Given the apocalyptic nature of nuclear weapons, how can states establish an international order that ensures survival while allowing the weapons to be used in controlled ways to discourage great wars, and while allowing nuclear technology to diffuse for civil purposes? How can the possession of nuclear weapons by a few states be reconciled with their renunciation by the majority of states? Which political strategies can best deliver an international nuclear order that is effective, legitimate and durable? These have been (...) central questions in the nuclear age. This article suggests that the effort to construct such an order displayed the characteristics of an enlightenment project, with its emphasis on balance and rationality, the quest for justice and trust among states, the feasibility of instrumental regulation, and the attachment to hope and progress. With the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at its heart, it necessarily gave precedence to diplomacy and containment over preventive war. The reasons why this conception of nuclear order was discarded by its erstwhile champion, the United States, in favor of one bearing traits of counter-enlightenment, are explored. Its alternative strategy can now be declared a failure. Avoidance of a greater disorder depends on recognition that the problem of nuclear order is more than the problem of proliferation, or of non-compliance, and on recovery whatever the difficulties of the cooperative yet pragmatic sensibility that lay behind the prior approach to order. (shrink)

William Walker's original analysis of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding offers a challenging and provocative assessment of Locke's importance as a thinker, bridging the gap between philosophical and literary-critical discussion of his work. He presents Locke as a foundational figure who defines the epistemological and ontological ground on which eighteenth-century and Romantic literature operate and eventually diverge. He is revealed as a crucial figure for emerging modernity, less the familiar empiricist innovator and more the proto-Nietzschean thinker whose text (...) fosters hitherto unsuspected instabilities and promotes a new kind of rhetorical force to counterbalance them. Walker's reading of Locke is at once finely attentive to the text and engagingly resourceful in placing the Essay in its broadest philosophical and historical context. (shrink)

Some of the founding documents of our modern human rights culture assert that, by virtue of natural law, the will of God, the will of a Supreme Being, or some kind of natural world order, all humans have a right to civil liberties. In Areopagitica, Milton rejects this way of grounding the claim to civil liberties. Instead, he argues for civil liberties on pragmatic grounds, but also on the premise that members of political societies are entitled to civil liberties from (...) their governors only insofar as those members are rational and virtuous. His argument for civil liberties is also grounded in the view that the proper function of government includes propagating virtue in those it governs, assessing their rationality and moral virtue, and extending civil liberties to them in accordance with this assessment. Arguing in this way, Milton opposes the notion that, simply by virtue of being human, all members of political societies have a specific set of rights which their governments, and indeed all other people on earth, are bound to respect. He thus has more in common with Isocrates and Renaissance humanists than he does with the defenders of our modern human rights culture. (shrink)

In the major political prose works which he published from 1649 to 1654, Milton argues that it was not the parliamentarians but Charles Stuart and his supporters who were the real rebels during the wars of the 1640s. He claims that during this period, the parliamentarians did not fight to overturn law, church, and government, but to preserve peace, to maintain the old, orthodox form of Christianity which had only partially been re-established in England, and to defend English law and (...) the civil liberties it safeguarded. He disavows any hostility to true monarchy and asserts the right of all peoples to choose for themselves whatever form of government they wish. He argues that, since by 1649 Charles Stuart had long been deposed, there was no regicide but merely a legal execution, one which was also consistent with the ancient constitution of England and the political thought of the champion of ancient Roman laws and customs, Cicero. All of this supports several recent accounts of Interregnum political thought and rhetoric and challenges much of the work, from Christopher Hill on, which makes Milton out to be a radical. (shrink)

This article provides an account of what may reasonably be inferred from Sallust’s historical writing about how he understands civil liberty, what he feels is necessary for it to exist in any given political society, why he feels it is important, and the extent to which he feels it is properly enjoyed by the plebeian citizens of Rome. On the basis of this account, the article revises recent arguments presented by Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and others concerning Sallust’s political thought (...) and how it is related to Aristotelian, republican, ‘neo-Roman’, and liberal traditions of political thought. (shrink)