Republics Ancient and Modern (Continued)

Twice in Against Throne and Altar Paul Rahe calls John Milton "the best-read Englishman of his generation" (ATA, pp. 102, 155). I suppose that claim could be made for Paul Rahe himself. He seems to have read or at least cited in his notes every primary and secondary text of even tangential relevance to his topics. It is difficult to imagine a better bibliographical guide to those materials than Rahe's notes, which also contain extremely learned discussions of issues roiling the relevant scholarly waters. Moreover, the range of topics, thinkers, and historical eras Rahe covers is more than impressive. In the two books under review, he takes up the modern republican tradition from Machiavelli through Margaret Thatcher, Nicholas Sarkozy, and, very briefly, Barack Obama, with backward looks at Epicurus, Aristotle, Averroes, and the medieval Averroist tradition. He traces the resurgence of Averroism at Padua in the fifteenth century and follows the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of inquietude from Pascal through Nicole and Locke and up to its central role in Tocqueville's diagnosis of the ills of modern democratic republicanism, among many other things.

Learnedness is not Rahe's sole virtue. Despite the heavy overlay of scholarship, he writes lucid, fluid, and graceful prose. He has a point—or many points—to make and addresses important questions. He writes not only clear but fearless prose, for he jumps into many raging scholarly and political debates with forcefully put judgments about where truth lies. For a historian, he delves extremely deeply into the thought he is discussing. For a student of political thought, he is remarkably knowledgeable about the relevant history. He is more careful with the thought and more pointed in his use of historical context than writers of the so-called Cambridge school, of whom he often reminds one.

Both books are related to Rahe's earlier mammoth Republics Ancient and Modern (RAM, 1992), which was an attempt to elucidate not the continuities between ancient and modern republicanism, as modern authorities like J. G. A. Pocock had done, but to bring out the "decisive break" between them (RAM, p. x). Against Throne and Altar is clearly part of that same agenda. Indeed, he presents it as "a sequel of sorts," aiming to make up for the "short shrift" he had given some thinkers in the earlier book's twelve hundred pages (ATA, p. 1). To redress the slight inflicted by the earlier book, he discusses at length Machiavelli, John Milton, Marchmont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, and James Harrington. His point is not merely that these five thinkers were under-discussed earlier, but that they represent a tradition of Machiavellian republicanism (or at least Nedham and Harrington do); and the tradition is an important one, for "their thinking marked a turning point in the history of constitutional prudence" (ATT, p. 1). Although Milton is sometimes treated as one of the English republicans influenced by Machiavelli, Rahe sees him differently. He is a contrast with the Machiavellians, for he is a genuine representative of the classical republican tradition, albeit one who took Machiavelli seriously but wrote in opposition to him. The differences between Milton and the others, thus, is a carryover from the theme of Republics Ancient and Modern—that there is really a great difference between the two forms of political thought. Rahe does not consider Hobbes to be a Machiavellian republican either; he presents him rather as a "modern monarchist" who, in his youth, was touched by Machiavelli but who has a place in this book because he greatly influenced James Harrington, whose republicanism was, Rahe argues, an amalgam of Machiavellian and Hobbesean themes.

Rahe's other book, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift (SD...