In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

One of the most original political thinkers of the Enlightenment, Montesquieu utilized his passionate belief in toleration and the moral benefits of science to construct a naturalistic system of political science based on the study of history, comparative government, and human behavior. This volume reveals Montesquieu's purpose by exploring the range of his literary output, focusing on his scandalous novel, The Persian Letters (1721), his philosophical history, Considerations on the Greatness and Decline of the Romans (1734), and his magnum opus, (...) The Spirit of the Laws (1748). (shrink)

In "Upheavals of Thought", Martha Nussbaum offers a theory of the emotions. She argues that emotions are best conceived as thoughts, and she argues that emotion-thoughts can make valuable contributions to the moral life. She develops extensive accounts of compassion and erotic love as thoughts that are of great moral import. This paper seeks to elucidate what it means, for Nussbaum, to say that emotions are forms of thought. It raises critical questions about her conception of the structure of emotion, (...) and about her conception of compassion, in particular. Finally, the paper seeks to show how analyzing the structure, as well as the moral value, of the emotions ultimately requires entering the realm of religious ethics. (shrink)

Almost every country today contains adherents of different religions and different secular conceptions of the good life. Is there any alternative to a power struggle among them, leading most probably to either civil war or repression? The argument of this book is that justice as impartiality offers a solution. According to the theory of justice as impartiality, principles of justice are those principles that provide a reasonable basis for the unforced assent of those subject to them. The object of this (...) book is to set the theory out, explain its rationale, and respond to a variety of criticism that have been made of it. As the second volume of his work-in-progress, A Treatise on Social Justice, this work lies at the heart of a thriving academic debate which the author has played a key role in shaping. (shrink)

A look at political ethics covers cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy, and is accompanied by a description of modern public opinion about ...

Thomas Hobbes took a new look at the ways in which society should function, and he ended up formulating the concept of political science. His crowning achievement, Leviathan, remains among the greatest works in the history of ideas. Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures as well as methods of science were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world. This edition of Hobbes' landmark (...) work is based on the original text. It incorporates the author's own corrections and retains the period spelling and punctuation, offering both flavorful authenticity and the utmost clarity of expression. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume all explore the problem of the relation between moral philosophy and modernity. Charles Larmore addresses this problem by attempting to define the way distinctive forms of modern experience should orientate our moral thinking. Charles Larmore wonders whether the dominant forms of modern philosophy have not become blind to important dimensions of the moral life. The book argues against recent attempts to return to the virtue-centered perspective of ancient Greek ethics. As well as exploring the (...) differences between ancient and modern ethics, the author examines such topics as the roles of reason and history in our moral understanding, the inadequacy of philsophical naturalism, and the foundations of modern liberalism. There are also extended discussions of a number of leading contemporary philosophers: Rawls, Habermas, Williams and Rorty. (shrink)

In light of many recent critiques of Western modernity and its conceptual foundations, the problem of adequately justifying our most basic moral and political values looms large. Without recourse to traditional ontological or metaphysical foundations, how can one affirm — or sustain — a commitment to fundamentals? The answer, according to Stephen White, lies in a turn to “weak” ontology, an approach that allows for ultimate commitments but at the same time acknowledges their historical, contestable character. This turn, White suggests, (...) is already underway. His book traces its emergence in a variety of quarters in political thought today and offers a clear and compelling account of what this might mean for our late modern self-understanding. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Part One of Montesquieu's Idea of Justice comprises a survey of the currency in philosophical, ethical and aesthetic debate during the second half of the 17th century of the terms rapport and convenance, which are central to the enigmatic definition given to justice by Mon tesquieu in Lettres Persanes LXXXllI. In this survey, attention is concen trated on the way in which the connotations of these terms fluctuate with the divergent development of the methodological and speculative outgrowths of Cartesian ism (...) into two schools of thought, materialist and idealist, often widely at variance in their views of the nature and orga nization of the universe. In Part Two, Montesquieu's definition of justice is set against this background, whose doctrinal conflicts, because of the characteristic as sociations of its key terms, it may be taken to reflect, just as it may be held to epitomize, by virtue of its elaboration in the opening chapter of De l' Esprit des Lois and its close terminological affinities with the defini tion of law there given, an undoubtedly related conflict between the implications of causal determinism and the aspirations of idealist meta physics surviving at the heart of Montesquieu's outlook, and, remaining unresolved, often said to impair the coherence if not the validity of his theory of society. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

How did the US judiciary become so powerful—powerful enough that state and federal judges once vied to decide a presidential election? What does this prominence mean for the law, constitutionalism, and liberal democracy? In The Cloaking of Power, Paul O. Carrese provides a provocative analysis of the intellectual sources of today’s powerful judiciary, arguing that Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws, first articulated a new conception of the separation of powers and strong but subtle courts. Montesquieu instructed statesmen to (...) “cloak power” by placing judges at the center of politics, while concealing them behind juries and subtle reforms. Tracing this conception through Blackstone, Hamilton, and Tocqueville, Carrese shows how it led to the prominence of judges, courts, and lawyers in America today. But he places the blame for contemporary judicial activism squarely at the feet of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and his jurisprudential revolution, which he believes to be the source of the now-prevalent view that judging is merely political. To address this crisis, Carrese argues for a rediscovery of an independent judiciary—one that blends prudence and natural law with common law and that observes the moderate jurisprudence of Montesquieu and Blackstone, balancing abstract principles with realistic views of human nature and institutions. He also advocates for a return to the complex constitutionalism of the American founders and Tocqueville and for judges who understand their responsibility to elevate citizens above individualism, instructing them in law and right. (shrink)

In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned. The positivists and the Marxists were happy to throw eternal moral ity out of the window, confident that some magic temporal harmony would eventually follow Progress in by the front door. Their hopes may not have been fully realized, but they did succeed in discrediting (...) natural law. What is often not appreciated is the extent to which we have adopted the tenets of the philosophy they despised, borh in the field of politics, and in the field of personal and social ethics, which Barbeyrac called "la science des mreurs" and which the positivists re christened "social science". Consequently, though we live in a world whose freedom, such as it is, is largely a result of the popularization of the philosophy of natural law, and whose conscious and unconscious standards, such as they are, are a result of that philosophy as it became combined with Christianity, the doctrine of natural law is itself for gotten. In view of the oblivion into which it has fallen, natural law is a concept which means little to the average reader. All too often, Montesquieu scholars have traded on this oblivion in order to give an exaggerated picture of his originality. (shrink)

[1] The rise of modern paganism.--v. 2. The science of freedom.

This first comprehensive commentary on The Spirit of the Laws uncovers and explicates the plan of Montesquieu's famous but baffling treatise. Pangle brings to light Montesquieu's rethinking of the philosophical groundwork of liberalism, showing how The Spirit of the Laws enlarges and enriches the liberal conception of natural right by means of a new appeal to History as the source of basic norms.

Many theorists have addressed a central concern of current political theory by contending that the dithering intellectualism of left politics prevents genuine political action. Arguments and Fists confronts this concern by refuting these arguments, and reconciling philosophical debates with the realities of current activism. By looking at theorists such as Montesquieu, Kant, Rousseau, the book contradicts current academic debates and also goes against contemporary theory's image of the liberal political agent as a narrowly rational abstraction. Mika LaVaque-Manty also argues that (...) progressive political philosophy and political action go hand in hand. He then ventures past Kant and Rousseau to talk about specific environmental activism, finding middle ground between the two while asserting that the liberal urge for political reform stems from sound philosophical considerations about the nature of politics and isn't the "cowardly" afterthoughts some theorists have called it. Arguments and Fists then puts these theoretical insights to use, examining environmental justice movements and varieties of environmental radicalism, showing how liberal theory illuminates concrete contemporary political practices. (shrink)

A treatment of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, which argues that the novel is a philosophic critique of despotism in all its forms: domestic, political and religious. It shows that Montesquieu believed that the Enlightenment failed as a philosophy by not recognising man as an erotic being.

In this volume Anne M. Cohler shows the importance of Montesquieu's teaching for modern legislation and for modern political prudence generally, with specific reference to his impact on The Federalist and Tocqueville. In so doing, she delineates Montesquieu's contribution to political philosophy and suggests new ways to think about the formation of the American Constitution.

Qui se souvient aujourd'hui de l'homme que fut Montesquieu? Qui se souvient encore de l'esprit léger, presque roué, qui jouissait à Paris des libertés de la Régence, du mondain assidu des salons? Qui se souvient du voyageur sillonnant l'Europe et ses cours princières? A bien des égards, Montesquieu paraît engoncé dans la pourpre du magistrat, figé dans la pompe romaine, immortalisé sur des billets de banque ou dans les dictionnaires. Je me suis dit qu'il y avait mieux à faire qu'à (...) statufier Montesquieu. Une fois quitté Matignon, je me suis lancé le défi de le relire. J'ai trouvé un homme curieux de tout, vif, drôle souvent ; un écrivain cultivant tous les genres ; un sage par-dessus tout, dur aux méchants et aux sots, amoureux de la liberté, de sa liberté et plus encore de celle d'autrui. J'ai surtout pensé que la réflexion de l'auteur de L'Esprit des lois sur la liberté et sur le pouvoir n'avait rien perdu de son actualité et que les citoyens du XXIe siècle pourraient même y puiser de précieux enseignements. Alain Juppé. (shrink)