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This dissertation examines the concept of divine sovereignty in Jihadi-Salafism through a study of four of its major proponents. In the subfield of Jihadi-Salafism, scholars have argued that the notion of 'divine sovereignty' is a modern abstraction with little connection to the premodern Islamic tradition. Against this narrative, this thesis argues that divine sovereignty in Jihadi-Salafism is, rather, fundamentally embedded in mainstream, premodern Islamic jurisprudence and theology. In the form of an intellectual genealogical study, it shows how conceptions related to divine sovereignty, such as caliphate and sovereignty (ḥākimiyya), have origins in a diverse range of premodern Islamic traditions. This dissertation engages in an in-depth study of the following four thinkers central to modern Salafī political thought: Sayyid Imām Sharīf, Abū Qatāda al-Filisṭīnī Abū Basīṛ al-Ṭarṭūsī, and ʿAbdullāh ʿAzzām. The concept of 'divine sovereignty' analysed in this dissertation denotes a range of interrelated concepts, centered on the notion of divine, supreme legal authority, and particularly its emphasis on the need for the political implementation of divine law. This thesis traces the origins of divine sovereignty and legitimacy to five currents of thought in the premodern Islamic tradition: (a)the Mālikite and Shāfiʿite 'political jurisprudence' genre of Islamic law developed in the Seljūk Period (11-13th c.); (b)Mamlūk Shāfiʿite jurisprudence and theology developed in response to the Mongol invasions (13th-15th c.); (c)Shāfiʿite-Ashʿarite legal theory as developed by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī (d. 1233); (d)Anticolonial Ḥanafite thought in British India as articulated by the School of Deoband (18-19th c.), and; (e)The hermeneutical literalism and 'ijtihād movement' pioneered by Yemeni luminary Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1839). In the form of an intellectual geneology, this study deconstructs anachronistic narratives of Jihadi-Salafism which portrays it as a contemporary invention that formed on the ideological marginalities of the greater Islamic tradition. Nearly all studies of the subject overemphasize the role of neo-Ḥanbalism - especially that of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb - at the expense of identifying the centuries of ideological development responsible for Jihadi-Salafism today. This thesis thus advances a fundamentally new narrative by undertaking a detailed genealogical study of the historical Islamic tradition and critiques the downplayed continuities prevalent in the subject of study. This dissertation shows that the movement is fundamentally embedded in a variety of premodern Islamic movements, encapsulating both doctrinal and sectarian diversity. On a methodological level, it is argued that the preferred methodology of many studies in Jihadi-Salafism both oversimplify the intellectual history of the movement as well as devalue Muslim narratives and their wider significance in Islamic thought. This dissertation thus follows a critical and deconstrucive approach in challenging existing classifications and dichotomizations, and reconsiders the assumptions that have been used to superimpose anachronisms on complex and multifaceted Muslim narratives. This dissertation thus advances a re-theorization of dominant methodologies in the subfield and emphasizes the importance of questioning the political nature of knowledge production.

This thesis reassesses the political thought of three 18th-century political thinkers-Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785), and John Adams (1735-1826). Despite their differences, I argue that each should be read as deeply engaged with and responding to the analysis of republican government offered in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. This engagement prompted each author to develop new ways of thinking about the possibility of free government in the modern world. Montesquieu was notoriously pessimistic about the prospects for republican government in modern, commercial societies. He had argued that republican government would require a strict regime of civic education, as well as restrictions on luxury and foreign trade. These features made republican government impossibly difficult to achieve, as well as unattractive, in his day. However, for the authors on which this thesis focuses, Montesquieu had issued not a fatal blow but a challenge worth taking up. Recognizing that there was a genuine problem in realizing republicanism in the large, unequal states of 18th-century Europe, they did not simply demand a return to the past, nor did they assume an optimistic future in which progress and enlightenment would secure the conditions for free government. In the shadow of Montesquieu, a cautiously hopeful republican discourse emerged. Through this re-reading of Rousseau, Mably and Adams this thesis challenges a widespread characterisation of 18th-century republicans as nostalgic for a bygone era and thus as unable to theorize in response to the demands of the modern world. At least for the republicans explored here-which includes Rousseau and Mably, two of the figures most often condemned for such nostalgia-it was clear that the civic virtue and equality of the ancients was no longer possible. They accepted Montesquieu's view that the absence of such virtue posed a threat to republican politics. This thesis argues that we should nonetheless read these authors as attempting to find what I call sites of republican possibility. For Rousseau, this included locating unexpected contexts-such as stereotypically 'weaker' and less wealthy nations-in which cultivating virtue and solidarity was more realistic than attempting to engage in commercial competition with other nations. In the large monarchies of Europe, Mably argued that the privileges of the nobles could be leveraged to start a 'revolution' that would bring liberty to the people. He acknowledged that such large European nations would not be able to withdraw from international commerce altogether, but he proposed ways to limit it in such a way as to protect the well-being of the average citizen. Even as other republicans came to believe that moral and material progress, as well as the end of hereditary distinctions would create a natural habitat for republican government in Europe, the thinkers I examine argued that commercial society could produce distinctions and inequalities that were just as detrimental to republican politics. Mably and Adams were derided by their contemporaries for being overly pessimistic, but they in fact presciently diagnosed the problem that material inequality posed in formally equal societies. For Adams, however, this correct diagnosis was combined with an overwhelming sense of doubt about the possibility of limiting such inequality. This meant that compared to Rousseau and Mably, he espoused diminished republican ambitions. By returning to these allegedly outdated republicans, we can see that they revealed a very real problem: to put it in the language of the thinkers I investigate, that there was a potential tension between the imperatives of commerce and those of republicanism. This tension remains alive today. It may be useful, then, to return to those who in some sense anticipated the challenges we face today in protecting our republican democracies.

This is the first book-length study of the family in Edmund Burke's political thought. It situates Burke's ideas about the family within his broader interest in the civic importance of love and duty, which also encompassed love and duty toward friends, country, and mankind. Although the influence of what has been called the "family model" of Burke's interpretation of the French Revolution has been acknowledged by cultural historians, the importance of the family to Burke has been underestimated by historians of political thought. In the existing scholarship, Burke is portrayed as a defender of the hierarchical, patriarchal family whose primary concern was to uphold the social order within the organisation of family life. This study reveals that Burke wished to defend the foundations of love and duty within the family in order to prevent the rise of tyranny. In his writings and speeches about empire and revolution, Burke identified the destruction of the family as one of the first warning signs of despotic power. Liberty depended, in his view, upon the strength and security of relationships within the family. By establishing the importance of the family to Burke, this study also draws attention to the importance of the family in the history of political thought.

The thesis traces the emergence of a discourse of ecological political economy in America during the postwar decades. It explores the work of three economists, Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Herman Daly, and one political theorist, William Ophuls, as they attempted to come to terms with the prospects for human life on a finite earth. Each of them developed their own unique vision of a desirable future for political economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, Boulding integrated entropy - the physical law of dissipation and decay - into his understanding of economic development. He envisaged a spaceship earth economy as an alternative to dominant discourses of militaristic modernization and as a model for global social science to guide the human future. By the start of the 1970s, the mounting environmental crisis made the problem of reconciling human industrial society with the limits of the earth's ecosystems a more widespread concern. At Yale University, a multidisciplinary group including Daly and Ophuls developed the model of a steady state society, seeking escape from the encroaching tide of environmental apocalypse. For Ophuls, the steady state marked the end of American liberal democracy, while for Daly, it offered a possible salvation for existing market and democratic institutions. Georgescu-Roegen, strictly opposed to the steady state metaphor, and concerned to make sense of entropic economic development, envisaged a wholly different future: a distant condition of global, egalitarian agrarianism. While these theorists framed their work as responses to ecological necessity, they each brought their own political commitments and desires to bear on their visions of the future. In the early 1970s, the urgency of creating a collective research agenda was clear and led them to articulate a shared vision of oikonomic globalism, but the project soon collapsed as the incompatibilities of the theorists' different visions became clear.

In this dissertation, I consider the nature and application of theories of the imagination by, especially English, Protestants, over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I make four significant observations. First, I argue that English Protestant philosophical treatments of the imagination were largely continuous with the earlier mediaeval, scholastic tradition, despite advances in anatomy and the rediscovery of new classical sources. Second, I argue that English Protestants developed a distinctive (but not original) theological discourse reflecting on the effects of the Fall on the human imagination. Third, I argue that despite a robust commitment to predestination, English Protestants by no means repudiated the possibility for specifically human methods of ameliorating the fallen imagination. Finally, I contend that this theological reflection on the fallen imagination was widespread, colouring even non-theological discourses, such as (nominally) secular writing on natural philosophy, ethics and politics. I explore these arguments over three large sections. First, I consider primarily philosophical reflections on the nature of the imagination, surveying works in the Aristotelian scientia de anima tradition, as well as early modern medicine. I also treat the revival of ancient Stoic theories of the imagination and their early modern promoters. Finally, I close off this section with an examination of the philosophy of Francis Bacon. In the second section, I turn to theological considerations. I first discuss the connection between idolatry and the imagination canvassed in Protestant theology and its sources in scholasticism and parallels in the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. I then introduce the pessimistic account of the imagination which features prominently within English Protestant discourse. I conclude this section with another discussion of Francis Bacon, this time focussing on the religious dimension of his account of the "idols of the mind." In the third section, I consider the language of psychological self-government as it focusses on the imagination. I consider the scholastic Aristotelian tradition of moral philosophy before returning to English Protestant theology and a brief excursus back into natural philosophy. The section ends with a detailed engagement with English political writing, focussing particularly on works written in the vernacular. I consider, in turn, Tyndale, Ponet, Goodman, Milton and, finally, the radical Civil War pamphleteer Gerrard Winstanley.

This thesis examines the deep interconnections between classical learning and modern international relations among three early-twentieth-century British internationalists, Gilbert Murray, Arnold J. Toynbee and Alfred Zimmern. These intellectuals began their careers as classical scholars before becoming some of Britain's foremost academic experts and public commentators on world politics after the First World War. The classics, especially the ancient Greek heritage, continued to exert an enormous influence over the way that they understood and theorised international relations. References to classical literature and political thought or to episodes from ancient history permeated all of their published writings and reflected a continuing, consistent and pervasive interest in the classical world and an underlying faith in the constructive value that classical ideas held in the present. Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern are termed the 'classicising internationalists', and the way that they conceptualised world politics is 'classicising internationalism'. The ways that they imagined modern international relations grew out of their admiration for the institutions and civic ideals of the fifth-century Athenian polis. They desired to transfer the moral cohesion and civic spirit they read onto ancient Athens to the realm of modern international politics by proposing an internationalised formulation of the polis as an organisational model for a civic international order. This was intertwined with an educational ideal that sought to expand civic identities into the global political sphere and create a politically engaged and internationally minded public in the mould of the Athenian citizen. For Toynbee, this internationalist project was linked to a need to theorise the dynamics of world history. By foregrounding the importance of the classical imaginary in these figures' internationalist writings, the thesis develops a more rounded understanding of the intellectual and disciplinary history of international relations, one that emphasises the wider intellectual influences on the discipline's foundational theorists. Classical antiquity was a crucial tool as Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern sought to make sense of international politics during the turbulent interwar years.

This thesis explores how the political thought of left-wing authors based around the journal Marxism Today transformed between the late 1970s and the 1990s. Under the editorship of Martin Jacques, the journal became a site of major debates on the British left over the course of the period and its contributors came from a wide variety of intellectual, social and political backgrounds. I trace their changing approaches to a number of themes, assessing whether their revisionism was characterised by ideological capitulation to their political opponents on the right. Their reception of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci; attitudes to the boundaries of the state; debates about class, identity and new social movements; shifting perspectives on European integration; and the communitarian political thought of Geoff Mulgan are all charted and analysed in this thesis. Notwithstanding the preoccupation with ‘Thatcherism’ among the journal’s authors, this thesis complements recent revisionist historical scholarship which seeks to de-centre Thatcher’s government from histories of the 1980s and which complicates descriptions of the final decades of the twentieth century as an age of neo-liberal revolution. I illustrate the specific dynamics that shaped left-wing debate in the 1980s, arguing that these years were consequential to the revision of left-wing ideas and that the authors of Marxism Today departed significantly from dominant forms of twentieth-century British socialism. In examining the interventions made within the journal, in addition to a wide range of contemporary publications and archival material, I place the more famous essays and debates in their historical context where other historians and commentators have failed to pay due regard to the status of the journal’s articles as primary sources. Through the systematic treatment of Marxism Today from a history of political thought perspective, I demonstrate that the left was not a passive, defeated force in the period.

This thesis is concerned with two central questions on the subject of privacy: (1) how should we conceptualize privacy? And (2), on what basis can laws and regulations to protect privacy be justified? The goal of this thesis is to provide an account of privacy that is both more persuasive than existing accounts and more capable of meeting the challenges to privacy in the modern day. The first part of the thesis advances the argument that privacy is a normatively dependent concept. A normatively dependent concept is defined as a concept that relies on outside normative frameworks for its meaning or value. This thesis argues that privacy has this quality because it exists in a relationship of opposition to “the public” and thus lacks any essential characteristic other than being not-public, not-visible, or not in the common view. An examination of four historic reformulations of what it means to be private, spanning two thousand years of western history, confirms that privacy has shifted considerably over time and that attempts to essentialize it are misplaced. In addition, the modern disarray of the privacy debate—characterized by deep disagreement over both the definition and the purpose of privacy—reflects privacy’s normative dependence and in particular reveals our over-reliance on liberal-individualist conceptions of privacy that wrongly prioritize consent and control. The second part of this thesis argues for adopting a wholly new approach to understanding privacy: the political approach. More specifically, this thesis argues for abandoning traditional liberal frameworks in favor of demonstrating how privacy supports central features of modern democracies, such as the ability to form a distinct political identity, the right to free expression, and the right of free assembly. Furthermore, this thesis argues that democracy even presupposes an “epistemic veil” of privacy around citizens, which motivates the practices of deliberation and voting. It can thus be shown that a commitment to democracy entails a commitment to certain privacy rights—a finding that circumvents the difficulty in establishing a common basis for privacy protections by appealing to all citizens who live under democratic regimes. In abandoning familiar understandings of privacy, the political approach to privacy does away with the problematic emphasis on consent, adapts privacy to an ever-changing surveillance environment, addresses prominent critiques of privacy rights, and provides a common basis of justification for future privacy legislation.

This thesis interprets the work of the German jurist and state theorist Carl Schmitt through the lens of a ‘double-historicism’ by using unpublished archival materials – journal entries, letters, manuscripts, and marginalia. Not only were Schmitt’s ideas and writings shaped by his intellectual and political context, but he himself viewed legal and political concepts as historically contingent. The first chapter reconstructs the ‘canonization’ of Carl Schmitt in the field of political theory, focusing on the reception and sanitization of his work in English language scholarship. The second chapter excavates Schmitt’s concept of ‘historicity’ and his turn to the founder of the Historical School of Law, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, in lectures given in 1943 and 1944. I then argue this historical turn is the key to understanding Schmitt’s postwar work, connecting four major monographs published concurrently in 1950. The following chapters show how Schmitt mobilizes historicity as a critique of natural law theories and the right of resistance against tyrannical regimes (chapter 3), the appropriation of Scholastic just war doctrines in the postwar period (chapter 4), Marxism’s weaponization of legality (chapter 5) and utopianism as a form of annihilation of law and the ‘de-localization’ of both nature and man (chapter 6). Schmitt saw both legal positivism and natural law theories as posing an existential crisis to the future of jurisprudence, one that could only be overcome by recourse to a self-reflexive history of the discipline.

The Seven Provinces of the United Netherlands, also known as the Dutch Republic, was a compound state in which sovereignty was shared between towns, provinces, and the States General. The Union of Utrecht of 1579 was one of the Republic’s principal founding documents, yet paradoxically grounded the state in the diverging values of provincial independence and national unity. Unique to the Dutch republican system was the office of stadhouder, which at times has been described in modern scholarship as an ‘enigma’ or as ‘peculiar’. Despite a wealth of historical studies on the Dutch Republic and on the Princes of Orange, who in the majority of the Republic’s provinces were typically appointed to the stadhoudership, no thorough analysis exists of the exact constitutional position of the office itself, nor of its practical functioning within Dutch politics or of its representation in popular culture. The present study addresses this lacuna in the scholarship by presenting a detailed overview of how the office of stadhouder developed from the beginning of the Dutch Revolt into the state’s Republican period. It argues that the inherent constitutional tension contained in the Union of Utrecht was embodied in the stadhoudership, which was subservient to provincial authority but simultaneously required by Articles 9 and 16 of the Union treaty to act as a mediator on both an inter- and supra-provincial level at times of political discord. This task of resolving conflict and preserving eendracht (‘unity’) within the Dutch state became the dominant feature of the role, both on a governmental level and in the stadhouder’s popular image. While thus undertaking an interrogation of the constitutional tensions underpinning the stadhoudership, this study draws on material culture in a variety of forms, from constitutional documents to popular literature and art. The first part of the thesis predominantly engages with the constitutional position of the stadhouder within the governmental structure of the Dutch Republic, whereas the second section instead focuses on how the political culture surrounding the stadhoudership was reflected in contemporary popular literature and the visual arts. Overall, this thesis provides deeper insights into the different ways of negotiating tension between central and provincial power in early modern states.

Many discussions of 'On Liberty' fail to consider the reception of Mill's political ideas during the nineteenth-century, which is significant for revising our understanding of Mill, his thoughts and how they have been interpreted. Accordingly, this thesis is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Mill's political thought from 1831 to 1900. Throughout this period, Mill's public image went through incredible changes due to the cumulative effect of almost seventy years of engagement, absorption and dismissal. Bringing together a variety of reactions to Mill's texts from the 1830s, particularly On Liberty (1859), including periodicals, plays, poems and speeches, this thesis unveils the reactions of his commentators and the development of Mill's controversial reputation during the nineteenth-century, challenging both the traditional and revisionary view of Mill scholarship. I structure this discussion in accordance with five key aspects which deeply influenced Mill's thought. The first was discussion concerning a collectivist theory of liberty in the 1830s. The second considers how scandalous On Liberty was, where I propose that Mill's critics misjudged the significance of this essay. The third concerns the powers of the state in promoting a tolerant society and removing restraints upon liberty. The fourth was the lack of clarity on the state's prerogatives over the individual. Finally, public support for the family as a model for social progress and the framework for an equal community, one where everyone played a special role and liberty surpassed all distinctions such as the private or public sphere. This thesis critically examines how contemporary responses to On Liberty stepped over the importance of Mill's reception, which in turn contributes to a fuller understanding of Mill and his political thought.

State responsibility is central to modern politics and international relations. States are commonly blamed for wars, called on to apologize, punished with sanctions, admonished to keep their promises, bound by treaties, and held liable for debts and reparations. But why, and under which conditions, does it make sense to assign responsibilities to whole states rather than to individual leaders and officials? The purpose of this thesis is to resurrect and develop a forgotten understanding of state responsibility from the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the two dominant theories of state responsibility and propose a Hobbesian alternative. According to the agential theory, states can be held responsible because they are moral agents like human beings, with analogous capacities for deliberation and intentional action. According to the functional theory, states can be held responsible because they act vicariously through their organs, much as principals act vicariously through agents. What makes Hobbes unique is that he considers states to be 'persons'-entities to which actions, rights, and responsibilities can be attributed-even though they are neither agents nor principals. Hobbes' idea of state personality relies on the concepts of authorization and representation, not of agency and intentionality, nor of functions and organs. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 develop the Hobbesian theory of state responsibility and apply it to three sets of problems. Chapter 3 addresses problems of attribution, such as whether the actions of dictators count as acts of state and whether states can commit crimes. Chapter 4 addresses problems of identity, such as whether revolutions and annexations negate the state's identity and hence its responsibilities. Chapter 5 addresses problems of distribution, such as whether the subjects of the state ought to bear the costs of debts and reparations that their state incurred before they were born. I argue that the Hobbesian theory provides better answers to each set of problems than the agential and functional alternatives.

This dissertation examines the role of political virtues in modern contexts, and in particular, the role of courage as a potential modern political virtue. Despite frequent commentary on the importance of virtues, many political theorists have exhibited a strange reluctance to discuss the virtue of courage, at least in the sort of depth that it merits. This thesis puts forward the suggestion that courage is one of the most important modern political virtues and one ripe for rediscovery by political theorists and historians of political thought alike. Following the Ancient Greeks, the dissertation defines courage as the virtue which aids us in the proper assessment of threats and, where appropriate, the overcoming of fear in the service of causes we deem worthy, while emphasizing the contexts in which it is deployed. The dissertation also seeks to outline several reasons for the seemingly problematic relationship courage has with modernity, given its historical nexus with war and conquest, the striving for difference and distinction, and exclusionary notions of masculinity. The dissertation moves on to examine the role of courage in the thought of three thinkers-Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt-all of whom have their doubts about the existence of courage in the modern world. Chapter 2 examines the role of courage in Tocqueville's early modern America, swept up in Americans' economic pursuits and captured by the soothing nature of consumer appetites. Chapter 3 examines the role of courage in Mill's thought, arguing that Mill's liberalism inherits many of the driving political and social concerns illuminated by Tocqueville, his friend and correspondent; however, Mill's advocacy for a politics free from the crushing weight of inherited dogmas and traditions leads him to fall into the modern trap of jettisoning courage, even as his politics makes abundantly clear the need for it. Chapter 4 turns to Arendt's skepticism that courage can ever exist in the modern world short of a fundamental act of recovery from the ancients, with a concomitant willingness to accept all of the problematic elements of courage as practiced by the Greeks. The dissertation concludes by stating that newer schools of thought on virtue, like liberal virtue theorists, have neglected the virtue of courage, which must be considered a modern political virtue, as there has been a proliferation of modern political contexts in which it is absolutely critical that we muster nothing short of courage. Courage is presented as a potential solution to the modern challenges facing liberalism from within, such as safe spaces, political correctness, no platforming, and trigger warnings, amongst others.

The thesis conceptualizes a new approach to the historical study of the global legal order. Instead of following an influential contextual approach focusing on understanding the works of great legal theorists, I analyze the relationship between legal thought and the global legal practices that constituted actually existing patterns of social order. The usual idea of legal practice needs however first be reimagined. A focus on the 'profession of international law' is too narrow. As often the most influential actors in legal practice were not lawyers but for example parliamentarians and diplomats. Second the conventional idea of a legal text needs to be reconceptualised. Drawing on literary theory, I argue that the historical significance of a legal text is constituted not only by the context of its writing but also through its reception and use by later practitioners. Moreover, legal texts are not constant but are often modified, even after the death of the original author, by later editors seeking to make the work useful for contemporary practitioners. This insight highlights a neglected and important alternative dynamic of legal change that first takes place through legal practice and is introduced to doctrine only afterwards. In this practice story, legal change predominantly takes place through practitioners pursuing their interests within broad bounds set by normative expectations rather than with the novel speculations of great thinkers. I have applied the new method to the case of foreigners' property rights. These rights are crucial as the legal frameworks that have enabled the growth of a global liberal economy through transnational trade and investment. The study of these rights has allowed me to challenge the conventional interpretation that Britain and the United States, as leading liberal democracies drawing on the liberal political thought of Locke, created a liberal international order through multilateral treaty making.

Karl Marx's relationship to republicanism proceeds in three stages: he began his political career as a republican, he subsequently transitioned to communism, and then he finally reconciled his republicanism and communism. Marx's early political writings reveal his commitment to central republican ideas, including popular sovereignty, widespread political participation and universal suffrage. These commitments led him to reject absolute and constitutional monarchy. But they also led to a critique of the modern republic, which Marx argued gave insufficient space for citizens to participate publicly for the common good. He thus gives a republican critique of the republic. Marx's disillusionment with the ability of a modern republic to deliver human emancipation eventually led him to transition to communism. He now argued that the republic would be a bourgeois republic, which would subject the proletariat to the capitalist. He attacked republicans for neglecting social depredation in favour of political reform. However, his transition to communism also carried with it several republican commitments. Unlike the many apolitical versions of communism at the time, Marx insisted that the workers had to establish the republic before communism could emerge. He also extended key republican political ideas, including the objection to arbitrary power, to the social sphere. But what was absent was an account of a more participatory and accountable political alternative to the modern republic. However, the experience of ordinary workers carrying out the legislative and public administration of Paris during the Commune, led Marx to return to many of those early republican themes. He celebrated ordinary citizens' capacity for self-government and advocated popular control over the state and transforming representative democracy into popular delegacy. He came to realise that these political structures were essential to achieving the social goals of communism. He thus came to a synthesis of his early republicanism and later communism.

What is political philosophy? Aristotle pursues that question by asking what the good is. If Nietzsche's postmodern diagnosis that modern philosophical rationalism has exhausted itself is true, it is unclear if an answer to that question is possible. Yet given the prevalence of extremist ideologies in 20th century politics, and the politically irresponsible support of philosophers for these ideologies, there is an urgent need for an answer. This thesis examines how, in these philosophical circumstances, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair MacIntyre conclude that a key resource in the recovery of political philosophy, and in showing its contemporary relevance, lies in the recovery of Aristotle's political philosophy. This thesis contends that how and why Arendt, Strauss, and MacIntyre turn to Aristotle, and what they find in Aristotle, depends on their varying critiques of modernity. Convinced that the philosophical tradition is shattered irreversibly after the events of totalitarianism, Arendt argues for a retrieval of Aristotle and his understanding of politics from the fragments of that tradition. Strauss is impelled to turn to the political philosophy of Aristotle because of the crisis of radical historicism, to recover classical rationalism’s answer to what the good is. MacIntyre turns to Aristotle to find the moral justification for rejecting Stalinism that contemporary philosophical traditions fail to provide; he reconstructs an Aristotelian tradition that can answer the question of what the good is better than his contemporary rivals. Although these thinkers may appear disparate, this thesis argues that each addresses the question of what the good is by offering a vision of political philosophy as a way of life, which Aristotle helps form. This way of life probes the relationship between philosophy and politics as permanent problem for human existence. In recovering this tradition of thinking with Aristotle about the character of political philosophy, this thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of each of these thinkers, as well as to the practice of political philosophy in modern, post-Nietzschean times.