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Is it anachronistic to talk about racism in Hobbes? After all, racism is usually seen as biological: the disliked group must have innate characteristics which are inherited biologically. This is mostly said to be a modern idea. Yet biological racism can be found in medieval and early modern times, as with the Spanish doctrine of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness/purity of blood). Racism, including biological racism, was much more common in Hobbes’s England than we might think, including in texts he may have read; the language of race was hardly uncommon either. Moreover, someone can be called a racist whether or not their dislike of a group is based on characteristics of a group that are inherited biologically, I argue. Whether Hobbes was a racist remains open to debate; this paper offers evidence both for and against that proposition. But we should not reject the question of Hobbes’s racism as anachronistic.

The distinction between equality and sufficiency, much discussed in the distributive justice literature, is here applied to democratic theory. Overlooking this distinction can have significant normative implications, undermining some defences and criticisms of political equality, as I show by discussing the work of three prominent democratic theorists: Thomas Christiano, David Estlund, and Mark Warren. Most importantly, Christiano sometimes defends egalitarian conclusions using sufficientarian premises, or worries about inequality in situations where insufficiency is also part of the problem; inequality above the level of sufficiency is not always as troubling. Estlund makes the reverse error. He attacks rather than defends political egalitarianism, but insufficiency seems to explain some of his concerns. Nonetheless, I show that political egalitarians may need to specify a sufficientarian threshold, to avoid levelling-down objections. Democratic theorists should thus take seriously the distinction between political equality and political sufficiency. More generally, political theorists and philosophers should be aware of omitted variable bias and interaction effects due to conceptual stretching arising from under-theorised distinctions in their thought experiments.

This paper proposes a new framework for categorizing approaches to the history of political thought. Previous categorizations exclude much research; political theory, if included, is often caricatured. And previous categorizations are one-dimensional, presenting different approaches as alternatives. My framework is two-dimensional, distinguishing six kinds of end (two empirical, four theoretical) and six kinds of means. Importantly, these choices are not alternatives: studies may have more than one end and typically use several means. Studies with different ends often use some of the same means. And all studies straddle the supposed empirical/theoretical “divide.” Quentin Skinner himself expertly combines empirical and theoretical analysis—yet the latter is often overlooked, not least because of Skinner's own methodological pronouncements. This highlights a curious disjuncture in methodological writings, between what they say we do, and what we should do. What we should do is much broader than existing categorizations imply.

Central to much critical theory is the critique of instrumental rationality (roughly, the ability to pick good means to ends). This critique is overstated, I suggest. Critical theorists often depict instrumental rationality too narrowly, and many criticize the wrong target, for example, attacking capitalist instrumental rationality when the fundamental problem is capitalism, not instrumental rationality. Nonetheless, critical theorists’ critique requires certain changes to orthodox accounts of instrumental rationality. I offer a more palatable definition, highlight instrumental rationality’s essential contestability, and show that it can actually help us pick ends. Everyone needs instrumental rationality, especially Habermasian critical theorists. And far from instrumental rationality being amoral, I argue that because instrumental rationality almost always involves multiple ends, one end may prohibit immoral means, acting as a side-constraint. Ultimately, the substance of critical theorists’ critiques remains highly important but should not be framed in opposition to instrumental rationality.

This paper presents a framework of four types of meaning and understanding in the history of political thought and intellectual history. Previous frameworks have overlooked a whole type of meaning – the type often prioritised by political theorists and philosophers. I call this “extended meaning.” Correcting a wrong turn in philosophy of language in the 1950s, I show how extended meaning has robust intellectual foundations, and I illustrate its value for textual interpreters. Even historians often need extended meaning, for example to help resolve ambiguous passages. So, the main types of meaning are not alternatives: scholars interested in one kind of meaning still need others. This paper thus celebrates both diversity and unity.

This paper offers a systematic analysis of Hobbes’s practical political thought. Hobbes’s abstract philosophy is rightly celebrated, but he also gave much practical advice on how to avoid disorder. Yet he is typically interpreted too narrowly in this respect, especially by those who only read him economistically. Other scholars supplement this economistic focus with sociological or political interpretations, but to my knowledge, no one stresses all three aspects of his thought. This paper thus examines each of Hobbes’s practical proposals for avoiding corruption and a state of nature. Hobbes clearly uses economistic, sociological and political approaches, which involve shaping incentives, desires/preferences, and opportunities, respectively. This intentionally anachronistic framework helps us see further, highlighting Hobbes’s rich and wide-ranging practical proposals for avoiding disorder – a crucial part of his theory.

We can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and ...

This essay defends deliberative democracy by reviving a largely forgotten idea of corruption, which I call “cognitive corruption”—the distortion of judgment. I analyze different versions of this idea in the work of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bentham, and Mill. Historical analysis also helps me rethink orthodox notions of corruption in two ways: I define corruption in terms of public duty rather than public office, and I argue that corruption can be both by and for political parties. In deliberative democracy, citizens can take off their party hats and may be more influenced by the force of the better argument than in party democracy.

Many historians focus primarily on authors' “intended meanings.” Yet all textual interpreters, including historians, need a second kind of meaning. I call this idea “extended meaning,” a new name for an old idea: “P means Q” is the same as “P logically implies Q.” Extended and intended meaning involve different kinds of understanding: even if we grasp exactly what authors meant, we miss something important if we overlook their errors, for example. Crucially, extended and intended meaning are not alternatives: just as some parts of texts cannot be understood without historical analysis, so too some parts of texts cannot be understood without philosophical analysis. Indeed, some historians are adept at using extended meanings to recover intended meanings. But the failure to make this explicit has led many historians to undervalue philosophical analysis. This article thus applies the idea of extended meaning to three practical questions: whether we can deviate from authors' intended meanings, whether we can use anachronisms, and how we can use extended meanings to recover intended meanings. The idea of extended meaning thus strengthens our theoretical foundations and offers valuable practical tools.

This is a constructive critique of Habermas’s account of rationality, which is central to his political theory and has sparked theoretical and empirical research across academia. Habermas and many critical theorists caricature means-ends rationality (the ability to pick good means to ends), e.g. by wrongly depicting it as egocentric. This weakens Habermas’s attempt to distinguish means-ends rationality from his hugely important and influential idea of communicative rationality (roughly, the rationality of genuine discussion). I suggest that sincerity and autonomy, rather than non-egocentrism, are the key distinguishing features of communicative rationality. This shows that communicative rationality actually overlaps with means-ends rationality. Indeed, means-ends rationality is needed by critical theorists, as I exemplify by showing its use in deliberative democracy. Moreover, means-ends rationality will be present in discourse ethics, as I show with the example of moral discourse about gay marriage. My article thus challenges decades of what Habermas and critical theorists have written on means-ends and communicative rationality, but I stay broadly true to – and hopefully improve – Habermas’s account of rationality.

SUMMARYThis paper offers practical guidance for empirical interpretation in the history of political thought, especially uncovering what authors meant and why they wrote what they wrote. I thus seek to fill a small but significant hole in our rather abstract methodological literature. To counter this abstraction, I draw not only on methodological theorising but also on actual practice—and on detective-work, a fruitful analogy. The detective analogy seeks to capture the intuition that we can potentially find right answers but must handle fragmentary evidence that different people can plausibly read in different ways. Placing the focus on evidence, and on combining different types of evidence, suggests that orthodox categories like ‘contextualist’ and ‘Marxist’ too often accentuate differences between scholars. This paper instead highlights core principles that unite us—ideas that underpin good textual interpretation across all ‘schools of thought’.

Arthur Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines is a much better account of esotericism than anything that Leo Strauss wrote. But although Melzer uncovers many examples of writers who make claims about other writers' esotericism, he provides fewer examples of actual esotericism than he thinks, and his evidence is sometimes tenuous. More important, perhaps, is Melzer's valuable evidence about particular esoteric techniques. But there are some curious silences here: he does not support Strauss' claims that esoteric writers used the techniques of numbers and density. How much of Strauss' esoteric interpretation rests on alleged techniques for which there is no historical basis? And Melzer's evidence about the alleged technique of centers involves a misreading of Cicero. I also raise questions about Melzer's distinctions between esoteric and non-esoteric, and between esoteric and literal. Moreover, his treatment of Strauss' critics sidesteps their key objections—objections that remain unanswered. Despite...

Different scholars count `the number of parties' in different ways, partly because they examine different parts of the political process and for different reasons. Sartori's qualitative approach focused mainly on competition for government, but is now largely supplanted by the quantitative `effective number of parties' index, which deals with votes and seats. But some quantitative research requires us to look beyond votes and seats. For example, testing proportional and pluralitarian models of democracy requires us to count parties not just in terms of votes and seats but also in terms of legislative and cabinet power. I estimate party shares of legislative and cabinet power to test democratic norms at British and German elections and parliaments. So, the effective number of parties index needs to be, and can be, extended beyond votes and seats alone.

Since the 1970s, the British electoral system has come under pressure from four factors: the decline of the cube law; the increase in minor-party seats; the decreased cohesiveness of legislative majorities; and the rise in pro-Labour bias. The first and last factors have been widely discussed though not always well understood; the second and third factors have been largely overlooked. New methods are presented for assessing the impact of these developments on past and future elections. First-past-the-post is shown to have been weakened, but not fatally. Ultimately, the biggest challenge to first-past-the-post is not intellectual but practical: whatever the theoretical arguments, these four developments may mean that electoral reform is more likely in practice.

First-past-the-post is often seen as unfair. But this reflects a narrow understanding of fairness. Several ideas of fairness exist, some of which help to defend first-past-the-post. Two key parts of the British electoral reform debate are discussed: the translation of votes to seats, and the translation of votes to power. Several arguments about fairness by both critics and defenders of first-past-the-post are questioned. Tensions within and between certain ideas of fairness are addressed. Stronger justification of different notions of fairness, and more rigorous empirical assessment of normative claims, are advocated. Conceptual clarity requires that protagonists identify explicitly which ideas of fairness they favour, or preferably, that they simply avoid the misleading and overly rhetorical language of fairness.

Leo Strauss's textual interpretations are epistemologically naive. Previous critics have not shown the full breadth and depth of Strauss's problems. The early, pre-esoteric Strauss makes some unduly certain claims on very slender evidence. The mature, esoteric Strauss's methodological principles rest on false dichotomies and logical errors. Most problematic is Strauss's one-sided approach: too often, he takes a single hypothesis, looks for and finds evidence which fits it, and thinks that this constitutes proof; he states too many conclusions as if they are certain, without adequately considering alternative explanations. Since we can see the same technique in his pre-esoteric writings, this suggests that the problem is not esoteric interpretation itself, but Strauss's particular version of esoteric interpretation. In short, the problem is not Straussianism, but Strauss. © 2012 Southern Political Science Association.

John Dryzek's justification of deliberative democracy rests on a critique of instrumental rationality and a defence of Habermas's idea of communicative rationality. I question each stage of Dryzek's theory. It defines instrumental rationality broadly but only criticises narrow applications of it. It conflates communicative rationality with Habermas's idea of ‘discourse’ – the real motor of Dryzek's democratic theory. Deliberative democracy can be better defended by avoiding overstated criticisms of instrumental rationality, by altering the emphasis on communicative rationality, and by focusing more on different models of politics than different models of rationality. Dryzek's theory can thus present deliberative democracy as a better means to better ends – a more powerful and more positive position.

The electoral system was once seen as ‘the key to the lock’ of the British constitution (Steel 1979). In this view, the Conservatives and Labour kept their duopoly of power by locking the constitutional door to outsiders. A proportional electoral system would lead to coalition government, and the new parties in government would unlock the door to other constitutional reforms.