The book roots corruption in the idea of a departure from conventional standards, and thus offers an account not only of its corrosiveness but also of its malleability and controversiality. In the course of a broadranging exploration, it examines various links between private and public corruption, connecting the latter with other social and political structures.

Plato wrote dialogues. While there has been attention to the dramatic elements of Plato's dialogues by a number of scholars, there has been much less attention to the narrative style of the dialogues. I argue that we should consider whether the dialogues are recited or presented like dramatic works with each character speaking his own words—or as a mixture of these narrative forms. By employing this interpretive tool to read the Republic, I illustrate how paying attention to the narrative style (...) enables us to see a democratic Socrates who undermines readings of the Republic famously offered by Karl Popper and Leo Strauss. Plato appears then as neither a defender of the "closed society" nor an advocate of the elite rule of the wise over the many. (shrink)

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

They do not understand that being brought apart is carried back together with itself; it is a back-stretching harmony as of the bow and the lyre. Herakleitus, Frag. 51 “Tell me, you, the heir of the argument,” I said, “what was it Simonides said about justice that you assert he said correctly?”“That it is just to give to each what is owed,” he said. “In saying this he said a fine thing, at least in my opinion.” Plato, Republic 331e.

The Phoenician Women, Euripides' peculiar retelling and refashioning of the Theban myth, offers a portrait of Antigone before she becomes the actor we mostly know today from Sophocles' play. In this under-studied Greek tragedy, Euripides portrays the political and epistemological dissolution that allows for Antigone 's appearance in public. Whereas Sophocles' Antigone appears on stage ready to confront Creon with her appeal to the universal unwritten laws of the gods and later dissolves into the female lamenting a lost womanhood, Euripides' (...) Antigone experiences the opposite journey, thereby offering insights into the conditions that allow for her exposure in the political arena. A speech by Eteocles at the center of the play questions the existence of absolutes, calls injustice beautiful, and opens the door for Antigone 's entrance into the public sphere. With this speech Eteocles challenges us to consider the conditions of political openness in the modern age. (shrink)

The Phoenician Women, Euripides’ peculiar retelling and refashioning of the Theban myth, offers a portrait of Antigone before she becomes the actor we mostly know today from Sophocles’ play. In this under-studied Greek tragedy, Euripides portrays the political and epistemological dissolution that allows for Antigone’s appearance in public. Whereas Sophocles’ Antigone appears on stage ready to confront Creon with her appeal to the universal unwritten laws of the gods and later dissolves into the female lamenting a lost womanhood, Euripides’ Antigone (...) experiences the opposite journey, thereby offering insights into the conditions that allow for her exposure in the political arena. A speech by Eteocles at the center of the play questions the existence of absolutes, calls injustice beautiful, and opens the door for Antigone’s entrance into the public sphere. With this speech Eteocles challenges us to consider the conditions of political openness in the modern age. (shrink)

This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call ‘hyphenated-democracies’, each of which adds a conceptual framework developed in early modern Europe to the language of democracy: representative-democracy, liberal-democracy, constitutional-democracy, republican-democracy. These hyphenated-democracies emphasize the restraints placed on the power of political authorities. In contrast, Athenian democracy with the people ruling over themselves rested on the fundamental principle of equality rather than the limitations placed on that rule. However, equality as the defining normative principle of democracy raises its own (...) problems, namely: How do we – of limited vision – identify who is equal, and what injustices attend the criteria used to establish who is equal? Consideration of several ancient tragedies illustrates how the Athenian playwrights explored these questions and how they identified the challenges faced by those who understand democracy as grounded on egalitarian principles. (shrink)

Who bears responsibility for the actions of a city or state? Is it the entity that we sometimes call a nation? Or the individual members of the nation? Shakespeare’s Henry V includes a brief interchange the night before the battle at Agincourt that addresses this question. A disguised king and the common soldiers of his army debate who is responsible for the deaths that will occur during the forthcoming battle if the war they are fighting is unjust: the king or (...) his soldiers? Who will be punished on Judgment Day? The interchange opens up reflections on the challenge of deciding who acts when a state acts. Henry V is a play that emphasizes the role of the imagination as central to both stagecraft and the politics of creating a nation. Engaging with the medieval theory of the “king’s two bodies,” the Henry of Shakespeare’s play is caught between the desire to be the embodiment of the imagined nation and yet be his own “natural person” when questions of responsibility for the actions of the nation emerge. Dependent on the imagination to build a unified nation of diverse peoples, Henry desires to escape responsibility for the potentially unjust actions of the nation by focusing on the private actions of his individual subjects. The play thereby brings questions of responsibility for the actions of collective bodies founded by the imagination to the fore and forces us to explore who is responsible when states or nations act. (shrink)

I consider Sophocles’s tragedy the Ajax against the backdrop of Pericles’s invocation of silence about and from women, Pericles’s citizenship law of 451BCE and Aristotle’s understanding of the human being as a political animal possessing logos. I argue that in the actions and speeches of the play there is a questioning of the exclusion of women and bastards from political deliberation. A study of the language of the play reveals that Tecmessa, Ajax’s concubine, and Teucer, his bastard half-brother, exercise logos (...) while the Homeric hero Ajax consistently resorts to the sort of sounds used by animals that give voice to pain. The dismissal of the speech of women and those from the lower ranks of society proves detrimental to the lives of those who choose to silence them. (shrink)

For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, _Horae Subsecivae_. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by new (...) statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting.". (shrink)

For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, _Horae Subsecivae_. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by new (...) statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting.". (shrink)

In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the playwright depicts the punishment of Prometheus by the tyrannical Zeus. Zeus’ subordinates understand his tyranny to be characterized by an absolute freedom of action. Yet the tyrant’s absolute freedom as ruler is called into question by insecurity of his position and by his dependence on Prometheus’ knowledge. We find in the Prometheus Bound a model of tyrannical rule riddled with contradictions: The tyrant’s claim to total control and absolute freedom is in tension with a reality (...) characterized by insecurity, impotence, and constraint. We contrast this model of rule with the model found in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens, in which the King, agreeing to be bound by the wishes of his subjects, nevertheless preserves for himself a certain freedom of action that the tyrannical ruler lacks. (shrink)

Bringing between two covers the most influential and accessible articles on Plato's Republic, this collection illuminates what is widely held to be the most important work of Western philosophy and political theory. It will be valuable not only to philosophers, but to political theorists, historians, classicists, literary scholars, and interested general readers.

This article describes how female managers with physical impairment negotiate their relationships in the workplace. It locates discussion of physical impairment and disability within an Interactional Model of Disability. Drawing on 20 interviews, this research identifies the factors that are central to the experience of female managers with disability in the workplace, including power, passing, and surface acting. When dealing with others who had power over them, the leaders adopted approaches such as passing, in an attempt to minimize the visibility (...) of both their impairment and their disability. This involved the leaders using surface acting to present an optimistic demeanor even when their actual feelings were very different. It will be argued that the use of surface acting and the reliance on passing begins to explain why people with disability are invisible in the workplace leadership literature and why this is damaging to diversity agendas in organizations. (shrink)

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

Tax administrators are empowered by the state to secure compliance with tax obligations. Enforcing compliance on the ground is complex, and street-level administrators often engage in the “art of the possible,” leading to dilemmas in the field. This paper examines tax administrators’ practices with regard to Jamaican property tax defaulters with outstanding tax liabilities in excess of 3 years. Drawing on interviews with tax administrators and other key agents, we find that tax administrators reposition themselves from objective enforcers to empathizing (...) officials engaging in schemes of action, doing what they can do rather than what they should do. This is a practical-sense approach to securing compliance. We identify two forms of empathy, assimilated and cynical, and conclude that administrators’ empathetic identification with defaulters does not necessarily arise solely from concern for social cohesion, or inter-subjective compassion, but also sometimes from self-interest. (shrink)

This short essay examines the relationship between academic research and policy with particular emphasis on the question of whether a critical criminology can engage in academic critique at the same time as engaging in policy oriented research. Recognising that critical criminology falls between theory and politics criminologists are urged to adopt pragmatic, strategic positions as they negotiate their role in contentious debates and practical minefields. It is concluded that a critical criminology must try not only to think the unthinkable about (...) crime, but also to speak the unspeakable about the conditions in which and by which it is known. (shrink)

As one reads the classic works of political philosophy one is limited to books written by male authors. When reading interpretations of these authors it seems that the male philosophers were only concerned with the male citizen. Arlene Saxonhouse argues that these classic authors, from Plato to Machiavelli, while they praised the world of male public action, also recognized that the public world was not the totality of human existence. These authors, Saxonhouse says, saw that a private sphere (...) which included women existed, and that that sphere set limits upon and defined the possibilities of the public world. She argues further that the authors did not ignore the female, rather it is the inadequacies of modern scholarship that have made them appear to have done so. This volume shows how women have been an integral part of political philosophers' vision of the world, not a scattered side show in certain philosophical works. (shrink)