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The Moral
Foundations
of Politics
ian shapiro
New Haven and London
Copyright 2003 by Yale University.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
"The Moral Foundations of Politics," by Ian Shapiro
For all the graduates of MoFoPo
Copyright 2012 by Yale University
. . . certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Wisawa Szymborska
Preface, xi
c o n t e n t s
Introduction, 1
chapter 1
Enlightenment Politics, 7
chapter 2
Classical Utilitarianism, 18
chapter 3
Synthesizing Rights and Utility, 37

chapter 4
Marxism, 71
chapter 5
The Social Contract, 109

chapter 6
Anti-Enlightenment Politics, 151

chapter 7
Democracy, 190
chapter 8
Democracy in the Mature

Enlightenment, 224
Notes, 231
Index, 267
p r e f a c e
This book grew out of a lecture course called The Moral Foundations of Politics that I have been teaching at Yale since the early
1980s. The course, a version of which I inherited from Douglas
Rae, has changed out of all recognition since that time. Yet it has
evolved more in the manner of rebuilding a ship at sea than
redesigning it from scratch. As a result, my debt to Rae is greater
than he might realize from perusing the present text. The idea to
turn the course into a book came in the mid-1990s from John
Covell, then my editor at Yale University Press. These two people
have my enduring gratitude as the projects step-parents. Bruce
Ackerman, Robert Dahl, Clarissa Hayward, Nancy Hirschman,
Nicoli Nattrass, Jennifer Pitts, Mark Stein, and two anonymous
readers for Yale University Press all read the manuscript from
stem to stern, oering helpful suggestions large and small. A
eet of research assistants, all graduates of Moral Foundations,
worked on dierent aspects of the project under the helpful
supervision of Katharine Darst. They were Carol Huang, Karl
Chang, Clinton Dockery, Dan Kruger, George Maglares, Melody
Redbird, David Schroedel, and Michael Seibel. Jerey Mueller
served as a sterling research assistant as I wrote the nal manuscript; his assistance was invaluable. Jennifer Carters help in the
nal stages was also most welcome.
The book is conceived of as introductory in the sense that no
prior knowledge of political philosophy is assumed. Its central
focus is on dierent theories of political legitimacy in the utili-
xii
preface
tarian, Marxist, social contract, anti-Enlightenment, and democratic traditions. My discussion of these dierent theories is
meant to give readers a grasp of the major intellectual traditions
that have shaped political argument in the West over the past
several centuries. The theories are set in historical context, but the
main focus is on current formulations as applied to contemporary problems. Although introductory, the book is written from a
distinctive point of view and advances a particular argument. I
will not be disappointed if instructors nd it to be a helpful teaching tool, yet feel the need to argue with it as they teach it.
Some of the material in 1.2, 4.2.3, and 5.5 appeared previously
in my article Resources, capacities, and ownership: The workmanship ideal and distributive justice, Political Theory, vol. 19,
no. 1 (February 1991), pp. 2846. It is copyright 1991 by Sage
Publications, Inc., and drawn on by permission here.
i n t r o d u c t i o n
When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should

they be denied it? This most enduring of political dilemmas motivates our inquiry. Socrates, Martin Luther, and Thomas More
remind us of its vintage; Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Aung
San Suu Kyi underscore its continuing force. They are moral
heroes because they faced down wrongful political authority, just
as surely as Adolph Eichmann was a moral villain for his failure to
do so. His motivation and behavior as a middle-level ocer in
Nazi Germany exemplify obedience to a technically legitimate
authority. Yet his actions in sending countless thousands to Nazi
concentration camps suggest that there must be limits to any
governments legitimate authority.
As the events surrounding Eichmanns own death underscore,
it is a good deal easier to say that there should be such limits than
to say what they should be or how they should be enforced. Captured by Israeli commandos in violation of Argentinean and international law, he was spirited to Israel, tried and executed for
crimes against humanity and against the Jewish people. Many
who shed no tears for Eichmann were nonetheless troubled by
the manner of his apprehension: he was tried in a country and by
courts that did not exist when he committed his crimes and a law
was tailor-made to facilitate his sentencing and execution. These
actions seem at odds with the hallmarks of legitimate political
authority that rule out illegal searches and seizures, post hoc
crafting of laws to t particular cases, and bills of attainder. Yet if
1
introduction
we are unnerved both by Israels acting on what its leaders saw as

a moral imperative despite the legal institutions of the day and by
Eichmanns slavish adherence to the legal institutions of his day,
our question is thrown into sharp relief. Who is to judge, and by
what criteria, whether the laws and actions of states that claim our
allegiance measure up? In this book we explore the principal
answers given to these questions in the modern West.
One set of answers grows out of the utilitarian tradition, famously associated with the name of Jeremy Bentham (1748
1832). His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,
rst published in 1789, is its locus classicus, although utilitarianism has older roots than this, and it has since been reformulated
and rened in numerous ways as we will see. Utilitarians answer
our question with a variant of the claim that the legitimacy of
governments is tied to their willingness and capacity to maximize happiness. What counts as happiness, whose happiness is
to count, how it is measured, and who does the counting are
among the contentious issues that distinguish dierent utilitarians from one another as will become plain in chapters 2 and
3. Despite disagreements about these and other consequential
matters, utilitarians generally agree that we should judge governments by reference to Benthams memorable, if ambiguous,
dictum that they should be expected to maximize the greatest
happiness of the greatest number of people.
The Marxist tradition that occupies us in chapter 4 takes
the idea of exploitation as the benchmark for judging political legitimacy. Marxists dier substantially from one another on the
denition of exploitation, its relations both to labor and to the
economic and political systems, and on the role of political institutions in eradicating it. On all Marxist understandings, however, political institutions lack legitimacy to the degree that they
underwrite exploitation and they gain it to the degree that they
promote its antithesis, human freedom. Every political system in
introduction
history has countenanced some kind of exploitation from the

Marxist point of view, but socialism and communism are thought
to hold out the possibility of a world that is free of exploitation.
History has not looked kindly on these possibilities since Karl
Marx (18181883) wrote, but, even if desirable variants of them
are unavailable, we will see that aspects of Marxist theory may
nonetheless be helpful in understanding the normative properties of capitalism and in distinguishing the relative legitimacy of
dierent types of capitalist systems.
The social contract tradition examined in chapter 5 oers a
third sort of answer to my initial question. Social contract arguments are as old as the hills, but in their modern form they are
generally thought to originate with Thomas Hobbess Leviathan,
published in 1651, and John Lockes Second Treatise on Government which rst appeared as an anonymous tract in England in
the 1680s. For social contract theorists, the states legitimacy is
rooted in the idea of agreement. From the beginning they have
disagreed among themselves about the nature of the agreement,
who the parties to the agreement are, and how, if at all, the agreement is to be enforced, but they agree that consent of the governed, somehow understood, is the source of the states legitimacy. We owe the state allegiance if it embodies our consent, and
we are free (and in some formulations even obliged) to resist it
when it does not.
Each of the utilitarian, Marxist, and contractarian traditions
brings a distinctive focus and set of questions about political legitimacy to the fore, but the traditions also overlap a good deal more
than is often realized. I will argue that this is mainly because they
have all been decisively shaped by the Enlightenment. This is the
philosophical movement aimed at rationalizing social life by basing it on scientic principles and in which there is a powerful
normative impetus to take seriously the ideal of human freedom as expressed in a political doctrine of individual rights. The
introduction
Enlightenment project, as Alasdair MacIntyre has dubbed it, is

generally associated with the writings of such European thinkers
as Ren Descartes (15961650), Gottfried Leibnitz (16461716),
Benedict Spinoza (16321677), and Immanuel Kant (1724
1804), though it was also greatly inuenced by the English Empiricists, John Locke (16321704), George Berkeley (16851753),
and David Hume (17111776). We will see how Enlightenment
values have shaped the utilitarian, Marxist, and social contract
traditions, and, in the course of examining those traditions, we
will also evaluate their understandings of the Enlightenment
values of science and individual rights.
The Enlightenment has always had its detractors; they are our
focus in chapter 6. Critics of Enlightenment political thinking
range from traditionalists like Edmund Burke (17291797) to
various postmodern and communitarian theorists in the contemporary literature. Despite their many dierences, they share in
common considerable skepticism, not to say hostility, to the goal
of rationalizing politics along scientic lines as well as to the
idea that the freedoms embodied in individual rights are the
most important political value. Instead they are inclined to attach
normative weight to inherited norms and practices, linking the legitimacy of political institutions to how well they embody communal values that shape, and give meaning to, the lives of individuals. The sources of the self, as Charles Taylor describes them, are
seen as rooted in systems of attachment and aliation that precede and survive individuals, shaping their expectations of political legitimacy.
By the end of chapter 6 it becomes plain that, despite serious
diculties with the utilitarian, Marxist, and social contract traditions, wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment project in politics
is infeasible and would be undesirable even if it were feasible.
Some of the diculties with the dierent theories are specic to
introduction
them; others ow from the particular understandings of Enlightenment values they embody. With respect to the former, each of
the three traditions contains insights that survive their failures as
comprehensive political doctrines and should inform our thinking about of the sources of political legitimacy. With respect to the
latter, I distinguish the early Enlightenment, which is vulnerable
to the arguments of anti-Enlightenment critics, from the mature
Enlightenment, which is not. Attacks on the Enlightenments
preoccupation with foundational certainty are not telling against
the fallibilist view of science that informs most contemporary
thinking and practice and, whatever the diculties with the idea
of individual rights, they pale in comparison with trying to develop a theory of political legitimacy without them.
This raises the question: What political theory best embodies
mature Enlightenment values? My answer in chapter 7 is democracy. The democratic tradition has ancient origins, but the modern formulations that shape contemporary political argument
spring from, or react against, Jean-Jacques Rousseaus discussion
of the general will in The Social Contract, published in 1762. Democrats hold that governments are legitimate when those who are
aected by decisions play an appropriate role in making them and
when there are meaningful opportunities to oppose the government of the day, replacing it with an alternative. Democrats dier
on many particulars of how government and opposition should
be organized, who should be entitled to vote, how their votes
should be counted, and what limits, if any, should be placed on
the decisions of democratic majorities. Yet they share a common
commitment to democratic procedures as the most viable source
of political legitimacy. My claim that they are correct will seem
vulnerable to some, at least initially. Democracy has long and
often been criticized as profoundly hostile both to the truth and to
the sanctity of individual rights. However, I make the case that on
introduction
the mature Enlightenment understandings of these values that

make the most sense, the critique is wrongheaded. The democratic tradition oers better resources than the going alternatives
for ensuring that political claims and counter-claims are tested for
their veracity in the public arena, and for protecting those individual rights that best embody the aspiration for human freedom.
c h a p t e r
Enlightenment
Politics
The philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment was

really several distinct, if overlapping, intellectual movements. Its
roots can be traced at least to the 1600s, and its inuence has
been felt in every walk of life. From philosophy, science, and
invention, to art, architecture, and literature, to politics, economics, and organization, every eld of human activity bears the indelible stamp of one aspect or another of the Enlightenment.
Despite innumerable assaults that have been leveled against different aspects of its philosophical assumptions and practical consequences from the beginning, the Enlightenment outlook has
dominated intellectual consciousness in the West for the better
part of four centuries.
If there is a single overarching idea shared in common by
adherents to dierent strands of Enlightenment thinking, it is
faith in the power of human reason to understand the true nature
of our circumstances and ourselves. The Enlightenment outlook
is optimistic to its core, supplying impetus to the idea of progress
in human aairs. As reasons reach expands, it seems plausible
to think that understanding will yield the possibility to control
and perhaps even improve our environments and our lives. Enthusiasts of the Enlightenment have always found this possibility
of progress seductive, even if fraught with attendant dangeras
current debates about advances in genetics underscore. When
knowledge advances, so too does the possibility of genetic engineering to eradicate inherited diseases and birth defects. The
7
enlightenment politics
same advances in knowledge might, however, be pressed in the

service of Orwellian manipulation of peoples psyches. Partisans
of the Enlightenment think the best bet is that the potential advantages of gaining knowledge outweigh the risks, or in some
cases that human beings are incapable of resisting the allure of
authentic knowledge. Whether the product of unvarnished enthusiasm or a more chastened desire to direct the inevitable in
felicitous directions, the Enlightenment enterprise is one of deploying reason in the service of improvement in human aairs.
The aspirations to understand the social and natural world
through the deployment of reason, and to press understanding
into the service of human improvement, are by no means new
with the Enlightenment. One need not read far into Platos Republic to discover an abiding value being placed on the pursuit
of knowledge through reason, and a central preoccupation of
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics is with improvement that can be
achieved by shaping the malleable aspects of the human psyche
in accordance with objectively identiable virtues. Yet the Enlightenment understandings of reason and human improvement are
distinctive. Reasons pursuit of knowledge is seen as mediated by,
and achieved through, science; and human improvement is measured by the yardstick of individual rights that embody, and protect, human freedom.
1.1 Sciences Ascendancy

The preoccupation with science stemmed from a program to
make all knowledge secure, measured by a standard rst articulated by Descartes when he announced that he was in search of
propositions that are impossible to doubt. His famous example,
known as the cogito, was I think, therefore I am. The very act of
trying to doubt it seems necessarily to arm it. Dierent Enlightenment thinkers would comprehend knowledge and science in
strongly diering ways over the next several centuries, but they all
have been consumed with the task, as Immanuel Kant dened it

in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), of placing knowledge on the
secure path of a science. These developments in philosophy
reected and reinforced the emergence of modern scientic
consciousness. That consciousness involved not merely a commitment to the idea that science provides the only genuine knowledge but also a massive and optimistic faith in its liberating effects. Francis Bacons (15611626) declaration that knowledge is
power embodied a programmatic commitment to a double faith
in science as the only reliable means of authentic understanding
of the universe and the best tool for transforming it in accordance
with human aspirations.
It is important for our purposes to note that the status of the
human sciences evolved considerably over the course of the Enlightenment. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
when the hallmark of scientic knowledge was indubitable certainty, ethics, political philosophy, and the human sciences were
regarded as superior to the natural sciences. This view seems
strange from the vantage point of the twenty-rst century, when
elds like physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and biology
have all advanced with astonishing speed to discoveries that
would have been unimaginable in the eighteenth century. The
human sciences, by contrast, have produced little, if any, enduring knowledge, and many doubt that ethics and political philosophy can be studied scientically at all. Understanding why contemporary views of the relative statuses of these various elds of
inquiry dier so radically from those prevalent in the early Enlightenment requires attention to two features of its distinctive
epistemology that would subsequently be abandoned.
1.1.1 The Workmanship Ideal of Knowledge
The rst distinctive feature of the early Enlightenment concerns
the range of a priori knowledge, the kind of knowledge that either
follows from denitions or is otherwise deduced from covering
10
principles. This is the kind of knowledge Descartes had in mind

when he formulated his cogito and that Kant located in the realm
of analytic judgments. Kant distinguished these from synthetic judgments. They always involve a leap from a subject to a
predicate, which has not been in any wise thought in it [the
subject], and which no analysis could possibly extract from it.
Analytic judgments are best thought of as being logically implied
by the meanings of terms, whereas synthetic judgments are not
usually because they depend for their veracity on the world beyond deductive meanings. Some twentieth-century philosophers
challenged the existence of an analytic/synthetic distinction, but
most would still accept a version of it.
Where most, today, would dier sharply from the philosophers
of the early Enlightenment concerns the epistemological status of
ethics, political philosophy, and the human sciences. These endeavors were all classied within the realm of a priori knowledge
by the earlier Enlightenment thinkers, because the relevant criterion was not a distinction between knowledge that is true by
denition versus knowledge that is derived from experience. Instead, it was a distinction between knowledge that depends on
the human will versus knowledge that is independent of it. As
Thomas Hobbes put it in De Homine, the pure or mathematical
sciences can be known a priori, but the mixed mathematics,
such as physics, depend on the causes of natural things [which
are] not in our power. He put it more fully in the Epistle Dedicatory to his Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics:
Of arts, some are demonstrable, others indemonstrable; and the
demonstrable are those the construction of the subject whereof is
in the power of the artist himself, who, in his demonstration does
no more but deduce the consequences of his own operation. The
reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived
from a precognition of the causes, generation, and construction of
the same; and consequently where the causes are known, there is
11
place for demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for.
Geometry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and gures from
which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil
philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth
ourselves. But because natural bodies we know not the construction, but seek it from eects, there lies no demonstration of what
the causes be we seek for, but only what they may be.
This creationist or workmanship theory conferred a vastly

superior epistemological status on moral matters in pre-Humean
Enlightenment thought to any they have enjoyed since. Consider
Hobbess statement at the end of his introduction to Leviathan:
that when he has laid out his own argument orderly, and perspicuously, the only task for the reader was to consider whether
he also nds the same in himself, for this kind of Doctrine,
admitteth no other Demonstration. Far from suggesting that
readers must see how their intuitions compare with Hobbess, he
is underscoring his belief that the argument of Leviathan has the
force of a mathematical proof.
John Locke held a similar view, though its underpinning lay in
theological controversies that will initially seem arcane. However,
the way he dealt with these controversies inuenced many of the
doctrines discussed in this book. A basic issue for Locke and
many of his contemporaries was the ontological status of natural
law and in particular its relation to Gods will. If one took the view,
common among natural law theorists of his day, that natural law
is eternal and unchanging, then this view threatened another
notion many of them thought compelling: that God is omnipotent. By denition, an all-powerful God could not be bound by
natural law. Yet if God has the capacity to change natural law, we
cannot assume it to be timeless and xed. Locke wrestled with
this tension without ever resolving it to his own satisfaction, but
in his moral and political writings he came down decisively in the
voluntarist, or will-centered, camp. He could not relinquish the
12
proposition that for something to have the status of a law, it must

be the product of a will. By adopting this voluntarist view, Locke
aligned himself with other will-centered theorists of the early
Enlightenment, notably German philosopher and natural law theorist Samuel von Pufendorf.
The voluntarist theory of natural law dovetailed neatly with
Lockes general epistemology, which mirrored the Hobbesian one
just described. Locke distinguished ectype from archetype
ideas: ectypes are general ideas of substances, and archetypes are
ideas constructed by man. This distinction generated a radical
disjunction between natural and conventional knowledge, underpinned by a further distinction between nominal and real
essences. In substances that depend on the external world for
their existence (such as trees or animals), only nominal essences
can be known to man. The real essence is available only to the
maker of the substance, God. In the case of archetypes, however,
nominal and real essences are synonymous so that real essences
can by denition be known by man. Because social practices are
always a function of archetype ideas, it follows that real social
essences can be known by man. We know what we make. For
Locke, as for Hobbes, man can thus have incontrovertible knowledge of his creationsmost importantly, for our purposes, of
political arrangements and institutions.
1.1.2 The Preoccupation with Certainty
Insisting that will-centeredness is the hallmark of the highest
form of knowledge involved an archaic gloss on what we today
think of as analytic truth. No less archaic was the related deprecation of forms of knowledge that are not will-dependent. The postHumean Enlightenment tradition has been marked, in contrast,
by a fallibilist view of knowledge. All knowledge claims are fallible, on this account, and science advances not by making knowl-
13
edge more certain but by producing more knowledge. Recognizing the corrigibility of all knowledge claims and the possibility
that one might always be wrong exemplies the modern scientic
attitude. As Karl Popper (19021994) noted, the most that we can
say, when hypotheses survive empirical tests, is that they have not
been falsied so that we can accept them provisionally. As a
dramatic illustration, a recent study by a distinguished group of
astrophysicists suggests that what have been accepted as the basic
laws of nature may not be unchanging. If true, the consequences
for our understanding of modern science will be at least as profound as was Einsteins theory of relativity.
Ethics, political philosophy, and substantial parts of the human
sciences would thus come to face a double threat as the Enlightenment matured. The abandonment of creationist theories of
knowledge would deprive them of their early Enlightenment identication with logic and mathematics as preeminent sciences, but
it was far from clear that they contained propositions that could be
tested empirically by the standards of a critical, fallibilist science.
Neither certain nor subject to falsication, these elds of inquiry
were challenged to escape the bugbear of being merely subjective, to be cast, as A. J. Ayer argued so dramatically in Language,
Truth, and Logic in 1936, along with metaphysics, into the trashcan
of speculation. Since the expression of a value judgment is not a
proposition, Ayer insisted, the question of truth or falsehood
does not here arise. Theorists of ethical science treat propositions which refer to the causes and attributes of our ethical feelings as if they were denitions of ethical concepts. As a result,
Ayer held, they fail to recognize that ethical concepts are pseudoconcepts and consequently indenable. Ayers doctrine of logical positivism is often attacked, but we will see that his view of the
nonscientic character of normative inquiry has endured in both
the academy and the public mind.
14
1.2 The Centrality of Individual Rights

In addition to faith in science, the Enlightenments central focus
on individual rights dierentiates its political philosophy from
the ancient and medieval commitments to order and hierarchy.
This focus brings the freedom of the individual to the center of
arguments about politics. This move was signaled in the natural
law tradition by a shift in emphasis from the logic of law to the
idea of natural right. Hobbes contended in Leviathan that it was
customary to conate Jus, and Lex, Right and Law; yet they ought
to be distinguished; because RIGHT, consisteth in liberty to do, or
to forbeare; Whereas LAW, determineth, and bindeth to one of
them; which in one and the same matter are inconsistent. We
nd similar reasoning in Lockes Essays on the Law of Nature,
written in 1663. Rejecting the traditional Christian correlativities
between right and law, he insisted instead that natural law ought
to be distinguished from natural right: for right is grounded in
the fact that we have the free use of a thing, whereas law is what
enjoins or forbids the doing of a thing. Just how distinctive
these moves were can be gleaned from the fact that European
languages other than English lack this linguistic distinction. The
German word Recht, the Italian diritto, and the French droit are all
used to signify law in the abstract as well as right; so closely bound
are the etymologies of these ideas historically. Although the English social contract theorists spearheaded this change, we will
see that it has left its indelible stamp on a much wider swath of the
political terrain.
We have already seen that in Lockes voluntarist theology, Gods
omnipotence is foundational. What humans perceive as natural
law is in fact Gods natural right, an expression of his will.
Lockes theory of ownership ows naturally out of this scheme,
transforming the workmanship model of knowledge into a normative theory of right. It is through acts of autonomous making
that rights over what is created come into being: making entails
15
ownership so that natural law is at bottom Gods natural right over

his creation. Lockes frequent appeals to metaphors of workmanship and watch making in the Two Treatises and elsewhere
make it fundamental that men are obliged to God because of his
purposes in making them. Men are the Workmanship of one
Omnipotent, and innitely wise Maker. . . . They are his Property,
whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one
anothers pleasure.
For Locke, human beings are unique among Gods creations
because he gave them the capacity to make, to create rights of
their own. We will see that this idea, in a secularized form, would
long outlive the workmanship theology and epistemology that
spawned it. In Lockes formulation, natural law dictates that man
is subject to divine imperatives to live in certain ways, but, within
the limits set by the law of nature, men can act in a godlike
fashion. Man as maker has a makers knowledge of his intentional actions, and a natural right to dominion over mans products. Provided we do not violate natural law, we stand in the same
relation to the objects we create as God stands to us; we own them
just as he owns us. Natural law, or Gods natural right, thus sets
outer boundaries to a eld within which humans have divine
authority to act as miniature gods, creating rights and obligations
of their own.
1.3 Tensions Between Science and Individual Rights

How the preoccupation with science and the commitment to individual rights have inuenced arguments about the source of political legitimacy will be explored in subsequent chapters. A general
point to bear in mind, already suggested by my discussion of
Lockes theology, is that these two Enlightenment values live in
potential tension with one another. Science is a deterministic
enterprise, concerned with discovering the laws that govern the
16
universe. In the social and political realms this point has obvious
potential for conict with an ethic that emphasizes individual
freedom: if human actions are law-governed, how can there be
the freedom of action that gives the commitment to individual
rights its meaning and point? This is an instance of the longstanding tension between free will and determinism that reared
its head in Lockes theological concerns, but it takes on a characteristic Enlightenment hue when formulated as a tension between science and individual rights.
Even Hobbes and Locke, who placed so much emphasis on the
existence of denitive answers to normative questions, could not
escape this tension completely. Both believed that people are free
to act as they choose when natural law is silent, but, when it is not,
neither was entirely comfortable with the proposition that free
human will must always succumb to natural laws requirements.
This was so despite the fact that both of them believed natural law
had the full force of both science and theology behind it. Hobbes
held that rational individuals would agree to submit to an absolute sovereign because the alternative was horric civil war. This
thinking implies that the sovereign could legitimately order his
subject to lay down his life in battle, but Hobbes felt compelled to
warn the sovereign not to be surprised if subjects were unwilling
to do this. Although Locke thought natural law as expressed in
the Scriptures binding on human beings, he recognized that the
Scriptures are suciently ambiguous to allow room for interpretive disagreement. One of his main arguments with Sir Robert
Filmer in the First Treatise concerned Lockes insistence that God
speaks directly to every individual who reads the Scriptures, and
that no human authority is entitled to declare one interpretation
authoritative in the face of a conicting one. This freedom to
comprehend natural law by ones own lights supplied the basis of
Lockes right to resist that could be invoked against the sovereign,
and to which he himself appealed when opposing the English
17
crown during the 1680s. His conviction that right answers can be
discovered about the meaning of the Scriptures, and, hence, what
natural law requires, was not understood to obliterate human
freedom to disagree even about that very subject.
In short, although the workmanship ideal is an attempt to synthesize the deterministic injunctions of science with an ethic that
gives centrality to individual freedom, that ideal contains tensions
for human beings that are analogous to the natural law paradox
that concerned Locke. If there are unassailable right answers
about political legitimacy that any clearheaded person must afrm, in what sense do people really have the right to decide this
for themselves? But if they are free to reject what science reveals
on the basis of their own convictions, then what is left of sciences
claim to priority over other modes of engaging with the world?
We will see this tension surface repeatedly in the utilitarian,
Marxist, and social contract traditions, without ever being fully
resolved. The tension is recast in the democratic tradition and
managed through procedural devices that diminish it, but there,
too, the tension is never entirely dispatched. Its tenacity reects
the reality that the allure of science and the commitment to individual rights are both basic to the political consciousness of the
Enlightenment.
Introduction to
the Bible
C h r i s t i n e H ay e s

illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,
business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).
Set in Minion type by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America
Biblical verses reprinted from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures by permission
of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1985 The Jewish
Publication Society, Philadelphia.
Table 3: From Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel, by Nahum
M. Sarna, copyright 1986 by Nahum M. Sarna, table appears on p. 76.
Used by permission of Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
For information about this and other Random House, Inc., books and
authors, see the Web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.
Map 6: From The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to
the Hebrew Scriptures, by Michael Coogan, copyright 2006 by Oxford
University Press, Inc., map appears on p. 403. Used by permission of
Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hayes, Christine Elizabeth.
Introduction to the Bible / Christine Hayes.
pages cm (The open Yale courses series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-18179-1 (pbk.)
1. Bible. O.T.Introductions. I. Title.
BS1140.3.H39 2012
221.6'1dc23
2012022003
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
10
"Introduction to the Bible," by Christine Hayes
For my students,
real and virtual,
past, present, and future
Contents
Preface ix
Chronology of Significant Events in the History of Ancient Israel
1. The Legacy of Ancient Israel
2. Understanding Biblical Monotheism
3. Genesis 13: The Biblical Creation
Stories
4. Doublets and Contradictions
5. The Modern Critical Study of the Bible
6. Biblical Narrative: The Stories of the
Patriarchs (Genesis 1236)
7. Israel in Egypt: Moses and the
Beginning of Yahwism
8. From Egypt to Sinai
9. Biblical Law
10. The Priestly Legacy: Cult and Sacrifice,
Purity and Holiness
11. On the Steps of Moab: Deuteronomy
and the Figure of Moses
12. The Deuteronomistic History I: Joshua
13. The Deuteronomistic History II:
Of Judges, Prophets, and Kings
14. The Kingdoms of Judah and Israel
15. Israelite Prophecy
16. The Prophetic Response to the Events
of History: Amos as Paradigm
17. Prophets of the Assyrian Crisis:
Hosea and First Isaiah
18. Judean Prophets: Micah, Zephaniah, Nahum,
Habakkuk, Jeremiah
1
15
29
43
58
76
94
111
127
148
165
185
198
216
236
248
263
280
xiii
viii
Contents
19. Responses to the Destruction:

Ezekiel and 23 Isaiah
20. Responses to the Destruction:
Lamentations and Wisdom
21. Canonical Criticism: Ecclesiastes,
Psalms, and the Song of Songs
22. The Restoration: Ezra-Nehemiah
and Ruth
23. Postexilic Prophets and the Rise of
Apocalyptic
24. Israel and the Nations: Esther
and Jonah
Epilogue
Notes
Index
403
417
298
315
338
360
379
391
400
Preface
This book examines the small library of twenty-four books common to all
Jewish and Christian Bibles everywherebooks that preserve the diverse
efforts of various writers over a period of nearly a millennium to make
sense of both the historical odyssey and the human experience of the ancient Israelite people. Like any library, this ancient collection contains
books by many authors writing in many contexts and responding to many
crises and questionspolitical, historical, socioeconomic, cultural, philosophical, religious, and moraloffering an unresolved polyphony that rewards careful reading and reflection.
The great variety and complexity of the many books of the Bible can
be daunting to those who wish to understand not only its contents but also
its continuing influence through history. This volume guides readers through
the complex and polyphonous literature of the twenty-four biblical books
that would serve as a foundational pillar of western civilization. Introducing readers to the modern methods of study that have led to deep and powerful insights into the original context and meaning of biblical texts, this book
traces the diverse strands of Israelite culture and thought incorporated in
the Bible, against the backdrop of their historical and cultural setting in the
ancient Near East. It probes the passionate and highly fraught struggle of
different biblical writers to understand and represent their nations historical experience and covenantal relationship with its god.
The twenty-four chapters that constitute the present volume are based
on the twenty-four lectures presented in my undergraduate course Introduction to the Old Testament, which is widely available online through
Yale Universitys Open Yale Courses project (http://oyc.yale.edu/). This volume is not an exact transcript of those lectures; it revises and adapts them
for a written format. At times a different order of presentation is adopted.
Repetitions and infelicitous formulations have been deleted, and some new
material has been incorporatedin particular, close analysis of primary
sources and biblical texts that, in the context of the Yale course, was undertaken by students in small discussion sections.
ix
Preface
By their very nature as introductory, the course and the current volume do not represent my own original research. Rather, they draw upon
and synthesize a vast body of existing scholarship on the Bible of ancient
Israelespecially the writings of Michael Coogan, Moshe Greenberg,
Yehezkel Kaufmann, Jonathan Klawans, Jacob Milgrom, Nahum Sarna,
and the excellent scholarly essays in The Jewish Study Bible, edited by Adele
Berlin and Marc Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Readers will also see some correspondences between the present volume and
two summary chapters on biblical Israel in my textbook The Emergence of
Judaism: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspectives (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 2010).
Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the Bible in its ancient Near
Eastern context. Chapters 2 through 15 follow the narrative chronology of
the Bible, from Genesis through 2 Kings. Readers should be aware that the
narrative sequence does not reflect the compositional sequence of the Bible.
In other words, and as just one example, most scholars now agree that parts
of Genesis were written long after parts of Exodus or Deuteronomy or Isaiah. Many biblical books came into being through the accretion of various
materials over the course of centuries. Thus, while following the narrative
chronology imposed by the final redactor of Genesis through 2 Kings, we
will simultaneously attend to the compositional history of the text, noting
the likely provenance of the various units that make up the final redacted
biblical text and considering how and why the text acquired the form we
see today. Chapters 16 through 19 examine the books of the prophets in historical sequence rather than canonical sequence, and chapters 20 through
24 take a somewhat thematic approach to the books collected in the section
of the Hebrew Bible known as the Writings.
Readers of this volume will derive maximum benefit if they are familiar with the biblical material analyzed in each chapter. Thus, readers are
strongly urged to read the relevant biblical passages listed at the beginning of each chapter. However, even readers unable to complete the biblical
readings will learn much from the presentations and discussions in this
book.
The biblical translation that serves as the basis for both the course and
this volume is that of the Jewish Publication Society, particularly as found
in The Jewish Study Bible. Citations of biblical texts in this volume are taken
primarily from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985) but also occasionally from the Revised Standard Version
(particularly in the case of well-known passages such as the twenty-third
Preface
xi
psalm). In both cases, I have modified the translation to more accurately

reflect the various modes of reference employed for the Israelite deity. Biblical writings regularly use four distinct terms to refer directly to the Israelite
deity (I include here terms of consistent direct address only and not more
occasional and descriptive epithets): El, Elohim, Yahweh, and (with less
frequency) Adonai. El is the name of the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon. Elohim is a grammatically plural form (gods), but in reference to
the god of Israel, it takes singular verbs and thus may be understood as
another name for this specific god. Yahweh is a divine name attested in archaeological finds from regions to the south of biblical Israel and applied to
the Israelite god in biblical writings. Adonai, literally my lord, is used as a
reference to the deity in a few biblical books. Many English translations of
the Bible adopt the convention of rendering El and Elohim as God (with
a capital G) and Yahweh as the Lord (in capital letters). The latter rendering is a pious substitution made in deference to a postbiblical reluctance to
pronounce the name Yahweh. Unfortunately, all of these renderings are
misleading. On the one hand, they obscure the historical connections between Israels god and the gods of surrounding peoples (specifically the
Canaanite deity El and the southern deity Yahweh). On the other hand, the
rendering God causes readers to confuse the deity of the Hebrew Bible with
the deity constructed by the much later tradition of western theology, a deity
commonly referred to as God (with a capital G). As any astute reader of
the Pentateuch will immediately discern, the biblical character El, or Elohim or Yahweh, is not represented by the biblical writer as possessing the
attributes attributed to the deity referred to as God by the later tradition of
western theology (for example, in many narratives he lacks the attributes
of omniscience and immutability). It is best that the reader keep these two
constructions (the biblical deity and the theologians God) distinct in order to fully appreciate the biblical texts. For that reason, the word God with
a capital G does not appear in this volume (except when quoting the work
of a scholar who does employ the term). In order to provide the most unmediated access to the conceptions of the divine found in ancient Israel, the
direct names El, Elohim, and Yahweh will be rendered as they appear in the
biblical text.
The terms Hebrew, Israelite, and Judean also require some explanation.
Hebrew is the name employed in some biblical sources to designate the
most ancient ancestors of the Israelite people. It is primarily an ethnic and
linguistic term denoting persons who spoke Hebrew, a Canaanite dialect.
The Hebrews are thought to have established themselves in the land of Ca-
xii
Preface
naan (roughly modern-day Israel) by about 1200 b.c.e. The terms Israel and
Israelite refer to a member of the twelve Hebrew tribes of the Israelite ethnos who inhabited Canaan, eventually forming themselves into a united
kingdom around 1000 b.c.e. The kingdom of Israel later split into a northern kingdom, Israel, and a southern kingdom, Judah. Although any member
of the twelve tribes was a member of the Israelite ethnos, inhabitants of the
northern kingdom were Israelites also by virtue of being from the kingdom
of Israel, while inhabitants of the southern kingdom were (additionally)
known as Judeans by virtue of being from the kingdom of Judah. However,
with the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722, the only Israelites remaining were the Judeans, and thus the terms Israelite and Judean become
somewhat interchangeable (except in contexts that refer clearly to the former inhabitants of the destroyed kingdom of Israel). Falling under Persian
rule at the end of the sixth century, the area around Jerusalem was named
Yehud and the term Yehudi (often translated Jew but more properly Judean) referred to an inhabitant of Yehud/Judea. It would be some centuries
before the term Yehudi was understood to designate an adherent of the tradition of Judaism (a Jew), rather than an inhabitant of the province of Yehud/
Judea (a Judean).
The land in which the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were located is
referred to by many biblical writers as the land of Canaan, and it is that
designation that will be adopted in this volume. Finally, throughout this
volume, the abbreviations c.e. (Common Era) and b.c.e. (Before the Common Era) will be employed instead of the corresponding abbreviations b.c.
(Before Christ) and a.d. (Anno Domini).
Chronology of Significant Events in the

History of Ancient Israel
20001900 b.c.e.
Third dynasty of Ur in Mesopotamia; XII dynasty in Egypt
19001800 b.c.e.
First Babylonian dynasty
17281686 b.c.e.
Period of Hammurapi, the historical setting for the patriarchal narratives,

spanning four generations from Abraham to the sons of Jacob
17001600 b.c.e.
Hyksos invade Egypt; Babylonia declines; possible Hebrew migration into

Egypt
12901211 b.c.e.
XIX dynasty in Egypt, Pharaohs Ramses II and Merneptah: the historical

setting for the story of the Jews enslavement in Egypt, the rise of Moses,
and the Exodus
End of thirteenth
century b.c.e.
An entity known as Israel is attested in Canaan
12001000 b.c.e.
Philistines settle along the coast of Canaan; the historical setting for the
events of the book of JudgesIsraelite tribes inhabit tribal areas throughout
Canaan, at times forming alliances against common enemies under the
leadership of judges
11001000 b.c.e.
Philistine ascendancy in Canaan; the prophet Samuel anoints Saul fi rst king
in Israel
1000961 b.c.e.
King David consolidates the Israelite tribes in a united kingdom and

establishes Jerusalem as the national capital
961922 b.c.e.
King Solomon builds the Temple in Jerusalem
922 b.c.e.
Upon Solomons death, the ten northern tribes rebel, creating Israel in the
north, ruled by Jeroboam I, and Judah in the south, ruled by Rehoboam
876842 b.c.e.
In Israel: the Omri dynasty; the prophet Elijah (c. 850 b.c.e.) rails against
Baal worship under Ahab and his queen, Jezebel. In Judah: Jehoshaphat
rules, followed by Jehoram
842 b.c.e.
In Israel: Jehu establishes a dynasty and pays tribute to Assyria. In Judah:

Athaliah rules
786746 b.c.e.
In Israel: Jeroboam II reigns; the prophets Amos and Hosea deliver their
oracles
750730 b.c.e.
Aggressive Assyrian expansion; the prophet Isaiah begins his prophetic

career in Judah (c. 742700 b.c.e.)
732 b.c.e.
Syria falls to the Assyrians; soon after, the prophet Micah delivers oracles in
Judah
722 b.c.e.
Assyrians under Shalmaneser V conquer Samaria, the capital of Israel;

Sargon II makes Samaria an Assyrian province, marking the end of the
northern kingdom; mass Israelite deportation
(continued)
xiii
xiv
Chronology of Significant Events
715 b.c.e.
Hezekiah reigns in Judah and initiates religious reforms in line with

Deuteronomistic ideology
701 b.c.e.
Sennacherib of Assyria lays siege to Jerusalem; Judah becomes a tributary

vassal of Assyria
687642 b.c.e.
Manasseh reigns in Judah and reintroduces foreign cultic practices
640609 b.c.e.
Josiah reigns in Judah; initiates religious reforms, centralizing the worship

of Yahweh in the Jerusalem Temple; short period of Judean independence
628622 b.c.e.
Zephaniah delivers his prophecies
626587 b.c.e.
Jeremiah delivers his prophecies
612 b.c.e.
Babylonians and Medes raze Nineveh, the capital of Assyria; Babylonians

soon establish dominance over the ancient Near East
609 b.c.e.
Judean King Josiah killed in the Battle of Megiddo
605 b.c.e.
Habakkuk delivers his prophecies
597 b.c.e.
Nebuchadrezzar of Babylonia attacks Judah; first deportation to Babylonia

includes Judahs king Jehoiachin and the prophet Ezekiel
593 b.c.e.
Ezekiel begins to deliver his prophecies in Babylonia
587586 b.c.e.
Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians; second deportation includes Judahs

King Zedekiah; the prophet Jeremiah flees to Egypt
539 b.c.e.
Babylon falls to Cyrus II of Persia; period of the prophecies of Second Isaiah
538 b.c.e.
Cyruss edict permits Jews to return to Judah and rebuild the Temple; fi rst
exiles return under Sheshbazzar
520515 b.c.e.
Jerusalem Temple is rebuilt; the prophets Haggai and Zechariah are active;
Judah (Yehud) is a semiautonomous province of the Persian Empire
Fift h century b.c.e.
Malachi delivers his prophecies; a second return under Ezra occurs (date
uncertain)
445 b.c.e.
Nehemiah arrives in Judah; rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem
336323 b.c.e.
Alexander conquers the ancient Near East; Hellenistic period begins
300200 b.c.e.
Palestine falls under the control of the Ptolemies of Egypt; rise of the Jewish
community of Alexandria in Egypt
200 b.c.e.
Palestine falls under the control of the Seleucids of Syria
175163 b.c.e.
Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes inflames factional violence in

Jerusalem; Judah Maccabee and his sons lead a revolt in 167 b.c.e.
164 b.c.e.
Maccabean victory; the desecrated Temple is rededicated to Yahweh; Judea

becomes an independent kingdom under the Hasmoneans
c ha p t e r 1
The Legacy of Ancient Israel
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, archaeologists unearthed the

great civilizations of the ancient Near East: ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia,
and the area we refer to as the Fertile Crescent, including Canaan. Scholars
have been stunned by the ruins and records of these remarkable cultures
and civilizationsmassive, complex empires in some cases, many of which
had completely disappeared from human memory. Their newly uncovered
languages had been long forgotten; their rich literary and legal texts were
indecipherable (though that soon changed). Thanks to these discoveries,
scholars were soon in a position to appreciate the monumental achievements of these early civilizations.
Many scholars have remarked that it is no small irony that the ancient
Near Eastern people with one of the most lasting legacies was not a people
that built and inhabited one of the great centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization. It can be argued that the ancient Near Eastern people with the most
lasting legacy was a people that had an idea. It was a new idea that broke
with the ideas of their neighbors. Those people were the Israelites.
Scholars have come to the realization that despite the Bibles pretensions to the contrary, the Israelites were a small and relatively insignificant
group for much of their history. Around the year 1000 b.c.e., they did establish a kingdom in the land that was known in antiquity as Canaan. They
probably succeeded in subduing some of their neighbors and collecting tribute (though there is controversy about that), but in approximately 922 b.c.e.,
this kingdom divided into two smaller kingdoms of lesser importance. The
northern kingdom, consisting of ten of the twelve Israelite tribes and retaining the name Israel, was destroyed in 722 b.c.e. by the Assyrians. The
southern kingdom, consisting of two of the twelve tribes and known as Judah, managed to survive until the year 586 b.c.e., when the Babylonians
conquered it. Jerusalemthe capitalfell, the Temple was destroyed, and
large numbers of Judeans were sent into exile.
In antiquity, conquest and exile usually spelled the end of an ethnic
national group. Conquered peoples traded their defeated god for the victorious god of their conquerors. Through cultural and religious assimilation,
the conquered nation disappeared as a distinctive entity. Indeed, that is
what happened to the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel after 722
b.c.e. They were lost to history. But it did not happen to those members of
the Israelite nation who lived in the southern kingdom of Judah (the Judeans). Despite the demise of their national political base in 586 b.c.e.,
the Judeans, alone among the many peoples who have figured in ancient
Near Eastern historySumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites, Phoenicians, Hurrians, Canaanitesemerged after the death of their state, and
produced a community and a culture that can be traced, through various
twists and turns, transformations and vicissitudes, down to the modern
period. And these Judeans carried with them a radical new idea, a sacred
Scripture, and a set of traditions that would lay the foundation for the
major religions of the western world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So
what is this radical new idea that shaped a culture and enabled its survival not only into later antiquity but even into the present day in some
form?
The Israelite Idea

Scholars have postulated that the conception of the universe widespread
among ancient peoples was one in which the various natural forces were
understood to be imbued with divine power, to be in some sense divinities
themselves. The earth was a divinity, the sky was a divinity, the water was
a divinity, or possessed divine power. In other words, the gods were identical with or immanent in the forces of nature. There were thus many gods,
and no one single god was all powerful.
There is very good evidence to suggest that most ancient Israelites
shared this worldview. They participated, at the earliest stages of their history, in the wider religious and cultic culture of the ancient Near East. Over
the course of time, however, some ancient Israelites, not all at once and not
unanimously, broke with this view and articulated a different view according to which there was one divine power, one god. More important than
this gods singularity was the fact that this god was outside of and above
nature. This god was not identified with nature; he transcended nature. This
god was not known through nature or natural phenomena; he was known
through history and a particular relationship with humankind.
This ideawhich seems simple at first and not so very revolutionary
affected every aspect of Israelite culture and in ways that will become clear
ensured the survival of the ancient Israelites as an ethnic-religious entity.
In various complicated ways, the view of an utterly transcendent god with
absolute control over history made it possible for some Israelites to interpret even the most tragic and catastrophic events, such as the destruction of
their capital and the exile of the nation not as a defeat of Israels god or even
that gods rejection of them, but as a necessary part of the deitys larger
purpose or plan for Israel.
Goals of the Book

The Israelites bequeathed to later generations the record of their religious
and cultural revolution in the writings that are known as the Hebrew Bible.
The present book is an introduction to the Hebrew Bible as an expression of
the religious life and thought of ancient Israel and as a foundational document of western civilization. The book has several primary goals. First and
foremost, this book aims to familiarize readers with the contents of the
Hebrew Bible. Second, this book introduces readers to a number of different methodological approaches to the study of the Bible advanced by modern scholars. At times, the approach adopted will be that of a historian, at
times it will be that of a literary critic, and at times that of a religious and
cultural critic. Third, the book will on occasion provide some insight into
the history of biblical interpretation. The Bibles radically new conception
of the divine, its revolutionary depiction of the human being as a moral
agent, and its riveting saga of the nation of Israel have drawn generations of
readers to ponder its meaning and message. As a result, the Bible has become the base of an enormous edifice of interpretation and commentary
and debate, not only in traditional settings but also in academic and secular settings. Very occasionally, this book considers how certain biblical passages have been interpretedsometimes in contradictory waysover the
centuries.
A fourth goal of the book is to explore the culture of ancient Israel

against the backdrop of its historical and cultural setting in the ancient
Near East. The archaeological discoveries in the ancient Near East referred
to above reveal the spiritual and cultural heritage of all of the inhabitants
of the region, including the Israelites, and shed light on the background
and origin of the materials in the Bible. It is now clear that the traditions in
the Bible did not come out of a vacuum. The early chapters of Genesis are
an excellent example of this claim. Genesis 1 through 11known as the
primeval history (an unfortunate name because these chapters are not
best read or understood as history in the conventional sense)owe a great
deal to ancient Near Eastern mythology. The creation story in Genesis 1
echoes themes and motifs found in the Babylonian creation epic known as
Enuma Elish. The story of the first human pair in the Garden of Eden,
found in Genesis 2 and 3, has clear affinities with the Epic of Gilgamesh, an
ancient Near Eastern epic in which a hero embarks on an exhausting search
for immortality. The story of Noah and the flood found in Genesis 69 is
simply an Israelite version of recently discovered ancient Near Eastern prototypes: a Mesopotamian flood story called the Epic of Atrahasis and a
flood story incorporated into the Epic of Gilgamesh. In short, biblical traditions have roots that stretch deep into earlier times and out into surrounding lands and traditions. The parallels between the biblical stories and
ancient Near Eastern stories have been the subject of intense study and will
be considered in some depth in this book.
It isnt just the similarity between the biblical materials and the ancient Near Eastern sources that is remarkable. The dissimilarity is also important because it shows us how the biblical writers transformed a common
Near Eastern heritage in light of radically new Israelite conceptions of the
nature of the deity, of the created world, and of humankind. For example, a
Sumerian story dating to the third millennium B.C.E., the story of Ziusudra, is very similar to the Genesis flood story of Noah. In both the Sumerian and the Israelite flood stories, a flood occurs as the result of a deliberate
divine decision; one individual is chosen to be rescued; that individual is
given very specific instructions regarding the construction of a boat and
whom to bring on board; the flood comes and exterminates all living
things; the boat comes to rest on a mountaintop; the hero sends out birds to
reconnoiter the land; and when he comes out of the ark, he offers a sacrifice
to his god. The same narrative elements appear in these two stories, but
what is of great significance is that the biblical writer does not simply retell
a story that circulated widely in ancient Mesopotamia. The biblical writer
transforms the story so that it becomes a vehicle for the expression of different values and views. In the Mesopotamian flood stories, for example, the
gods act capriciously. In fact, in one of the stories, the gods complain that
noisy humans disturb their sleep and decide to wipe them all out indiscriminately with no moral scruple. The gods destroy the helpless but stoical
humans who chafe under their tyrannical, unjust, and uncaring rule. But
in the biblical story, the details are modified to reflect a moral purpose: It is
the deitys uncompromising ethical standard that leads him to bring the
flood in an act of divine justice. He is punishing the evil corruption of the
human beings he has so lovingly created and whose degradation he cannot
bear to witness. Thus, the story provides a very different message in its Israelite version.
Comparing the Bible with the literature of the ancient Near East reveals not only the cultural and literary heritage common to them but also
the ideological gulf that separated them. The biblical writers used these
stories as a vehicle for the expression of a radically new idea. They drew
upon older sources but shaped them in a particular way, creating a critical
problem for anyone seeking to reconstruct ancient Israelite religion or culture on the basis of the biblical materials: the conflicting perspectives of the
final editors of the text and of the older sources that are incorporated into
the Bible. Those who were responsible for the final edited form of the text
had a decidedly monotheistic perspective that they attempted to impose on
the older source materials. For the most part they were successful. But at
times the result of their effort is a deeply conflicted, deeply ambiguous text
featuring a cacophony of voices.
In many respects, the Bible represents or expresses a basic discontent
with the larger cultural milieu in which it was produced. And yet, many
moderns think of the Bible as an emblem of conservatism, an outdated
document with outdated ideas. The challenge of the present book is to help
readers view the Bible with fresh eyes in order to appreciate it for what it
was: a revolutionary cultural critique. To view the Bible with fresh and appreciative eyes, readers must first acknowledge and set aside some of their
presuppositions about the Bible.
Myths and Facts about the Bible

It is impossible not to hold opinions about this text because it is an intimate
part of our culture. Even those who have never opened or read the Bible can
cite a verse or a phrase, such as an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth or
the poor will always be with youalthough it is likely they do not know
what these phrases really mean in their original context. Verses are quoted
or alluded to, whether to be championed and valorized or lampooned and
pilloried, and such citations create within us a general impression of the
biblical text and its meaning. As a result, people believe they have a rough
idea of the Bible and its outlook, when in fact what they have are popular
misconceptions that come from the way the Bible has been used or misused. Indeed, many of our cherished presuppositions about the Bible are
based on astonishing claims that others have made on behalf of the Bible,
claims that the Bible has not made on behalf of itself.
There is value in examining and setting aside some of the more common myths about the Bible. The first common myth is that the Bible is a
book. In fact, the Bible is not a book with the characteristic features that
such a designation implies. For example, the Bible does not have a uniform
style, a single author, or a single messagefeatures conventionally implied
by the word book. The Bible is a library or an anthology of books written
and edited over an extensive period of time by people in very different situations responding to very different issues and stimulipolitical, historical,
philosophical, religious, and moral stimuli. Moreover, there are many
types or genres of material in the Bible. There are narrative texts, and there
are legal texts. There are cultic and ritual texts that prescribe how a given
ceremony is to be performed. There are records of the messages of prophets. There is lyric poetry and love poetry. There are proverbs, and there are
psalms of thanksgiving and lament. In short, there is a tremendous variety
of material in this library.
It follows from the fact that the Bible is not a book but an anthology of
diverse works that it is also not an ideological monolith. Each book within
the biblical collection, or strand of tradition within a biblical book, sounds
its own distinctive note in the symphony of reflection that is the Bible. Genesis is concerned to account for the origin of things and wrestles with the
existence of evil, idolatry, and suffering in a world created by a good god.
The priestly texts in Leviticus and Numbers emphasize the sanctity of all
life, the ideal of holiness, and ethical and ritual purity. There are odes to
human reason and learning in the wisdom book of Proverbs. Ecclesiastes
scoffs at the vanity of all things, including wisdom, and espouses a kind of
positive existentialism. The Psalms contain writings that express the full
range of emotions experienced by the worshipper toward his or her god.
Job challenges conventional religious piety and arrives at the bittersweet
conclusion that there is no justice in this world or any other, but that none-
theless we are not excused from the thankless, and perhaps ultimately meaningless, task of righteous living.
One of the most wonderful and fortuitous facts of history is that later
Jewish communities chose to put this diverse material in the collection we
call the Bible. They chose to include all of these dissonant voices and did
not strive to reconcile the conflictsand nor should modern readers because the Bible isnt a book but a library. Each book, each writer, each voice
reflects another thread in the rich tapestry of human experience, human
response to life and its puzzles, and human reflection on the sublime and
the depraved.
A second myth about the Bible that should be set aside is that biblical
narratives are pious parables about saints. Biblical narratives are not simple,
pious tales. They are psychologically real literature about realistic people
whose actions are not always exemplary and whose lives should not always
be models for our own. There is a genre of literature that details the lives of
saints called hagiography, but that genre emerges later in the Christian era.
It is not found in the Hebrew Bible. The Bible abounds with human, not
superhuman, beings and their behavior can be scandalous, violent, rebellious, outrageous, lewd, and vicious. But at the same time, like real people,
biblical characters can turn and act in ways that are loyal and true or above
and beyond the call of duty. They can and do change.
Nevertheless, many people open the Bible for the first time and
quickly close it in shock and disgust. Jacob is a deceiver! Joseph is an arrogant, spoiled brat! Judah reneges on his obligations to his daughter-in-law
and sleeps with a prostitute! Who are these people? Why are they in the
Bible? The shock some readers feel comes from their expectation that the
heroes of the Bible are perfectly pious people. Such a claim is not made by
the Bible itself. Biblical characters are realistically portrayed, with realistic
and compelling moral conflicts, ambitions, and desires. They can act shortsightedly and selfishly, but like real people they can learn and grow and
change. If we work too hard and too quickly to vindicate biblical characters
just because they are in the Bible, or attribute to them pious qualities and
characteristics as dictated by later religious traditions, then we miss the
moral sophistication and the deep psychological insights that have made
these stories of timeless interest.
A third myth to be set aside is that the Bible is suitable for children.
The subject matter in the Bible is very adult, particularly in the narrative texts.
There are episodes of treachery and incest and murder and rape. Neither
is the Bible for nave optimists. It speaks to those who have the courage to
acknowledge that life is rife with pain and conflict, just as it is fi lled with
compassion and joy.
The Bible is not for children in a second sense. Like any literary masterpiece, the Bible is characterized by a sophistication of structure and style
and an artistry of theme and metaphor that are often lost even on adult
readers. The Bible makes its readers work. It doesnt moralize, or at least it
rarely moralizes. It explores moral issues and situations; it places its characters in moral dilemmasbut very often the reader must draw the conclusions. There are also paradoxes, subtle puns, and ironies that the careful
reader soon learns to appreciate.
The fourth myth to be set aside is that the Bible is a book of theology.
The Bible is not a catechism, a book of systematic theology, or a manual of
religion, despite the fact that at a much later time, very complex systems of
theology would be spun from particular interpretations of biblical passages. There is nothing in the Bible that corresponds to prevailing modern
western notions of religion; indeed, there is no word for religion in the language of biblical Hebrew. With the rise of Christianity, western religion
came to be defined, to a large degree, in terms of doctrine and belief. The
notion of religion as requiring confession of, or intellectual assent to, a catechism of beliefs is entirely alien in biblical times and in the ancient Near
East generally. Thus, to become an Israelite, one simply joined the Israelite
community, lived an Israelite life, and died an Israelite death; one obeyed
Israelite law and custom, revered Israelite lore, and entered into the historical
community of Israel by accepting a common fate. The process most resembled what today would be called naturalization.
In short, the Hebrew Bible is not a theological textbook. It is not primarily an account of the divine, which is what the word theology connotes.
It features a great deal of narrative, and its narrative materials provide an
account of the odyssey of a people, the nation of Israel. To be sure, although
the Bible does not contain formal statements of religious belief or systematic theology, it does treat moral and sometimes existential issues that would
become central to the later discipline of theology, but it treats them in a very
different manner. The Bibles treatment of these issues is indirect and implicit. It uses the language of story and song, poetry, paradox, and metaphor
a language and a style very distant from the language and style of later
philosophy and abstract theology.
It is important that readers not import into their reading of the Hebrew Bible their conceptions of a divine being generated by the later discipline of philosophical theology. The character Yahweh of the Hebrew
Bible should not be confused with the god of western theological speculation (generally denoted as God). Qualities attributed to the latter by
theologianssuch as omniscience and immutabilitysimply are not attributed to the biblical character Yahweh by the biblical narrators. Yahweh
is often surprised by the actions of humans and is known to change his
mind and adjust his plans in response to what he learns about human nature and behavior. Accordingly, one of the greatest challenges for modern
readers of the Hebrew Bible is to allow the text to mean what it says, when
what it says flies in the face of centuries of theological construction of the
concept God.
A final myth concerns the Bibles provenance. The Bible itself does not
claim to have been written by a deity. The belief in the Bibles divine
authorship is a religious doctrine of a much later age, though how literally
it was meant is not clear. Similarly, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy, known as the Pentateuch, nowhere claim to
have been written in their entirety by Moses. Later tradition would refer to
these five books as the Torah (Instruction) of Moses, and eventually the
belief would arise that they were authored by Moses, a view questioned already in the Middle Ages and not accepted by modern scholars. The Bible
was formulated, assembled, edited, modified, censored, and transmitted
first orally and then in writingby human beings. There were many contributors over many centuries, and the individual styles and concerns of
those writers and editors, their political and religious motivations, betray
themselves frequently.
Structure and Contents

The Hebrew Bible is an assemblage of books and writings dating from approximately 1000 b.c.e. (opinions vary on this point) down to the second
century b.c.e. The last book within the Hebrew Bible was written in the
160s b.c.e. Some of these books contain narrative snippets, legal materials,
or oral traditions that may date back even further in time. These materials
may have been transmitted orally but eventually were reduced to written
form. The Bible is written largely in Hebrew (hence the name Hebrew Bible), with a few passages in Aramaic (primarily in the books of Daniel and
Ezra).
The biblical writings have had a profound and lasting impact on three
world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For the Jewish communities who first compiled these writings in the pre-Christian era, the Bible
10
was perhaps first and foremost a record of the Israelite gods eternal covenant with the Jewish people. Jews refer to the Bible as the Tanakh, which is
an acronym composed of the initial letters of the three chief divisions of the
Bible: Torah, Neviim, and Ketuvim. The first division, Torah, consisting of
Genesis through Deuteronomy, contains a narrative that stretches from
creation to the death of Moses. Torah is often translated as law, but instruction or teaching better captures the sense of the word in this context.
The name of the second division of the Bible, Neviim, means Prophets.
This division is further subdivided into two parts reflecting two different
types of writing. The first part, known as the Former Prophets, continues
the Torahs narrative prose account of the history of Israel from the death
of Moses to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 b.c.e. Prophets
and kings are central characters in these narratives. The second part,
known as the Latter Prophets, contains poetic and oracular writings that
bear the name of the prophet to whom the writings are ascribed. There are
three major prophetsIsaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekieland twelve minor
prophets (which in the Hebrew Bible are counted together as one book because they were traditionally transmitted on a single scroll). The third and
final division of the Bible is referred to as Ketuvim, which simply means
Writings. This division is a miscellany containing works of various types:
historical fiction, poetry, psalms and liturgical texts, and proverbs, as well as
books that probe some of the fundamental questions of human existence.
The three divisions correspond very roughly to the process of canonization. The Torah probably reached a relatively fixed and authoritative
status first (probably the early fift h century b.c.e.), then the books of the
Prophets (probably the second century b.c.e.), and finally the Writings
(perhaps as late as the second century c.e.). It is likely that by the end of the
second century c.e., the entire collection was organized in a relatively stable form.
Any examination of the Bible runs immediately into the problem of
defining the object of study, because different biblical canons have served
different communities over the centuries (see Table 1). One of the earliest
translations of the Hebrew Bible was a translation into Greek known as the
Septuagint (LXX). The translation was made in the third century b.c.e. for
the benefit of Greek-speaking Jews who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. The
LXX diverges somewhat from the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible (referred to as the Masoretic text, or MT) as we now have it, both in wording
and in the order of the books. The Septuagints rationale for the order of the
books is temporal: The first section, from Genesis through Esther, tells of
Table 1. The Canons of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

with Abbreviations in Brackets
Jewish
Protestant
Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)

Torah
Genesis (Bereshit) [Gen]
Exodus (Shemot) [Ex]
Leviticus (Vayiqra) [Lev]
Numbers (BaMidbar) [Num]
Deuteronomy (Devarim) [Deut]
Prophets (Neviim)
Former Prophets (Neviim Rishonim)
Joshua (Yehoshua) [Josh]
Judges (Shophetim) [Jud]
1 & 2 Samuel (Shmuel) [1 Sam; 2 Sam]
1 & 2 Kings (Melakhim) [1 Kgs; 2 Kgs]
Latter Prophets (Neviim Aharonim)
Isaiah (Yeshayahu) [Isa]
Jeremiah (Yirmiyahu) [Jer]
Ezekiel (Yehezqel) [Ezek]
The Twelve (Tere Asar)
Hosea (Hoshea) [Hos]
Joel (Yoel) [Joel]
Amos (Amos) [Amos]
Obadiah (Ovadyah) [Obad]
Jonah (Yonah) [Jon]
Micah (Mikhah) [Mic]
Nahum (Nahum) [Nah]
Habakkuk (Havakkuk) [Hab]
Zephaniah (Tsephanyah) [Zeph]
Haggai (Haggai) [Hag]
Zechariah (Zekharyah) [Zech]
Malachi (Malakhi) [Mal]
Writings (Ketuvim)
Psalms (Tehillim) [Pss]
Proverbs (Mishle) [Prov]
Job (Iyyov) [Job]
Roman Catholic
Old Testament
Old Testament
[Pentateuch]
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
[Pentateuch]
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
[Historical Books]
Joshua
Judges
Ruth
1 & 2 Samuel
1 & 2 Kings
1 & 2 Chronicles
Ezra
Nehemiah
Esther
[Historical Books]
Joshua
Judges
Ruth
1 & 2 Samuel
1 & 2 Kings
1 & 2 Chronicles
Ezra
Nehemiah
Tobit
Judith
Esther
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
[Poetical Books]
Job
Psalms
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Song of Solomon
Wisdom of Solomon
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)
[Poetical Books]
Job
Psalms
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Song of Solomon
[Prophets]
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Lamentations
[Prophets]
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Baruch
(continued)
12
Table 1. (continued)
Jewish
Protestant
Five Scrolls
Song of Songs (Shir haShirim) [Song]
Ruth (Rut) [Ruth]
Lamentations (Ekhah) [Lam]
Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) [Eccl]
Esther (Ester) [Est]
Daniel (Daniel) [Dan]
Ezra-Nehemiah (Ezra-Nehemyah)
[Ezra; Neh]
1 & 2 Chronicles (Divre haYamim)
[1 Chron; 2 Chron]
Ezekiel
Daniel
Roman Catholic
Hosea
Joel
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Ezekiel
Daniel
Additions to Daniel
Hosea
Joel
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
Micah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
things past; the second section, from Job through the Song of Songs (also
known as the Song of Solomon), contains wisdom that applies to the present; and the third section, the prophetic books from Isaiah through Malachi, tells of future things. In the Christian Bible, the prophetic books come
immediately before the New Testament to support the doctrine that the
former foretell the events of the latter rather than conveying a message specific to their historical context. Some copies of the Septuagint contain books
not included in the Hebrew canon but accepted in the early Christian canon.
The Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible became the Bible of
Christianity (most early Christians spoke Greek), or more precisely, it became the Old Testament of the Christian Bible when, in an effort to associate itself with an old and respected tradition, the church adopted these
writings as the precursor to its Hellenistic gospels. The Christian Old
Testament contains some material not included in the Hebrew Bible. Some
of these works are referred to as Apocrypha (from a Greek term meaning
hidden away, though there is little evidence that they were hidden away).
These writings were composed between approximately 200 b.c.e. and 100 c.e.
13
Although they were widely used by Jews of the period, Jews did not consider them to be of the same authoritative status as the twenty-four books
that became the Hebrew Bible. They did, however, become part of the canon
of Catholic Christianity. During the Renaissance and the Reformation, some
Christians became interested in the Hebrew version of the Bible rather than
the ancient Greek version. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant church
denied canonical status to the non-Hebrew books (the books of the Apocrypha). Although deemed important for pious instruction, these works were
excluded from the Protestant canon proper, with the result that the Protestant Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh contain the same books but in a
different order. In the same century, the canonical status of the apocryphal
books was confirmed for the Catholic Church. Other writings from roughly
the same period and known as the Pseudepigrapha (because they are attributed to ancient heroes who did not in fact author them) were never part
of the Jewish or the Catholic canon, but some eastern Christian groups include them in their biblical canon.
In short, there have been many sacred canons cherished by many religious communities, all of which are designated Bibles. In this volume, our
primary concern is the Bible of the ancient Israelite and Jewish community
the twenty-four books grouped in the Torah, Prophets, and Writingsthat
are common to all Bibles, Jewish or Christian, everywhere and at all times.
Because the term Old Testament is theologically loaded (emerging from the
dogma that the New Testament has somehow fulfilled, surpassed, or antiquated the Bible of ancient Israel), this book employs the more neutral
terms Hebrew Bible or Tanakh to refer to the twenty-four books that are the
subject of our study, in contrast to more expanded canons. For the sake of
convenience, however, the unqualified term Bible should also be understood as referring to this common base of twenty-four books found in all
Bibles, Jewish and Christian.
Not only has there been some variety in the scope of the biblical
canon cherished by different communities, there has also been some fluidity in the actual text itself. We do not, of course, possess original copies of
any biblical materialsindeed, the very notion of original copies is anachronistic because texts circulated in multiple versions in antiquity. Before
the mid-twentieth century, our oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible
the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codexdated to the years 920 and
1008 c.e., respectively. These and other manuscripts stand at a great chronological distance from the events described in the writings, raising all sorts
of questions about the transmission and preservation of the biblical text
14
over time. The exciting discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the middle of
the twentieth century brought about a dramatic change in our Hebrew
manuscript evidence and in the state of our knowledge of the biblical text.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea in the
Judean desert, are widely believed to have been the library of a small sectarian community. The scrolls contain many Hebrew Bible manuscripts.
Most are partial manuscripts, except for the famous scroll of Isaiah. Every
book of the Bible except Esther is represented among the scrolls, and some
of the manuscripts date back to perhaps the third or second century b.c.e.
The importance of this discovery lies in the fact that it provides evidence
for the biblical text significantly older than the evidence of medieval
manuscriptsmore than a thousand years older. Although there are certainly differences between the Qumran fragments and the later manuscripts, there is nevertheless a remarkable degree of correspondence. It is
possible, therefore, to speak of a relatively stable textual tradition despite
some textual fluidity.
"Political Philosophy," by Steven Smith
Political
Philosophy
steven b. smith
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of

Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections
107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for
educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).
Set in Minion type by Westchester Book Group.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Steven B., 1951
Political philosophy / Steven B. Smith.
p. cm. (The open Yale courses series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-18180-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political science
PhilosophyHistory. I. Title.
JA71.S498 2012
320.01dc23
2012016209
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Dylan, Geoff, Mari, Rebecca, Rek, Yedidya, Yishai,

and the memory of the Sunday Club
If you will it, it is no dream.

Theodor Herzl, Altneuland
Contents
Preface
Texts
ix
xi
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Why Political Philosophy?

Antigone and the Politics of Conflict
Socrates and the Examined Life
Plato on Justice and the Human Good
Aristotles Science of Regime Politics
The Politics of the Bible
Machiavelli and the Art of Political Founding
Hobbess New Science of Politics
Locke and the Art of Constitutional
Government
10. Rousseau on Civilization and Its Discontents
11. Tocqueville and the Dilemmas of Democracy
12. In Defense of Patriotism
Notes
Index
259
271
1
10
20
37
67
89
109
140
165
189
214
243
Preface
This book grew out of an introductory lecture course on political philosophy that I have taught at Yale for many years. It was a pleasure for me to be
able to edit and revise these lectures for Yale University Presss book series.
I have written this book as an introduction to political philosophy
rather than the more conventional history of political thought. What I understand by political philosophy is treated in the first chapter. Suffice it to
say that political philosophy is a rare and distinctive form of thinking and
is not to be confused either with the study of political language in general
or with the dry and desiccated form of concept analysis so prominent in
the 1950s and 60s. Political philosophy is the investigation of the permanent problems of political lifeproblems like Who ought to govern?
How ought conflict to be managed? How should a citizen and a statesman be educated?that every society must confront.
The texts and authors considered here have been chosen because
they help to illuminate the permanent problems of political life rather
than the par ticu lar problems of the times in which they were written. I
have not tried to adapt Plato or Machiavelli or Tocqueville to fit our concerns but have aimed to show how our concerns are intelligible only when
viewed through the lenses of the most serious thinkers of the past. The
problems we confront today, to the extent that they remain political problems, are precisely the same as those confronted in fi ft h-century Athens,
fi fteenth-century Florence, or seventeenth-century England. It would be
a mistake to think otherwise.
This book is intended for readers who believe, as do I, that we still
have something to learn from the great thinkers of the past. This may seem
obvious, but it is hotly disputed within the current political science profession. There are those who believe that political science is or should aspire to
be a discipline like physics or chemistry or certain precincts of economics
and psychology that pay little attention to their own histories. It is to resist
this kind of academic amnesia that I have devoted my teaching and writing. My ideal audience is a general readership with no other specialization
than a desire to learn.
ix
Preface
In writing this book I make no claim to novelty. Most of what I have

said is but a reflection on some previous reflection or on a well-known text.
Nevertheless, I have put these lectures together in my own way, and they
bear my own stamp. I have tried to retain the informal, even conversational,
style of the lecture and to avoid the minutiae of academic controversy. I have
also kept footnotes and other scholarly references to a minimum, while at
the same time I have freely acknowledged my debts to other scholars, teachers, and colleagues from whom I have learned so much over the years.
I have no doubt that I have learned more from writing and rewriting
these lectures than have the undergraduates upon whom they have been
inflicted. I can only say that it has been an honor and a privilege to have
had so many wonderful students who have sat through these classes and
expressed an interest in my subject. I would like to give special thanks to a
former student, Justin Zaremby, for reading an earlier version of these lectures and for making many helpful comments.
Texts
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1984); references are to the Bekker numbers provided in the margin of the text.
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1994); references are to chapter and section number.
Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
references are to chapter and section number.
Machiavelli, Niccol, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); references are to chapter and page number.
Machiavelli, Niccol, The Discourses of Niccol Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J.
Waker, S.J. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); references are to
book, chapter, and page number.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); references are to chapter and
verse number.
Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968); references are to the Stephanus numbers provided in the margin of the text.
Plato, Apology of Socrates and Crito, in Plato and Aristophanes: Four Texts on
Socrates, trans. Thomas G. and Grace Starry West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); citations are to the Stephanus numbers provided in
the margin of the text.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings,
trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); references are to page number.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); references are to book and chapter number.
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); references are to line number.
Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield
and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); references are to volume, part, chapter, and page number in brackets.
xi
c ha p t e r 1
Custom dictates that I say something about the subject matter of political
philosophy at the outset of our course. This may be a case of putting the cart
before the horseor before the coursebecause how is it possible to say
what political philosophy is in advance of having studied it? Nevertheless
I will try to say something useful.
In one sense political philosophy is simply a branch or a subfield of
political science. It exists alongside other areas of political inquiry like
American government, comparative politics, and international relations.
Yet in another sense political philosophy is the oldest and most fundamental
part of political science. Political philosophy is political science in its oldest
or classic sense. Its purpose is to lay bare the fundamental problems, the
fundamental concepts and categories, which frame the study of politics. In
this sense it is less a branch of political science than the very foundation and
root of the discipline.
The study of political philosophy today often begins with the study of
the great books of our discipline. Political science is the oldest of the social
sciencesolder than economics, psychology, or sociologyand it can boast
a wealth of heavy hitters from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli and Hobbes
to Hegel, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. The best
way to find out what political philosophy is, is simply to study the works and
ideas of those who are regarded as its master practitioners. How better to learn
than to read with care and attentiveness those who have shaped the field?
Such an approach is not without its dangers. Let me just list a few.
What makes a book or thinker great? Who is to say? Why study just these
thinkers and not others? Isnt any list of so-called great thinkers or texts
likely to be arbitrary and tell us more from what such a list excludes
thanwhat it includes? Furthermore, the study of the great books and the
great thinkers of the past can easily degenerate into a kind of pedantry or
antiquarianism. We may find ourselves easily intimidated by a list of famous
names and we end up not thinking for ourselves. Doesnt the study of old
booksoften very old booksrisk overlooking the issues facing us today?
What can Aristotle and Hobbes tell us today about the world of globalization, terrorism, and ethnic conflict? Hasnt political science made any progress over the preceding centuries? After all, economists no longer study
Adam Smith; psychologists no longer read Freud. Why should political science continue to study Aristotle and Rousseau? These are all serious questions. Let me try to respond.
One very widely held view among political scientists is that the study
of politics is a progressive field very much like the natural sciences. Just as a
modern particle physicist does not feel compelled to study the history of
physics, so political science has now outgrown its earlier prehistory. The
methods and techniques of experimental and behavioral social scienceit
is often arguedhave doomed to oblivion the earlier and immature speculations of an Aristotle, a Machiavelli, or a Rousseau. To the extent that we
study these thinkers at all, it would be more as a curator or an archivist who
is only interested in their contributions to the collective edifice of modern
social scientific knowledge.
This progressive or scientific model of political science is often combined with another, that of the historicist or the relativist. According to this
view, all political ideas are a product of their own time, place, and circumstance. We should not expect ideas written for an audience in fifteenthcentury Florence, seventeenth-century England, or eighteenth-century Paris
to provide any lessons for readers in twenty-first-century America. All
thinking is bound by its own time and place, and the attempt to extract
enduring wisdom or lessons from writers or texts of the past is a mistake.
This beliefwidely held by many people of todayis almost literally selfrefuting. If all ideas are limited to their own time and place, then this must
also be true for the idea that all ideas are limited to their own time and
place. Relativism or historicism, as it is sometimes called, insists, however,
that it alone is true, that it alone is eternally valid, while at the same time
condemning all other ideas to their historical circumstances. One does not
need to be a profound logician to understand that relativism is incoherent

even in its own terms.
The historicist manner of reading denies the claim that there is a
single tradition linking the works of Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Rousseau, and beyond. This has been contemptuously dismissed
as an exercise in myth-making. In the name of seeking greater historical
accuracy, historicism has resulted in the deliberate parochialization of the
great works, confining them to their purely local contexts and interests. The
historicist thesis often regards ideas as no more than rationalizations or
ideologies expressing different preexisting social interests. The fact is,
however, that ideas have a causal power of their own. Ideas not only have
consequences, their consequences often stretch far beyond their immediate
context and environment. Constitutional theories like those of John Lockes
that were developed in England under one set of circumstances often take
on a life of their own when they are transplanted to other places such as
the North American continent. The history of the twentieth century with
its clash of ideologiescommunism, fascism, democracytestifies to the
power of ideas to shape the world. Ironically it took no less an authority than
the economist John Maynard Keynes to bring out the limitations of a purely
economic theory of history: The ideas of economists and political philosophers, he wrote, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are
more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by
little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy
from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
The study of political philosophy is not simply some kind of historical
appendage attached to the trunk of political science; nor does it perform
some kind of custodial or curatorial functionkeeping alive the great glories of earlier ages like mummified remains in a natural history museum.
Political philosophy is the study of the deepest, most intractable, and most
enduring problems of political life. The number of such problems is by no
means infinite and is probably quite small. The study of political philosophy has always revolved around such questions as Why should I obey the
law? What is a citizen and how should he or she be educated? Who is a
lawgiver? What is the relation between freedom and authority? How
should politics and theology be related? and perhaps a few of others.
The thinkers that we will be reading provide the basic frameworks
the constitutive concepts and categoriesthrough which we can begin to
think about politics. They provide the forms of analysis that make possible the work of later and lesser thinkers who work within their orbit. We
continue to ask the same questions about law, about authority, about justice
and freedom asked by Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes even if we do not always answer them in the same way. We may not accept all of their answers,
but their questions are often put with unrivaled clarity and insight. These
questions do not simply go away. They constitute the core problems of the
study of politics. The fact is that there are still people who describe themselves as Aristotelians, Thomists, Lockeans, Kantians, Marxists, and Heideggerians. These doctrines have by no means been refuted or surpassed,
consigned to the dustbin of history as have so many defunct or discredited
scientific or cosmological theories. They remain constitutive of our most
basic outlooks and attitudes that are still alive and very much with us.
One thing you will quickly discover is that there are no permanent
answers in the study of political philosophy, only permanent questions.
Among the great thinkers there is often profound disagreement over the
answers to even the most basic questions regarding justice, rights, freedom,
the proper scope of authority, and so on. Contrary to popular wisdom, apparently all great minds do not necessarily think alike. But there is some
advantage to this. The fact that there is disagreement among the great thinkers allows us to enter into their conversation, to listen first, to reason about
their differences, and then judge for ourselves. I will admit that I am not a
great thinker, but neitherI should add straight awayare any of the professors you are likely to encounter at Yale or any other university. Most of the
people who call themselves philosophers are in fact only professors of philosophy. What is the difference?
The true philosopher is rare; one would be fortunate to encounter such
a person maybe once in a lifetime, maybe once in a century. But here is
where philosophy differs from other fields. One can be, say, a mediocre historian or a mediocre chemist and still function quite effectively. But a mediocre philosopher is a contradiction in terms. A mediocre philosopher is
not a philosopher at all. But those of us who are not great thinkers can at
least try to be competent scholars. While the scholar is trained to be careful
and methodical, the great thinkers are bold, they go, in the words of Star
Trek, where no man has gone before. The scholar remains dependent on the
work of the great thinkers and does not rise to their inaccessible heights. The
scholar is made possible by listening to the conversation of the greatest thinkers and staying alive to their differences. I do at least have one advantage over
the great thinkers of the past. Aristotle and Hobbes were great thinkers, but
Aristotle and Hobbes are long dead. With me you at least have the advantage
that I am alive.
But where should one enter this conversation, with which questions
or which thinkers? Where should we begin? As with any enterprise, it is
always best to begin at the beginning. The proper subject of political philosophy is political action. All action aims at either preservation or change.
When we seek to bring about change we do so to make something better;
when we seek to preserve we do so to prevent something from becoming
worse. Even the decision not to act, to stand pat, is a kind of action. It follows, then, that all action presupposes some judgment of better and worse.
But we cannot think about better and worse without at some point thinking about the good. When we act we do so to advance some idea or opinion
of the good and when we act politically we do so to advance some idea of
the political good or the common good. The term by which political philosophers have designated the common good has gone under various names,
sometimes the good society or the just society or sometimes simply the best
regime. The oldest, the most fundamental, of all questions of political life is
What is the best regime?
The concept of the regime is an ancient one, yet the term is familiar. We
often hear even today about shaping regimes or changing regimes, but what
exactly is a regime? How many kinds are there? How are they defined? What
holds them together and causes them to fall apart? Is there a single best kind
of regime? The term goes back to Plato and even before him. In fact the title
of the book we know as Platos Republic is actually a translation of the Greek
word politeia, meaning constitution or regime. But it was above all Aristotle
who made the regime the central theme of the study of politics. Broadly
speaking, the regime indicates a form of government, whether it is ruled by
one, few, or many or whether it is some mixture or combination of these
three ruling elements. The regime is identified in the first instance by how a
people are governed, how public offices are distributedby election, by birth,
by outstanding personal qualitiesand what constitute a peoples rights and
responsibilities. The regime refers, above all, to the form of government. The
political world does not present an infinite variety. It is structured and ordered into a few basic regime types: monarchies, aristocracies, democracies,
tyrannies. This is one of the most important propositions of political science.
But a regime is more than a set of formal political structures. It consists of the entire way of lifemoral and religious practices, habits, customs,
and sentimentsthat make a people what they are. The regime constitutes
what Aristotle called an ethos, that is, a distinctive character that nurtures
distinctive human types. Every regime shapes a distinctive human character with distinctive human traits and qualities. The study of regimes is,
therefore, in part the study of the distinctive character types that constitute
the citizen body. So when Tocqueville studied the American regime in Democracy in America he started first with our formal political institutions as
enumerated in the Constitution, the separation of powers, the division between state and federal authority, but then went on to look at such informal
practices as American manners and morals, our tendency to form small
civic associations, our materialism and restiveness as well as our peculiar
defensiveness about democracy. All of these help to constitute the democratic regime. In this respect the regime describes the character or tone of
society, what a society finds most worthy of admiration, what it looks up to.
There is a corollary to this insight. The regime is always something particular. It stands in a relation of opposition to other regime types. As a consequence the possibility of conflict, tension, and war is built into the very
structure of politics. Regimes are necessarily partisan. They instill certain
loyalties and passions in the same way that one may feel partisanship toward
the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, Yale or Harvard. These passionate attachments are not merely something that takes place between different regimes, they take place within them as different parties, factions, and
groups with different loyalties and attachments contend for power, for honor,
and for interest, the three great motives of human action. Today it is the hope
of many both here and abroad that we might some day overcome the basic
structure of regime politics and organize our world around global norms of
justice and international law. Is such a hope possible? It cannot be entirely
ruled out, but such a worlda world administered by international courts of
law, by judges and judicial tribunalswould no longer be a political world.
Politics is only possible within the structure of the regime.
This raises a further question, namely, how are regimes founded?
What brings them into being and sustains them over time? For thinkers
like Tocqueville, regimes are embedded in deep structures of human history that have evolved over long centuries and determined our political
institutions and the way we think about them. Yet other voicesPlato, Machiavelli, Rousseaubelieve that regimes can be self-consciously founded
through the deliberate acts of great statesmen or founding fathers as we
might call them. These statesmenMachiavelli refers to Romulus, Moses,
Cyrus in the way we might think of Washington, Jefferson, Adamsare the
shapers of peoples and institutions. The very first of the Federalist Papers by
Alexander Hamilton begins by posing this question in the starkest of
terms: It has been frequently remarked, Hamilton writes, that it seems
to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and
example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are
really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and
choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political
constitutions on accident and force. Hamilton leaves the question open,
but he clearly believes that the founding of regimes can be an act of deliberate statecraft.
The idea that regimes may be founded by acts of deliberate statecraft
raises another question related to the regime, namely, who is a statesman?
In its oldest sense political science meant the science of statecraft. It was
addressed to statesmen or potential statesmen charged with steering the
ship of state. What are the qualities necessary for a good statesman? How
does statecraft differ from other activities? Must the good statesman be a
philosopher versed in mathematics and metaphysics as Plato argues? Or is
statesmanship a purely practical skill requiring judgment based on deliberation and experience as Aristotle suggests? Is a streak of cruelty and a willingness to act immorally necessary for great leaders as Machiavelli argues?
Must the legislator be capable of literally transforming human nature as
Rousseau maintains or is the sovereign a more or less faceless authority
much like an umpire or a referee as Hobbes and Locke believe? All of our
texts, the Republic, the Politics, The Prince, The Social Contract, and so on,
offer different views on the qualities necessary to found and maintain states.
This practical side of political philosophy was expressed by all of our
authors. None of them was a cloistered scholar or university professor detached from the real world of politics. Plato undertook three long and
dangerous voyages in order to advise the tyrants of Sicily; Aristotle was famously a tutor to Alexander the Great; Machiavelli spent a large part of his
career in the foreign ser vice of his native Florence and wrote as an adviser
to the Medici; Hobbes was the tutor to a royal household who joined the
court in exile during the English Civil War; Locke was associated with the
Shaftsbury circle and was also forced into exile after being accused of plotting against another English king; Rousseau had no official political connections, but he signed his name Citizen of Geneva and was approached
to write constitutions for Poland and the island of Corsica; and Tocqueville
was a member of the French National Assembly whose experience of American democracy deeply affected the way he saw the future of Europe. The
great political philosophers were all engaged in the politics of their times
and provide us with models of how to think about ours.
The study of the regime either implicitly or explicitly raises a question
that goes beyond the boundary of any given or existing society. A regime
constitutes a peoples way of life, what makes it worth livingand perhaps
dyingfor. Although we are most familiar with our own democratic regime, the study of political philosophy reveals to us that there is a variety of
regime types, each with its own distinctive set of claims or principles, each
vying with and potentially in conflict with the others. Underlying this cacophony of voices is the question of which of the regimes is best, which has,
or ought to have, a claim on our loyalty and rational consent. Political philosophy is always guided by the question of the best regime.
But what is the best regime? Is the best regime, as the ancients believed,
an aristocratic republic, one in which only the few best habitually rule? Or is
the best regime, as the moderns believe, a democratic republic, where in principle political office is open to all by virtue of their membership in society
alone? Will the best regime be a small closed society that through generations has made a supreme effort toward human perfection? Or will it be a
large cosmopolitan society embracing all human beings, a universal league of
nations with each nation consisting of free and equal men and women?
Whatever form the best regime takes, it will necessarily favor a certain type
of human being with a certain set of character traits. Is that type the common man as in democracies, those of acquired taste and money as in aristocracies, the warrior, or even the priest as in a theocracy? No question could be
more fundamental.
And this finally raises the question of the relation between the best
regime and actually existing regimes. What function does the best regime
play in political science, and how does it guide our actions here and now?
This issue received its most famous formulation in Aristotles treatment of
the difference between the good human being and the good citizen. For the
good citizen, patriotism is enough, to uphold and defend the laws of your
own country simply because they are your own is both necessary and sufficient. Such a view of citizen virtue runs into the obvious objection that the
good citizen of one regime will not be the good citizen of another. A good
citizen of contemporary Iran will not be the same as the good citizen of contemporary America.
But the good citizen is not the same as the good human being. While
the good citizen is relative to his or her regimeregime specific, we might
saythe good human being is good anywhere. The good human being loves
what is good simply, not because it is his or hers, but because it is good. Lincoln once said of Henry Clay: He loved his country partly because it was his
own country, but mostly because it was a free country. Clay exhibited here,
at least on Lincolns telling, something of the philosopher. What he loved was
an idea, the idea of freedom, and this idea was not the property of America in
particular, but of any good society. The good human being, it would seem, is
a philosopher who may only be truly at home in the best regime. But the best
regime, so far as we know, lacks actuality. The best regime, therefore, embodies a supreme paradox: it is superior to all actual regimes but has no concrete
existence. This makes it difficult for the philosopher to be a good citizen of
any actual regime; the philosopher will never feel truly at home, never truly
be loyal, to any regime but the best.
This tension between the best regime and any actual regime is the
space that makes political philosophy possible. In the best regime political
philosophy would be unnecessary or redundant; it would wither away. Karl
Marx famously believed that in the ideal socialist society of the future philosophy would no longer be necessary, presumably because society would at
last become transparent to those living under it. Similarly, it is not clear in
Platos kallipolis, his ideal city, what function philosophy would continue to
have once philosophers ruled as kings and kings became philosophers. In
such a world philosophy would cease to exercise its critical function and become merely descriptive of the way things are. What is wrong with this, you
might well ask. The acceptance of continued social injustice seems a high
price to pay just to make political philosophy possible. Political philosophy
existsand can only existin this zone of indeterminacy between the Is and
the Ought, between the actual and the ideal. Philosophy presupposes a lessthan-perfect society, a world that requires interpretation and, perforce, political criticism. This is why philosophy is always potentially a disruptive
undertaking. Those of you who embark on the quest for knowledge of the
best regime may not return the same people you were before. You may return
with very different loyalties and allegiances. There is at least some small compensation for this. The Greeks had a beautiful word for this quest, for this
desire for knowledge of the best regime. They called it eros or love. Philosophy was understood as an erotic activity. The study of political philosophy
may be the highest tribute paid to love.

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t h e o p e n ya l e c o u r s e s s e r i e s is designed to bring the depth and

breadth of a Yale education to a wide variety of readers. Based on Yales

Paul H. Fry, Theory of Literature

New Haven and London

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"The Moral Foundations of Politics," by Ian Shapiro

For all the graduates of MoFoPo

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Synthesizing Rights and Utility, 37

The Social Contract, 109

Anti-Enlightenment Politics, 151

Democracy in the Mature

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When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should

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we are unnerved both by Israels acting on what its leaders saw as

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history has countenanced some kind of exploitation from the

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Enlightenment project, as Alasdair MacIntyre has dubbed it, is

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the mature Enlightenment understandings of these values that

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The philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment was

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same advances in knowledge might, however, be pressed in the

1.1 Sciences Ascendancy

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have been consumed with the task, as Immanuel Kant dened it

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principles. This is the kind of knowledge Descartes had in mind

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This creationist or workmanship theory conferred a vastly

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proposition that for something to have the status of a law, it must

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