Applications of Political Theory

Joly's Dialogue addresses perennial questions that are now more urgent than ever: What are the prospects for freedom? Is the liberal system universally applicable? Is despotism a benighted remnant of the past or can it develop into new forms? After a century and a half, Joly's thought -repressed, ignored, hijacked, and misunderstood -comes into light [and] his voice is still quite fresh. The bitter irony of the despotic abuse to which this book was put demands redress by renewed access to Joly's liberal, anti-despotic thought. John Waggoner has made this possible for English-speaking readers. -- Richard F. Hassing
A fair and timely reassessment of one of the earliest and most acute analysts of modern despotism. -- Pierre Manent, Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron (EHESS, Paris)
Joly's is a classic diagnosis of distinctively modern despotism, and Waggoner adds to Joly's text an illuminating commentary. This book has lessons for all who love free government. -- Robert K. Faulkner
In addition to teaching us about the permanence of the possibility of tyranny, and its perverse new forms in modernity, Joly compels us to wonder whether our liberalism or Machiavelli's is truer. * Azure *
Joly's work is a briliant account of modern depotism, and of the vulnerability of republicanism to a Machiavellianism aware of the manipulability of popular mechanisms. Joly's updating of Machiavellianism deserves to be read as a prophetic and unwittingly influential document. Having detailed the despotism of its own century and inadvertently contributed to that of the century to come, perhaps in can help our century to learn to formulate an adequate response to the all-too enduring voice of tyranny. * The Review of Politics *
John Waggoner has done all of us a tremendous service by making available in English the text of Maurice Joly's Dialogue, as well as a penetrating analysis of this neglected work. His insight allows us to better understand the origins of both totalitarianism and anti-Semitism in the twentieth century. -- Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man