Continental Philosophy

TOC

Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception — Bonnie Honig

Competition in the Best of Cities: Agonism and Aristotle’s Politics — Steven C. Skultety

Publius and Political Imagination — Jason Frank

The Concept of Private Property and the Limits of the Environmental Imagination — John M. Meyer

Schumpeter’s Leadership Democracy — Gerry Mackie

Why Value Pluralism Does Not Support the State’s Enforcement of Liberal Autonomy: A Response to Crowder — David Thunder

Thunder versus Enlightenment: A response to Thunder — George Crowde

On Aristotle

A review of Susan D. Collins' Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship

Susan Collins seeks a renewed conception of citizenship through an investigation of Aristotle's political philosophy. This is necessary, she argues, because liberal political theory has failed to reckon with the fact that the human good has an unavoidable political dimension. Liberal theorists often flee from the fact that every political community "requires specific virtues, molds characters, and shapes its citizens' vision of the good" (2). Their deferral of the question, "What is good for us to be and do?" leads not merely to a kind of self-righteous blindness to the ways in which liberalism shapes the public and private lives of its citizens. It also eviscerates liberalism's ability to respond to the challenge of "creedal and salvationist religions" (166) which in their more vociferous forms argue that liberalism is morally bankrupt. So we need a more capacious understanding of the seriousness and nobility of citizenship, along with a sense of its proper limits.

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