Robert C. Bartlett

On the Politics of Faith and Reason: The Project of Enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu

This study seeks to contribute to our understanding of the original political goals of the Enlightenment, especially in its confrontation with the Bible as a source of political guidance. It consists primarily of an exegesis of two seminal works of the period, Pierre Bayles Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (1682) and Montesquieus Spirit of the Laws (1748). With clarity, grace, and power, both works make manifest the grandeur of the Enlightenments philosophic vision, the staggering ambition of its attempt to overcome the Bible as a political authority, and the ultimate vulnerability of that attempt, the full consequences of which we in the post-Enlightenment era must come to grips with.

Socratic Political Philosophy and the Problem of Virtue

Platos Meno deserves careful examination today because it highlights two facets of the concern for virtue neglected or obscured by the current revival of virtue among liberal theorists: the devotion to a good that cannot simply be reduced either to individual flourishing or to communal well-being—what Plato calls “nobility” or “the noble”; and the complex relation of virtue so understood to the concern for religion or piety. If the sought-for incorporation of virtue into liberal thought and practice today fails to grapple with these profound human concerns, in the first place by recognizing their existence, the language of virtue and its attendant moral sentiments will remain a matter more of scholarly debate than of lived practice.

Plato's Critique of Hedonism in the Philebus

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question “How ought I to live?”, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Platos, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasures claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of “the good” with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.

An introduction to Hesiod's Works and Days

The present essay sketches the outline and the intention of Hesiods Works and Days . Hesiods principal task appears to be the identification (and praise) of the best way of life for his wayward brother Perses, but in carrying out this task, Hesiod speaks of justice and its human and divine supports in such a way as to go well beyond what would be of benefit to his brother. For in the course of his analysis of justice, or as a result of it, Hesiod praises also the life of autonomous understanding, the life that appears to be the poets own. In crucial ways, then, Hesiod explores the chief themes of what was to become political philosophy, and for this reason, among others, he deserves the attention of all those who are also concerned with it.

On the decline of contemporary political development studies

This study argues that the self-described “malaise” in the study of political development theory is in part the product of the early attempt to strip judgments of value from those of fact in the interests of a more scientific comparative politics; that the resulting science has been inclined to ignore or neglect what may be the most fundamental difference between the modern and premodern worlds, namely the elimination of all religious concerns from those of politics proper (the “separation of church and state”); and that this neglect is in turn linked with the crisis in self-confidence characteristic not only of the science of comparative politics but of science or rationalism simply.

Sophistry as a Way of Life

Socrates’s life is noteworthy not least for its unnatural end: Socrates was executed by democratic Athens on a twofold charge of not believing in the city’s gods and of corrupting the young. Inasmuch as Socrates’s way of life and the death to which it led are intended by Plato to be instructive and even exemplary, he seems intent on indicating a fundamental tension between the philosophic life as Socrates lived it and political life, even when, as in the case of Athens, it is characterized by considerable freedom and enlightenment. This tension is treated most directly in the four dialogues that depict the trial and execution of Socrates (Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo). Yet interwoven with these most political works are three dialogues that record conversations originally occurring immediately before (Theaetetus) and immediately after (Sophist, Statesman) the initiation of court proceedings against Socrates (Theaetetus 210d1–4). And this trilogy of dialogues presents Socrates in his relation to the two great camps of philosophy prior to him, that represented by (among others) Heraclitus, who stressed the fundamental importance of motion or a certain kind of “relativism,” and that of Parmenides, who evidently denied motion altogether (consider Theaetetus 152e2–5).