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The Phoenician Women, Euripides' peculiar retelling and refashioning of the Theban myth, offers a portrait of Antigone before she becomes the actor we mostly know today from Sophocles' play. In this under-studied Greek tragedy, Euripides portrays the political and epistemological dissolution that allows for Antigone's appearance in public. Whereas Sophocles' Antigone appears on stage ready to confront Creon with her appeal to the universal unwritten laws of the gods and later dissolves into the female lamenting a lost womanhood, Euripides' Antigone experiences the opposite journey, thereby offering insights into the conditions that allow for her exposure in the political arena. A speech by Eteocles at the center of the play questions the existence of absolutes, calls injustice beautiful, and opens the door for Antigone's entrance into the public sphere. With this speech Eteocles challenges us to consider the conditions of political openness in the modern age.

Over the past century and a quarter, there has been a dramatic decline in the equitable distribution of real income around the world. Associated with this rising inequality has been a dramatic acceleration in the pace of the real economic growth. The association of a decline in the equitable distribution of global income by country with a rapid acceleration in the pace of economic growth, can only mean that a relatively small number of countries have achieved extremely rapid rates of economic growth. The author discusses Japan's experience in this regard. (DÜI-Sen)

A Plato opposed to democracy fills the literature, and while some scholars question whether Plato adequately captures Socrates' possibly favorable views of democracy, Plato himself remains a paragon of elitism. I argue that Plato's response to democracy is far more theoretically interesting than simple disdain for the unenlightened masses. Rather, in Book 8 of theRepubliche explores the fundamental tensions of a regime identified with freedom and equality, which he presents as characterized by formlessness, and the epistemological and theoretical problems posed by the absence of forms (eidê).Eidêgive structure and identity to regimes and to their citizens; they are necessary for intellection and philosophy, but they are also the grounds for compulsion. Plato's analysis of democracy thus becomes a more serious challenge for democratic theorists than previously recognized.