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Drawing on his past work as an interpreter of Adam Smith, Hanley offers an account of Fénelon's social and political thought that emphasizes the role (and the dangers) of pride and self-love in human affairs. Fénelon does not join those, like Mandeville and La Rochefoucauld, who seek to understand and possibly to control self-love. Instead, he attempts to wed a far more rigorous and classical approach to the problem of pride—namely, the refinement of self-love through virtuous practices—to a modern view of the state and political economy.

For three hundred years, Bernard Mandeville was considered the first great apologist for luxury and the unsavory dimensions of commercial society, a reputation that remains largely intact even as scholars reconsider the depth and influence of his thought. Here, I argue that Mandeville's attitude toward luxury and material excess is far more ambivalent—indeed, highly critical—than previously thought. As societies became wealthier and more literate, Mandeville saw both individuals and societies growing increasingly susceptible to discontent—to "grumbling," as the original title of The Fable of the Bees has it. This focus on grumbling is particularly worthy of close study because Mandeville's chief profession was medicine, and, more specifically, the treatment of hypochondria. Identifying the bourgeois lifestyle as the cause of hypochondria in both the body and the body politic led him to caution his patients against the very things with which his name is synonymous: luxury and excess.

AbstractThe agonistic critique of liberalism argues that liberal theory unwisely eliminates conflict from the design of liberal-democratic institutions and understandings of liberal citizenship. John Stuart Mill anticipates and resolves the agonistic critique by incorporating several theories of antagonism into his political theory. At the institutional level, Mill places two antagonisms at the center of his political theory: the tension between the popular and bureaucratic elements in representative government, on the one hand, and that between the democratic and aristocratic elements in modern society, on the other. These tensions guarantee the fluidity of the political sphere. At the experiential level, Mill's embrace of antagonism is even more complete, as he argues that even our objectively correct opinions must be ceaselessly contested to become properlyours. The theory that emerges is both agonistic and liberal; further, it calls into question current liberal attitudes concerning conflict and antagonism.