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While Plato's political dialogues give much attention to the relation of the legal and the divine, this subject receives scant notice in Aristotle's Politics. But this is not a sign that Aristotle neglects or dismisses the subject; it is in fact perfectly consistent with what the author understands to be Aristotle's view of the proper political relation of laws and gods. This view emerges indirectly, and only after reflection on the substance and manner of Aristotle's "umpiring" of a staged debate over the rule of the "best laws" versus that of the "best man" (Politics III). From the standpoint of the highest, Aristotle finds law to be both regime-derivative and somewhat prudence-impeding. At the same time, the "apolitical" character of the best man's rule necessitates the rule of law, and with it —for largely utilitarian reasons — Aristotle's public acquiescence in the apotheosis of the legal. But this teaching, and its basis, emerge fully only when the Politics' relative "silence" is interpreted in light of the open statements of a text much less palatable and thus much less accessible to statesmen and citizens (and even to political scientists): the Metaphysics. The Politics' obliqueness, argues the author, owes to the fact that Aristotle's final understanding of the relation of laws and gods cannot be fully disclosed publicly if it is to achieve its end of improving public life.

One of the fundamental premises of the modern liberal political tradition is the positing of society itself as the source of moral authority. Given that for more than 1,500 years of Western European history, the ultimate sources of both morality & social authority were conceived of as rooted in a transcendent & other-worldly sphere, an attempt is made to explain: (1) how the mundane sphere of community (society) was invested with moral suasion that previously had been the province of the transcendent sphere; & (2) what historical dynamics informed this fundamental restructuring of moral authority in the Christian West. To address these problems, a Weberian informed sociological approach, centered on the analysis of charisma, is combined with a historical analysis of the idea of authority prevalent among seventeenth-century New England Congregational Puritans. Central to the argument of this work is an analysis of the changing sources of charisma within the English Puritan movement, especially within New England Puritanism. The establishment of communities in the New World -- & with them, a restructuring of both boundaries & definitions of collective solidarity as well as the sources of the sacred in society -- led to new definitions of both morality & authority. Within the communities of New England Congregationalists, the sources of moral authority were no longer rooted in other-worldy sacramentalism (represented by the Eucharist community), but rather, in a this-worldly salvational collective, an ecumene, pursuing the work of redemption within mundane historical time. The transformation of the soteriological doctrines of Christianity (in New England Puritanism) in conjunction with the redefinition of the terms of the salvational collective, was a crucial moment in the constitution of the community as a locus of moral authority. AA