A careful examination of the idea of democracy suggests that democracy is not best understood as a form of government that is unconditionally responsive to the preferences of the majority. In particular, a will-based conception of democracy—which assigns effectively unlimited power to the majority—can claim support neither in the intellectual history of democracy nor in a plausible interpretation of the idea of democracy. The western democratic tradition is contractualist, and that tradition works from the foundational intuition that legitimate power derives from the consent of the governed. That intuition justifies majority rule as an important element of social choice, but it also requires the entrenchment of rights protections as an element of any acceptable set of political institutions. If entrenched rights are to provide effective protections to liberty interests, they must be enforced by an institution that is not subject to majority control; a “constraint” on the will of the majority that is controlled by the majority is no constraint. Democratic institutions must therefore include an institution independent of majority control whose purpose is to enforce rights protections against the majority.

The “democratic” character of the representative legislature is routinely contrasted with the undemocratic character of courts administered by unelected judges. Since the legislature allegedly possesses a democratic pedigree while the courts allegedly lack such a pedigree, it is argued that the courts should defer to the legislature on questions regarding fundamental social values. I argue that this view does not survive a careful examination of the history and character of representative government and the judiciary. Representative government was designed to assign decisive political power to elites whose qualities distinguish them from the average citizen. The legislature, therefore, hardly possesses an impeccable democratic pedigree. The democratic pedigree of courts exercising the power of judicial review, on the other hand, is stronger than has been generally appreciated. The democratic pedigree of the Constitution is superior to that of statutory law because the Constitution represents a more fundamental and direct expression of the public will than statutory law. The courts, in exercising the power of judicial review to enforce constitutional requirements, can therefore plausibly claim a democratic pedigree—within their areas of competence—at least equal to that of the legislature.

Hume published only three books of the Treatise (the examination of politics and criticism was supposed to “compleat” it). Of the Understanding and Of Morals have a final section entitled “Conclusion of this book”; Of the Passions ends up with “Of curiosity, or the love of truth”. Each final section has its scandalous image: back-gammon, hunting or gaming, and anatomy. The final section of Book I is a proper conclusion, that of Book III is almost such, while that of Book II is something different, especially its last paragraphs on the “insatiable desire” of knowing the actions of our neighbours. The conclusion of Book I (“before I launch out…”) marks the transition to Book II and that of Book II (“before we leave …”) the transition to Book III; yet Hume allows to have been “inattentive” in running over “so many” parts of the mind and passions, without considering “that love of truth, which was the first source of all our enquiries”. It is time to analyse Hume’s account, its structure, images and connections with the philosophical tradition.

In this chapter, I argue for the centrality of Hume’s detailed exposition of the association of ideas in fulfilling the goals which he sets out in the Introduction to the Treatise—namely that of providing a foundation for the other sciences including the science of human nature, and applying the experimental method in its foundation. I discuss three different physical models of association of ideas which Hume presents and their appropriateness to the way he applies his theory to explain phenomena. I begin by putting Hume’s account of the association of ideas in its historical background, and conclude with comments on how it was taken up by his eighteenth-century Scottish successors. Hume’s positive account is contrasted with the negative account found in his predecessors Locke and Hutcheson, and his limited principles of association are contrasted with the more extensive principles found in the writings of Kames, Gerard, Reid and Dugald Stewart.

Abstract: This chapter engages closely with the key state of nature passages in Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. It shows how each text constructs strikingly distinct imaginaries of the state of nature, and begins to explore some of the real-world implications of these imaginaries.

It is claimed that the form of perceiving is mirroring and also map-like. Historically, mirroring is here considered to be akin to mirroring in Leibniz, by whom Kant was influenced. Mirroring can also be taken to be indirect, by way of a representative, as in Locke, according to the standard interpretations. However, it follows from the immediacy condition on perceptions that the mirroring has to be direct in Kant. He also explicitly attacks picture theories of perception. Perceptions are not of an intermediary to be perceived. Rather, they are themselves space-like in their mereological organization, and they represent by way of a structural similarity with the layout of spatial scenes. On this point, it is claimed that Kant’s version of non-conceptualism has similarities with positions in current debates on perception, like those of Fodor and Peacocke. Indeed, perceptions also map the territory, as in Burge, and that goes a bit beyond mirroring. Thus, some features of cartographic representation carry over to intuitions in Kant. Finally, the relation between the saturation of intuitions and the fact that they mirror and map what they represent is discussed.

Locke held that any number of persons might join together to form a government. He imposed no limitation on the knowledge or reasoning that joiners might make use of. It is likely that Locke imagined that governments typically arose by consensus among private landowners, who then by a majority vote chose the procedure by which the legislative power was to operate. It is safe to say that Locke did not favor a wide suffrage or democracy. Locke also did not insist on any strict separation of executive and legislative powers: Of necessity, the executive must have a “prerogative power” to further the common good even if contrary to legislation. The notions of an independent judiciary and judicial review of legislation are nowhere found in Locke. Locke did, however, advocate reform of the composition of Parliament to make it more representative. And he was defensive of the rights of commoners against enclosures – so, logically, he may have favored a wider franchise.

Locke’s work in epistemology and personal identity secures his reputation. His excursion into political philosophy seems to have been guided by his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to make a case for mixed government, in which Parliament is supreme and the monarch a Protestant. Locke argued for toleration among Protestant sects but excluded atheists and Roman Catholics. Locke’s argument for limited government describes the state of nature as one in which each has an equal right to punish infractions of natural law. Civil society comes into being when any number of people agree to surrender this “natural executive right,” on the condition that others do so as well. But, Locke says, contrary to Hobbes, submission to an absolute Sovereign is worse than a condition of civil war.

Unlike the Putney soldiers and Hobbes, Locke held that, although originally God gave the Earth to humankind as a common possession, private property rights arose prior to government and need not be surrendered at the threshold upon entering civil society. This doctrine is widely (but mistakenly) taken as a thesis of “the sanctity of private property.” This chapter traces Locke’s argument, the main thread of which proceeds from self-ownership, to ownership of one’s labor, to ownership of whatever one mixes one’s labor with – with two provisos, a nonspoilation proviso and a enough-and-as-good-left-for-others proviso. With the invention of money, unequal accumulation of wealth without limit was tacitly consented to, and tacit consent is also invoked by Locke to explain why all who inhabit a territory consent to be governed.

The state of nature in social contract theories tells us two stories, one about who the main political actors are, and another one about the supra-juridical normativity and principles those actors use to judge and act politically once they are in the civil state. In my chapter I focus on the latter matter by contrasting Kant’s approach to the state of nature and its role in his social contract theory as given in the Feyerabend lectures with the conceptions of the state of nature in Hobbes, Locke, Achenwall, and Rousseau. Following the thesis that pre-juridical normativity functions as supra-juridical normativity once in the state, my main question is: how is "natural", in the sense of "pre-political", normativity generated? With this I am referring not only to the source of normativity, but mainly to how pretensions of normativity arise when people interact in the state of nature, and if these are or are not regulated by a moral-legal order independent from that interaction.

The chapter outlines the long history of the maker’s knowledge tradition from Hippocrates to Vico. It explores five specific paradigmatic moments during which the fundamental intertwinement between making and knowing was problematised. First, it addresses the Hippocratic cogitations on the nature of knowledge as a practical and theoretical activity. Second, it engages with Plato and Aristotle’s desperate attempts to purify episteme from any practical concerns. Third, it follows the transformation of the concept of episteme in the post-Aristotelian debates on the so-called stochastic arts. Fourth, it explores how the very concept of ‘knowledge by making and doing’ is gradually concocted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Finally, it shows how the idea of knowing by making is gradually integrated into the epistemology of modern science and history since Giordano Bruno.

Natural rights can justify legal rights to control and dispose of those resources exclusively – that is, rights of ownership. Ownership is justified on moral grounds when it seems likely in practice to help people acquire and use resources more effectively than alternate regimes would – especially, a system in which resources were open for everyone’s access and use and people enjoyed them with usufructs. This chapter studies four core or paradigm cases in which ownership facilitates use enough to be legitimate. One (associated with Aristotle) stresses ownership’s tendency to reduce disputes over property; another (associated with St. Thomas Aquinas) focuses on how ownership encourages careful management of resources; a third (Locke) focuses on how ownership incentivizes people labor and productivity; and the last (James Madison and other American founders) focuses on ownership’s securing privacy and autonomy for owners’ own preferred uses. This chapter considers egalitarian critiques of ownership, especially by Jeremy Waldron, Joseph Singer, G.A. Cohen, Liam Murphy, and Thomas Nagel. To define ownership, this chapter relies on conceptual work by A.M. Honore and J.E. Penner.

This chapter studies the elements of an interest-based natural property right. To acquire a prima facie right in a resource, the claimant must use it productively and claim exclusivity to its use in terms others will understand. But the prima facie right may be overridden by either of two provisos. The sufficiency proviso limits property rights when a proprietor’s use of a resource does not leave others sufficient access to the same type of resource for their own needs. The necessity proviso limits natural rights when someone who does not hold property in a resource needs access to it to repel some serious threat to life or property. This chapter illustrates legal doctrines for capturing animals and other articles of personal property, occupying unowned land, and appropriating water flow by use. This chapter contrasts productive use with Locke’s treatments of labor, waste, and spoliation, and it contrasts claim communication with Pufendorf and Grotius’s treatments of possession. This chapter also considers familiar criticisms of rights-based property theories, involving hypotheticals with radioactive tomato juice or ham sandwiches embedded in cement.

Shelley was an adherent to the basic tenet of empiricism, that ‘the senses are the only inlets of knowledge’. Yet he also affirmed that there are things we only ‘feel’ to be true. Rooted in Hume’s distinction between ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ – between sensory perceptions and the pictures in our minds, distinguishable only by the relative strength of their appearances – Shelley developed the notion of an ‘inward sense’ that guides us in our feelings or intuitions and discerns between real and ideal things. Above and beyond the philosophy of the British empiricists and the scepticism of Hume, yet rooted in their works, Shelley also developed in his verse a notion of what it would mean for an ‘idea’ to outstrip an ‘impression’ – for the world of the imagination to surpass the real thing, and for poetry to offer up ideas of greater force than empirical reality.

Chapter 2. The removal of James II from the throne in 1688 and the settlement of the crown jointly on William and Mary gave rise to an extensive debate about the legitimacy of the new regime. Many wrote to celebrate the ending of arbitrary rule. Some commentators (notably James Tyrrell) focused on the final securing of the fundamental rights of the people in the manner promised by the ancient constitution of England. But others (notably John Locke) preferred to appeal to the natural rights of the people as the only sound basis for guaranteeing freedom under government. At the same time, however, many rejected the settlement of 1688. The Jacobites objected that William and Mary were merely usurpers, while in the course of the 1690s a group of ‘commonwealth’ writers began to argue that the crown and executive were failing to keep their promise to outlaw the use of arbitrary power. The chapter concludes by discussing the contributions of Molesworth, Trenchard and Toland to the development of ‘commonwealth’ claims about the policies that will need to be followed if the freedom of the people from subjection and dependence is to be secured.

The chapter explores the concept of the individual as a democratic citizen who voluntarily exercises rights and authority, and can both legitimize and delegitimize the government. It suggests that Western secular cosmological dualism, which separates the world from man, has led to the development of the modern individual, capable of introspection, autonomy, and agency. This dualism creates a divide between the physical human body and the autonomous human mind and spirit. It has facilitated the simultaneous growth of natural sciences and humanities. The chapter examines how this secular imaginary, based on the separation of Nature and man since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is reflected in the philosophical discourses of influential thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. They explored the potential of this separation to evolve human agency in politics and to derive universal rights from Nature to safeguard individual freedom in society and politics. This dual cosmology also led to the development of social sciences and varying views on voluntarism and natural determinism, as seen in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Finally, it shows how Nature has become a cultural resource through art.

In this chapter, Ezrahi analyzes the influence of philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Vico, and Rousseau, as well as the Federalists, on the shift from a medieval monistic cosmology based on God to a modern dualistic cosmology, emphasizing dynamic Nature and human agency. These thinkers played a pivotal role in shaping a political order and obedience independent of divine authority, turning to Nature as the source of laws and a check on human actions. This transformation led to the emergence of new concepts, such as the state, freedom, and equality, despite their being imaginative. Hobbes pioneered the use of metaphors and empirical sciences in civic affairs. Spinoza adopted a detached scientific perspective, viewing human emotions and drives as natural phenomena. Locke presented empiricism and probability to inform political decisions through an understanding of human judgment. Vico proclaimed that political systems are based on collective political imagination, facilitating the construction of institutions and political processes rooted in commonsense. Rousseau further developed the dichotomy of Nature/Culture, highlighting its impact on politics, education, and ethics. The American Revolution marked the merging of objective Nature and human agency, giving rise to the idea of employing science to manipulate Nature.