The Locke Essay: Achievement and Promise

Abstract

Strauss's essay on Locke is devoted to Locke's early lectures on the law of nature, a text unpublished when he initially wrote on Locke in Natural Right and History. One purpose of his essay was to show that the Locke text did not contradict the position on the law of nature that Strauss had earlier attributed to him. Strauss also used the essay as an opportunity to further his own reflections on traditional natural law doctrine.     

The Presidency and the News Media

Abstract

Leo Strauss, often considered a critic of modernity, is famous for his claim that Machiavelli, in turning away from the classical tradition, is its originator. Yet his “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero” presents a concise indictment of that tradition and a remarkably sympathetic account of the political and philosophic motives that led to the rupture. In light of this tension, Strauss's interest in Xenophon appears as a useful counterweight to both.     

Liberty and Community: A Liberal Resolution

Much has been written in the last few years regarding Leo Strauss's political attachments, especially with respect to his purported influence over American neoconservatives. Problematically, Strauss scrupulously avoided explicit ideological entanglements, rarely addressed particular policy debates, and left little guidance for the statesman or thoughtful commentator interested in drawing practical political inferences from his philosophical writing. To add further ambiguity to already muddy waters, Strauss's discussion of the relation between prudence and philosophic insight coupled with the many and incompatible roles he assigns to the philosopher within the city make it unclear if there is anything at all that philosophy can teach us of political significance. The following essay aims to explain Strauss's view of the political function of philosophy in light of his distinction between classic and modern utopianism and what he calls in On Tyranny "philosophic politics."     

A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: What We Know about the Role of the Media in State Politics

Abstract

This article explores the intellectual itinerary of the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent. In particular, it highlights his efforts to do justice to the three great “poles” of human existence: philosophy, politics, and religion. Manent is shown to be a philosophically minded Christian, one who thinks politically and who rejects the temptation to “despise the temporal order.” Manent's reservations about the European project in its present form are shown to be rooted in a understanding of politics that emphasizes the need to weave together “communion” and “consent” if Europeans are to avoid administrative despotism and those postpolitical fantasies that prevent them from thinking and acting politically. The article ends with a reflection on Manent's impressive history of “political forms” in the Western world.     

Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It

Abstract

Responding to my generous critics, I attempt to clarify my view of reason’s responsibility and its limits, and I underline my agreement with Strauss on the insuperability of political thinking and thus the impossibility of any neat separation between theory and practice or of any trans-political doctrine of transcendence. Finally, I resist invitations to overcome tensions between vertical and horizontal transcendence and thus to go beyond responsibility to autonomy.     

Humphrey and Civil Rights: The Politics of Racial Progress

Abstract

This article explores and defends Leo Strauss's interpretation of Edmund Burke's thought. Strauss argues that Burke's conservatism is rooted in the modern empiricist school of John Locke and others. Following Strauss, this article sets out to consider the suitability of these foundational principles to conservative politics. Burke wants to temper or ennoble Lockean politics by inspiring sublime attachment to the political community and its traditions, but he shies away from stating universal standards according to which the traditions of political communities ought to be judged. This respect for reason in history without moorings in transcendent standards of reason or revelation leaves his conservatism on precarious ground.     

现代性的歧路:清末民初的社会达尔文主义思潮

自进化论传入中国,斯宾塞的社会达尔文主义提供了一条物竞天择、适者生存的富强之路。斯宾塞的竞争进化论,与中国文化传统中儒家的经世致用、法家的富国强兵相结合,形成了近代中国物质主义与功利主义的狂潮。社会达尔文主义颠覆了两千年来中国传统的礼的秩序,代之以竞争为核心的力的秩序,并产生了以强者为主导的新国民人格。然而,这一去价值、去伦理的力的秩序,在清末民初产生了严重的政治后果,它造就了民国,却毁了共和。五四知识分子痛定思痛,重新思考中国的复兴之路,开始了从富强到文明的历史转变。     

Freudian Slips and Coteries of Vice: The Sexual Offences Act of 1967*

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 made the first inroads to decriminalising men's homosexual sex since buggery was made a capital offence under Henry VIII. The act was drafted at the direction of the 1957 Wolfenden report, but bore the distinct hallmark of individuals of the 1967 parliament. More complex than the dictated product of Wolfenden, and more idiosyncratic than a simple reflection of the social climate of the 1960s, the private member's bill was a Labour initiative with bipartisan support, driven in the Commons by the bizarre motivations of its sponsor, Labour member for Pontypool, Leo Abse. Contrary to popular myths about the aims of decriminalisation, Abse's crusading Freudian motivation was concerned with discouraging, more than allowing, homosexual behaviour. Similarly, ‘privacy’– the gift of the house of lords to sexual regulation – was aimed largely at curtailing men's sexual practices, along with secreting them away. Thus, while the act is typically associated with a general ideal of freedom, much parliamentary motivation concerned control and the prevention of sexual activities.     

Responsibility Ethics and Postliberalism: Rereading H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation

Abstract

Postliberals have hailed H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation as a harbinger of narrative theology. A careful reading of Niebuhr's argument, however, suggests a theological ethic that is at once attentive to the narrative formation of agency and yet distinct from postliberalism because of its attention to the divine object of Christians' stories. Niebuhr's theocentrism yields a view of narrative as opened from the inside because it requires appropriation of what he calls "external" narratives in order to do justice to the sovereignty of God. The result is a theological ethic which is sharply critical of modern conceptions of agency and yet continually sifted by contemporary insights and experience.     

Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator,SJ, ed., Reconciliation,Justice, and Peace: The Second African Synod

Abstract

The World Social Forum (WSF) emerged in Brazil from a network of grassroots anti-globalization activists and campaigners as an alternative to the World Economic Forum. The WSF focuses on human development in the holistic sense of "social capital" and provides a forum for Southern perspectives to be heard. From its birth, faith-based organizations have been prominent in the WSF. The seventh World Social Forum (WSF) took place in Africa in January 2007. Just before that event, theologians attending the WSF held a pre-meeting of the World Forum of Theology and Liberation (WFTL). This paper offers a brief outline of the World Forum of Theology and Liberation: the event, the programme, an assessment, recommendations for future Forums and transcending moments of the event. In so doing it attempts to express the suffocated cry of an Africa, in large measure, ignored and forgotten.     

Saddam Hussein,Islam, and Just War Theory: The Case for a Pre-emptive Strike

Abstract

America and its allies face a world that has become more and more dangerous with its weapons of mass destruction and a shadowy world of terrorists more than willing to use them. The wisdom of the past does not have the prescience or universal insight to deal with this new threat. America and its allies must change direction if they wish to respond to the challenge in an effective manner, even if it means employing policies that seemed dubious in the past. The state is called to protect its citizens in a Machiavellian world, filled with depravity and compromise. The church is called to submit to the superior wisdom of those who have the special intelligence, experience and expertise to handle the current crisis.     

Cleansing Les Halles: Discourses of Health and Disease in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris

The analysis of hygiene and nutrition in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre will guide us to the relationship his characters establish with their own bodies and with existence, as well as clarify the liaison between that of the intimate and the social. Undoubtedly, Beckettian bodies are willingly badly known, poorly treated, and continually exposed to degradation. However, scorn over nutrition and sleaziness toward hygiene allow an époché of the body that consents to the enlargement of the space of consciousness.     

The Gompers v. Buck's Stove Saga: A Constitutional Case Study in Dialogue, Resistance, and the Freedom of Speech

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Public vices,private remedies in nineteenth-century Italy: Giulia Falletti di Barolo Colbert and Le Forzate

In nineteenth-century Italy notions of femininity and, no less, masculinity influenced the ways in which crime was viewed. The result was that criminality was perceived, judged and explained differently according to the sex of the offender. At every stage in the penal process, cultural understandings of what women were like, and how they ought to behave, operated to define the appropriate response to their misconduct and to structure their punishment. These 'gendered' aspects of criminal justice have influenced the practices of prosecution and sentencing, and, most clearly of all, the special regimes and attitudes adopted in women's prisons: throughout the century male prison regimes emphasized discipline and deterrence, while female prisons developed individualized programmes of 'moral regeneration'. This article deals with the history of the first prison destined exclusively for women - which was opened in Turin in 1821 - with the circumstances which brought about its creation as well as with its organizational structure and its aims. Its promoter - both in money and in spirit - was a woman, named Giulia Falletti di Barolo Colbert. Giving special consideration to the ideals of its foundress, this article examines how nineteenth-century perceptions of the female criminal differentiated the nature and purpose of penal servitude for women.