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Becoming Political argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. By recuperating in Spinoza’s writings a “vital republicanism,” the book illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. On this view, judgment furnishes the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. Each chapter of the book offers a different perspective on the political meaning of judgment as the concept operates and evolves in Spinoza’s texts. The resulting interpretations of Spinoza’s vital republicanism analyze judgment in relation to an array of other key concepts, including freedom, affect, community, constitution, law, state, religion, and, above all, democracy. In addition to providing an interpretive key for understanding Spinoza, the book’s organizing idea of “vital republicanism” puts Spinoza’s thought in critical dialogue with various strains of contemporary political theory, from neorepublicanism to Italian biopolitics.

This book argues that the enduring importance of Leo Strauss lies in his recovery of the exoteric art of writing. That art was universally practiced by the greatest thinkers in Western philosophy and poetry prior to the modern Enlightenment. The book begins with Strauss’s own account of his recovery of exotericism (also called esotericism) in private letters he wrote to Jacob Klein in 1938-39. The candor of those letters makes them singular in a body of work marked by its own forms of caution or exotericism. The book then treats an essay of great importance in which Strauss not only showed how the Medieval philosopher Halevi practiced exotericism but also indicated why Strauss himself adopted exotericism. In four chapters dealing with “The Socratic Enlightenment” the book discusses first Strauss’s single-handed recovery of Xenophon from modern ridicule and neglect, focusing on Socrates’ theological-political program as Xenophon presented it. The chapter on Plato shows why Plato’s dialogues were always central to Strauss’s understanding of philosophy. A chapter on Seth Benardete’s book on Homer’s Odyssey shows that philosophy and political philosophy can, as Strauss suspected, be traced back to Homer. The final three chapters treat essays by Strauss on the modern Enlightenment in which he criticizes it and demotes it relative to the ancient and medieval Enlightenment. Here the book argues against Strauss’s evaluation and shows why Nietzsche’s attempt to advance the modern Enlightenment is wiser, morally superior, and truer to the history of exotericism.

This book argues for a concept of natural morality that unites the concepts of natural rights and the natural law in a new and compelling way. Drawing on the thought of John Locke and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is argued that natural rights and the natural law are each derived independently from the single underlying fact of self-ownership through self-consciousness. From an intellectual historical standpoint, this argument includes the claim that while the idea of natural rights is a distinctly modern one and the idea of the natural law is a distinctly classical and medieval one, these two ideas are nevertheless profoundly compatible with one another. Taking issue equally with historians of political thought in the tradition of Leo Strauss and New Natural Law theorists in the tradition of Jacques Maritain, classical liberals and communitarians, and political liberals and conservatives, this book aims to re-establish the natural foundational approach to morality in an original manner. The concept of natural morality that emerges possesses both the backward-looking potential to unite intellectual history in a new way, and the forward-looking potential to illuminate persuasive approaches to issues of contemporary political relevance including universal health care, the death penalty and same-sex marriage.

This book explores the meaning of freedom through its fundamental relationship to the experience of slavery. It makes transparent a central insight on the human condition often ignored or disavowed by philosophers and political theorists by examining a specific, highly overlooked form of flight from slavery, marronage, that was fundamental to Caribbean and Latin American slave systems and has widespread application to European, New World, and black diasporic societies. The theory derived from such flight is freedom as marronage. The text deepens our understanding of freedom not only by situating slavery as freedom’s opposite condition, but also by investigating the significance of the equally important liminal and transitional social space between slavery and freedom. It argues that we must pay more attention to the experience of the process by which people emerge from slavery to freedom. The study investigates ideas in Hannah Arendt, Philip Pettit, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Haitian Revolution, Édouard Glissant, and Rastafari to develop a theory of freedom that offers a compelling interpretive lens to decipher the quandaries of slavery, political language, and the experience of freedom still confronting us. Its contributions to freedom’s meaning, and by extension unfreedom, include a cautionary tale on the limitations of disavowing slavery and slave agency in conversations about flight. This work is significant for scholars in black studies, Caribbean thought, interdisciplinary philosophy, American studies, critical theory, contemporary political theory, and all those interested in the idea of freedom between past and future.

Individual agency is an emergent property of intersubjective exchanges, not solely a function of faculties such as the will that are strictly internal to the individual. It eludes personal control and it regularly comes apart from conscious choices and intentions, for persons are commonly the agents of outcomes they did not foresee or wish to bring about. Consequently, the exercise of agency is a non-sovereign experience. The non-sovereign nature of human agency makes it vulnerable to social inequality in deep and constitutive ways. The failure to understand agency’s non-sovereign character generates enduring injustice and regular failures of freedom for those who are marginalized in the U.S. and other ostensibly free societies today. Yet despite being non-sovereign, agency can be surprisingly potent: Revolutions happen. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty explores the nature of human agency, including both its vitality and its vulnerabilities. The book identifies emancipatory sources of agency under conditions of domination and oppression, and it suggests a new, pluralist way to understand political freedom. Non-sovereign freedom should be conceived in a plural way because it takes diverse forms, happens in many different places, and aims at a variety of ends. The book reconstructs liberal individualism in fundamental ways. It offers new categories for conceiving human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty. It brings experiences of the marginalized to the center of political theory and the study of freedom, with a focus on race, gender, and sexual orientation, and it helps point the way to a future that finally achieves freedom for all.

The book is a contribution to the genealogy and critique of ourselves, and of our own present, advocated by Foucault. It does that by focusing on the problem of desire in our western culture. For centuries, it was thought that desire needed to be dominated in order for the good life to flourish. This began to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when desire was no longer seen as something to be governed, or as an object of pastoral and spiritual care, but as an instrument of government. Liberalism, the book argues, coincides with this shift in attitude. Far from amounting to a straightforward liberation of desire, this onto-historical shift amounts to a specific process of subjectivation, one that continues to shape our present. It required the emergence of specific rationalities (political economy, the science of sexuality, the philosophy and psychology of recognition), each of which frames desire in a precise way, and the collaboration of various institutions – the court room, the market, the family, schools, the office, etc. Together, they amount to a formidable operation of normalization - that is, a new way of experiencing, understanding and governing the (desiring) self - and constitute the pillars of what, following Foucault, the book calls liberal governmentality. But a critique of ourselves also asks if and how we could govern ourselves differently, and the sort of subjects we could become. The book concludes by advocating a sovereign, anarchic form of desire as an alternative to liberal governmentality.

This book discusses Marx’s formulation of a theory that, since it is supposedly practical, changes or will change the world. The discussion is divided into three parts, including Marx’s Theory of Practice, Marx and Marxism on materialism, Feuerbach and Hegel, and On the Practice of Marx’s Theory, or the Transition from Capitalism to Communism. The first part argues that Marx, under the general influence of Hegel, formulates a supposedly practical alternative to the view outlined in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Special attention is given to the Marxian view of the traditional philosophical theme of human flourishing as social freedom. The second part discusses the meaning of “materialism” for Marx, including the “Theses on Feuerbach,” as well as Marx’s understanding and critique of Hegelian dialectic. The third part considers four possible transitions from capitalism to communism, all of which fail: the revolutionary proletariat, economic crisis, the party as the vanguard of the revolution, and critical social theory. The conclusion argues that since Marx’s account of the transition from capitalism is impractical, Marx’s dream is only a dream.

This book presents the author's confrontation with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire, the philosopher's most beautiful and daring work, as well as his last and least understood. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of study of Rousseau, the book unfolds an original interpretation in two parts. The first part approaches the Rêveries not as another autobiographical text in the tradition of the Confessions and the Dialogues, but as a reflection on the philosophic life and the distinctive happiness it provides. The second turns to a detailed analysis of a work referred to in the Rêveries, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” which triggered Rousseau's political persecution when it was originally published as part of Émile. The examination of this most controversial of Rousseau's writings, which aims to lay the foundations for a successful non-philosophic life, brings to light the differences between Natural Religion as expressed by the Vicar and Rousseau's Natural Theology. Together, the two reciprocally illuminating parts of this study provide an indispensable guide to Rousseau and to the understanding of the nature of the philosophic life.

On Tyranny is Leo Strauss' classic reading of Xenophon's dialogue Hiero, or Tyrannicus, in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. Included are a translation of the dialogue from its original Greek, a critique of Strauss' commentary by the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and the complete correspondence between the two. This revised and expanded edition introduces important corrections throughout and expands Strauss' restatement of his position in light of Kojève's commentary to bring it into conformity with the text as it was originally published in France.

The book's central premise is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand obedience of its most powerful opponent, revealed religion. Philosophy must rationally justify and politically defend its free and unreserved questioning, and, in doing so, the book turns decisively to political philosophy. The first of three chapters determine four intertwined moments constituting the concept of political philosophy as an articulated and internally dynamic whole. The following two chapters develop the concept through the interpretation of two masterpieces of political philosophy: Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. The book provides a detailed investigation of Thoughts on Machiavelli, with an appendix containing Strauss's original manuscript headings for each of his paragraphs. Linking the problem of Socrates (the origin of political philosophy) with the problem of Machiavelli (the beginning of modern political philosophy), while placing between them the political and theological claims opposed to philosophy, Strauss's most complex and controversial book proves to be, as the book shows, the most astonishing treatise on the challenge of revealed religion. The final chapter, which offers a new interpretation of the Social Contract, demonstrates that Rousseau's most famous work can be adequately understood only as a coherent political-philosophic response to theocracy in all its forms.

This book argues for a major reconsideration of Plato as a rhetorical theorist and for a radical reframing of the relationship of rhetoric and philosophy. In the Republic, the failures of normal democratic discourse and of Socratic elenchic discourse (a discourse based on refutation) to defend justice, a foundational value for a democracy, produce a crisis that is both rhetorical and philosophical. The dialogue represents the crisis over the absence of a persuasive defense of justice as a situation beyond the scope of normal rhetorical practice and one that requires philosophy as a response to a world that is unjust and likely to remain so. In response to this crisis Plato develops a complex theory of persuasion as an act of constitution. This innovative philosophic rhetoric responds to the contingency and temporality that pose a continual threat to any political order, and especially to democracy. To develop a philosophical discourse that is politically effective and can speak to a non-philosophic audience, Plato appropriates literature and uses it rhetorically to reconstitute a citizenry so that they value justice. In this turn to literature as a rhetorical practice, the Republic becomes Plato’s democratic epic poem in which he represents mimetically the heroism of Socrates and his interlocutors as they pursue a revolutionary political discourse that can provide a genuine defense of justice.

This study is the first to put together and analyze Plato’s two-part presentation of Protagoras, the most famous sophist of all time. In the Protagoras Plato sets out the sophist’s moral-political teaching, and in the Theaetetus we learn of his theoretical doctrine. Protagoras turns out to be a devout atheist contemptuous of all ordinary morality, and he claims on that basis to teach his best students what wisdom is. Going together with this harsh moral-political teaching is a daunting theoretical one, according to which “a human being is the measure of all things.” In Protagoras’ hands this amounts to a radical relativism: how things appear to each really are for each, there being no stable, “objective” world against which to measure our necessarily private perceptions. Plato reveals that Protagoras was led to adopt that relativism in order to respond to the threat or challenge posed by religious piety to the very possibility of philosophy, understood as the way of life guided by autonomous human reason. Socrates too was concerned with that challenge, but in his engagement with Protagoras it becomes clear that he neither denigrated ordinary moral life nor succumbed to the temptation of a radical relativism.