in the crucial fifth chapter of the Second Treatise of Government (Locke, 1960 : sec. 42, l. 23). However, there is one pivotal point upon which the notes analysis may conceal as much as it reveals, and in order to frame the debate properly it is important to establish clarity about the nature of the possible ambiguity in Lockes description of the goal of the political art being “the increase of lands,” or alternatively the “increase of hands.” Following John Goughs suggestion (Locke, 1966 : 23, n. 1), the note maintains that the context of the passage in section 42 of the Second Treatise relating to the “great art of government” favours the use of hands rather than lands (Locke, 1960 : sec. 42, ll. 22–23). However, there is strong evidence indicating that the context of this passage is not what the note suggests it is.

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England. By Vickie B. Sullivan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 284p.

The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America

75.00. In this important and insightful book Vickie B. Sullivan offers an impressive and ambitious examination of the philosophical roots and historical development of liberal democratic theory in early-modern England. In the Introduction, Sullivan frames her analysis in the context of the various contours of the debate about the character of early-modern thought between the advocates of classical republicanism, on the one hand, and the proponents of the liberal school, on the other. The opening chapters on Machiavelli and Hobbes, respectively, provide a provocative interpretive lens through which to evaluate and critique the prevailing liberal and republican paradigms. The lions share of the book deals in five successive chapters with the way in which English republicans from the civil war era through the early Hanoverian period—including Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and the coauthors of Catos Letters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon—modified, balanced, and ultimately synthesized the Machiavellian republican and Hobbesian liberal elements of their complex philosophical inheritance. With the final consummation of this synthesis in the commercial republic of Catos Letters, Sullivan argues, a distinctively modern form of liberal republicanism was born.