The question addressed by this essay is whether Thomas Hobbes is the true intellectual forebear of John Locke. A brief comparison of the teachings of these two authors with respect to natural justice and civil justice would seem to suggest that Locke is a determined adversary of Hobbes whose views on justice are reducible to the maxim that “might makes right.” But a reexamination of Locke's Second Treatise shows that Locke adopts this principle with hardly less thoroughness than Hobbes. Even so, an important difference remains, for Locke takes steps to disguise the grim reality of power, whereas Hobbes makes the enlightenment of people the sine qua non of his political science. Locke's departure from Hobbes is seen as an attempt to instill in the body politic a degree of justice that would not otherwise exist.

The study of ethics has recently become influenced by a form of moral conservatism—a critique of “modernity” with a bias towards Aristotle. It stresses the integrity of communities and their customs, a pluralistic and particularistic respect for the diversity of human groups, the poverty of utopianism and Marxism, and the inevitability of moral and political conflict. Each stress raises major issues: the priority of social goods over human rights; hermeneutical problems of understanding between communities; difficulties for societies' shaping a common future in accordance with their moral understanding; the balance between consensus and conflict in political life. These problems are addressed in an extended form of moral conservatism which defines a number of correspondences with progressive conceptions of humanity. Referring to central facts of moral psychology and possible institutions of public communication, the discussion identifies universal human purposes whose practical implications are consistent with a postmodern society in which the course of development is settled by public deliberation.

The modern science of politics has agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government must be based on the rejection of Aristotle's belief that claims to rule might be judged and accepted on their substantive merit as a matter of justice. The present essay examines the premodern approach as found in Aristotle's treatment of the question of regimes in the Politics. It is argued that the interpretation of Aristotle's discussion that understands him to distinguish right and deviant regimes as these are in the interest of ruled or rulers respectively and to seek a resolution of the conflict between claims to rule as a kind or instance of distributive justice is belied by a close reading of his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics and collapses distinctions crucial to Aristotelian political science.

Religion is again a lively topic not only in practical-political life but also in social and political thought. The latter development is by far more surprising and intriguing than the practical-political relevance. For some time, political theory had ostensibly settled accounts with, or resolved the status of, religious belief: basically churches and religious movements were classified as one type of interest groups (or “input variables”) within a comprehensive liberal-democratic model — a model secular in character but not intolerant, within limits, of religious convictions. On the part of organized (especially Protestant) churches, the settlement was widely accepted as a means for securing both internal church autonomy and some influence in the political arena; the “social gospel” movement in particular saw faith chiefly as a leverage for advancing welfare and progress within secular society. To be sure, the optimism of the liberal settlement was severely challenged, and partly disrupted, by catastrophic events in our century as well as by radical theological criticism — a criticism highlighted in Richard Niebuhr's well-known phrase: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Yet, when carried to an extreme, theological criticism had the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the secular-liberal paradigm. Once religion was radically segregated from politics or the “city of God” from the “earthly city,” the latter was left entirely to its own devices; purged of all religious and millenarian considerations social and political theory could return to business as usual.