This article examines whether Aquinas's political science is philosophy or theology, a question that arises from his understanding of happiness. If the supernatural vision of God constitutes perfect beatitude or the ultimate end, then how can an account of imperfect happiness—political virtue—be given without reference to it and hence without appeal to revealed theology? I argue that Aquinas provides a strictly philosophical account of imperfect happiness by showing that, among temporal goods, virtue most fully instantiates general attributes of beatitude such as self-sufficiency and continuity, even though it does not perfectly instantiate them. This way of demonstrating the superiority of virtue to other temporal goods requires no appeal to supernatural beatitude, and thus political science, which takes this imperfect happiness as its first principle, is philosophy.

Many Machiavelli scholars emphasize his discussion of fear and neglect the important role that hope plays in his thought. I analyze Machiavelli's frequent references to hope throughout his corpus to offer an explanation of what he means by ‘hope,” examine the relation between hope and fear, and identify the benefits, dangers, and limits of these two foundational and complementary passions. Greater attention to the role of hope in Machiavelli's thought can help us understand the significance of this passion for Machiavelli's political project, particularly his view of freedom.

The eighteenth century is often thought of as an important era for the secularization of British philosophy. One dimension of this secularization involves philosophers developing theories that, while not explicitly rejecting God, are less reliant on claims about God for their intelligibility and plausibility. A comparison of Adam Smith with his teacher, Francis Hutcheson, reveals an underappreciated facet of this process. Hutcheson portrayed God as an impartial legislator and used this metaphor to clarify contested moral rules in a way that would make little sense if God did not exist. In contrast, Smith's impartial spectator does not require belief in a God who is the author of the moral law in order to determine the correct interpretation of contested moral principles. By pursuing this alternative conception of impartiality, Smith developed a theory that was, in this respect, less reliant on religious premises than Hutcheson's had been.

Liberal views of civil disobedience that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s can only be properly interpreted with recourse to the complicated history of the early civil rights movement's selective appropriation of the labor sit-downs of the 1930s. This essay addresses the messy but basically successful effort by civil rights sit-inners and the lawyers who defended them to circumvent the repressive state and legal response—especially the US Supreme Court ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation (1939)—that the 1930s sit-downers garnered. My reexamination of the sit-ins places influential liberal ideas about civil disobedience in a fresh light. In his influential theory of civil disobedience, John Rawls mirrored key features of the politically and legally savvy strategy of delinking the lunch counter sit-ins from the workplace sit-downs. The result was a somewhat restrictive view of civil disobedience that sidelined matters of economic justice.

From the Freedom Rides to the students’ lunch counter sit-ins, the campaigns of the civil rights movement are seen as the archetypes of civil disobedience. Pineda's wonderful and brilliant book draws on rich archival and historical research to peel the layers of idealization, romanticization, and ideology that have turned the classical phase of the civil rights movement (1954–1965) into both myth and protest template. This illuminating, insightful, and beautifully written book is a must-read for anyone interested in civil disobedience.

Between fifteen and twenty-five million Americans took to the streets in the summer of 2020 to march, mourn, occupy highways, clash with police, and be together in grief and rage. Municipal and state police forces responded with a national campaign of excessive force. Demonstrators were clubbed, tear gassed, sprayed with chemical agents, kettled and trampled, illegally detained, and mutilated by “less-than-lethal” munitions. Internal police reviews and municipal leaders blamed the violence on insufficient training but the scale and intensity of repression suggest a more profound democratic crisis surrounding the criminalization of dissent.

Seeing Like an Activist is a profound—and profoundly political—book. Skillfully distilling complex historical evidence into a vivid narrative and advancing a compelling theoretical argument, Pineda unsettles conventional accounts of the civil rights movement to ask what we can learn about the nature and limits of civil disobedience “by reconsidering the example we already think we know so well” (3). One of the book's key contributions is its analysis of political practices that constituted the “short civil rights movement”—the decade of southern protest bookended by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–56 and the Selma March in 1965. “The civil rights movement (and its multitude of activists),” Pineda observes, “operates between the lines of theory as an object lesson—a ready-made example that proves the moral purchase of the theory, rather than a live source of novel theoretical insights and political claims” (48). As object lesson, the movement is often recruited to police or criticize forms of protest that are said to fall short of the disciplined nonviolence of the past. This view of history, Pineda contends, enables theorists of civil disobedience like John Rawls to use the example of civil rights activism to affirm the liberal constitutional order. Offering incisive critiques of Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Hugo Bedau, Pineda exposes the unearned ease with which political theories that do not take racial injustice as a central concern or focus on Black theoretical practices have conscripted the civil rights movement in service of their arguments.

Pineda's book is an original and imaginative reconstruction of activist strategy and political theory, upending the orthodox account of civil disobedience during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Against liberal and democratic theorists who domesticate civil disobedience in the United States, with the aim of legitimizing the nation's constitutional democracy as “nearly just,” or in need of reform rather than revolution, Pineda argues that civil rights activists “theorized and deployed” civil disobedience as “decolonizing praxis” (16). She traces the decades-long history in which Black activists in the United States crafted their strategy of civil disobedience through embodied spaces, relationships, and practices of “imaginative transit” with revolutionaries in India, South Africa, and Ghana. These networks of transit enabled activists to diagnose segregation and colonialism as sites of a “shared, global condition” (59) of white supremacy, “operating with a common, reinforcing logic” of economic, political, and psychological domination (89). As a decolonizing praxis, civil disobedience combined an “inward-facing politics” of self-emancipation with an “outward-facing politics” (16) of disruption and disclosure—aimed not at reforming aberrations in constitutional democracy, but at “transforming the psychological, structural, and relational bases of white supremacy” (59).