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Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction: Honorable Statesmen and Obscuring Theories -- Chapter 2. The Gentleman-Statesman: Aristotle's (Complicated) Great-Souled Man -- Chapter 3. Imperial Ambition in Free Politics: The Problem of Thucydides' Alcibiades -- Chapter 4. The Soul of Grand Ambition: Alcibiades Cross-Examined by Socrates -- Chapter 5. Imperial Grandeur and Imperial Hollowness:Xenophon's Cyrus the Great -- Chapter 6. Obscuring the Truly Great: Washington and Modern Theories of Fame -- Chapter 7. Honorable Greatness Denied (1): The Egalitarian Web -- Chapter 8. Honorable Greatness Denied (2): The Premises -- Notes -- Index.

Alexander Bickel's three most comprehensive books explore a common constitutional-political theme, the manner in which sound political judgment should guide judges and scholars who authoritatively interpret the United States Constitution. Yet the works differ, and the differences illuminate a dual development of Bickel's understanding: a growing fear of the contemporary obstacles to politic constitutional judgment, and a growing thoughtfulness in coming to grips with these obstacles. The Least Dangerous Branch had invented politic techniques for applying the judiciary's principles. The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress cautioned against judicial application, by novel techniques, of an impolitic egalitarian faith. The Morality of Consent, upon which this paper concentrates, elaborates Bickel's turn from the techniques of judicial power to the wise direction of judicial power. The paper considers the direction that Bickel proposes.

This essay has two complementary purposes. It seeks principally to clarify the basis of the political philosophy of Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan divine, and, in so doing, to clarify as well certain of the limits of political speculation itself. We hear quite often now that reports of the death of political philosophy have been greatly exaggerated. If this is indeed a time of its resuscitation, it is important that its limits be recognized and that inquiry be liberated from doctrines which cannot be based on unassisted reason alone. The ancillary purpose of this study is a contribution to such a disentanglement.Hooker's political thought itself also repays the attention of modern political scientists, if only as a remarkably comprehensive model of pre-modern or "traditional" society. Hooker wrestles with one of the difficulties which had much to do with ending "traditional" society in Europe and in those places Europe has influenced: the bitter and conflicting claims of church and state, and especially of various churches. Hooker's is a revealing endeavor to solve the political problems inherent in revealed religion, without abandoning—as his "enlightened" successors did—Christianity as a decisive constituent of politics or Aristotle as the secular guide of politics.