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The opening, in 2004, of John Rawls's personal archive prompted a new wave of Rawls scholarship. This work has deepened our understanding of the development and impact of Rawls's ideas and of the broader contours of twentieth-century analytical political philosophy. This article places these recent archival histories, for the first time, in the context of the longer history of attempts to historicize Rawls, beginning with the publication of A Theory of Justice fifty years ago. Doing so does three things. First, it shows that early readers were more interested in how to think historically about Rawls than is sometimes assumed. Second, it reveals that partisan accounts of Rawls's place in history, popularized by those close to him, have sometimes made their way into the archival studies. Third and finally, it offers an opportunity to rethink how the twentieth-century history of political philosophy and political theory is often told.

Historians of early modern "scientia civilis" focus on two main understandings of that concept: the juridical and the rhetorical. This article focuses on another way of thinking about civil science in the early modern period, the origins and development of which are in the Aristotelian commentary tradition. This article begins with political science in Aristotle then turns to the works of commentators from Albert the Great in the thirteenth century, to the Oxford philosopher John Case in the late sixteenth. It ends on ways that this history offers new perspectives on Hobbes's science of politics, and on the broader historiography.

The conventional view of Hobbes's commonwealth is that it was inspired by contemporary theories of tyranny. This article explores the idea that a paradigm for Hobbes's state could in fact be found in early modern readings of Aristotle on democracy, as found in Book Three of the Politics. It argues that by the late sixteenth century, these meditations on the democratic body politic had developed claims about unity, mythology, and personation that would become central to Hobbes's own theory of the commonwealth. Tracing the history of commentary on the relevant passages in Aristotle reveals new perspectives not only on the political theories of both Aristotle and Hobbes but also introduces modern readers to the richness of early modern commentaries on classical political texts. The article ends with some thoughts on why attention to traditions of commentary might be valuable for political theorists today.

Historians of late imperial Russia have been categorical in asserting that Russian peasants lacked any form of national identity. Scholars as diverse as Orlando Figes, Geoffrey Hosking, John Keep, Bruce Lincoln, Richard Pipes, Robert Service, Ronald Suny, and Allan Wildman have agreed that Russian peasants were too rooted inGemeinschaft,too particularistic in their social identities, to be capable of identifying with the polity and territory of Russia. John Keep expresses the consensus concisely when he writes:At the beginning of the twentieth century the Russian people lagged behind many others in the tsarist realm (Poles, Finns, even Baits and Ukrainians) in the development of a modern national consciousness. The social elite identified with the multinational empire; in the terminology of the day their thinking wasrossiiskiirather thanrusskii.Ordinary folk either opted for a social class orientation or else had none at all, in that their horizons were limited to the local community. This helps to explain why Russia was defeated in World War One, why the Bolsheviks with their Utopian internationalist creed won mass support in 1917 and why the Whites failed to worst the Reds in the ensuing civil war.