Thomas L. Pangle

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Government

This chapter explores the First Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries . It describes a spontaneous outpouring of an anguished self-expression that segues into a stream of sinuous and cascading reasonings that deal with the Solitary Walker's idiosyncratic present, past, and prospected future life. It also presents the autobiographical justifi...

This chapter discusses the Fourth Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries , which begins in the present tense but quickly moves to the narrative past tense. It explains what occasioned the intensely reasoned self examination that the Solitary Walker will proceed to describe himself as having engaged in during and subsequent to his walk, promis...

This chapter details how the Solitary Walker presents himself in a sweet conversation with his soul that articulates an abrupt quasi-dialectical rebound from the Seventh Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries . It shifts the rebound from a focus on the outward activity of the Solitary Walker's expansiveness soul to a focus on his inward self-...

This chapter examines the Second Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries , which is explicitly linked in sequence to the First Walk by a beginning that is emphatically in the past tense and of a conventional narrative. It mentions the Solitary Walker that conspicuously leaves behind and highlights the First Walk's artfully soliloquized perform...

This chapter investigates the Fifth Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries , which is related to the preceding as a kind of dialectical rebound from virtue to happiness. In this Fifth Walk, the eclipse of happiness has ended, though the eclipse of the philosophical perspective continues. It describes an unphilosophical thinking that is illumi...

This chapter investigates the Sixth Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries , which has the Solitary Walker treat the third pillar of his moral thought. It highlights goodness as a decided contrast with virtue and as emphatically a source of another, different version of true happiness. It also discusses the reiteration of the Solitary Walker...

This chapter focuses on the Third Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries , which provides a synoptic account of the evolution over the Solitary Walker's entire lifetime of religiosity. It reviews the stygian theological culmination of the Second Walk and an account of an actual walk's autobiographical reverie that was preoccupied with death a...

This chapter highlights the Seventh Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries , which is a diary-like presentation of the Solitary Walker's major solitary, self-centered, and even frivolous activity at present. It continues the silence into which the Solitary Walker has fallen concerning divine judgment with its compensations for virtue and vice...

This chapter constitutes a dialectical compensation, covering an extended apologia wherein Jean-Jacques Rousseau strives to leave his readers with the strong closing impression of the Solitary Walker's essentially loving, convivial nature. It stresses the seeming impossibility of any attainment of happiness for humans on the earth. It also draws an...

This book is the first complete exegesis and interpretation of Rousseau's final and culminating work, showing its full philosophic and moral teaching. The Reveries has been celebrated as a work of literature that is an acknowledged acme of French prose writing. The author argues that this aesthetic appreciation necessitates an in-depth interpretati...

Montesquieu was among the most influential writers of the eighteenth century, and the study of his thought enriches and complicates our understanding of the Enlightenment. Following renewed interest in his writings over the last three decades, the Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu brings together the variety of disciplinary and interpretive approa...

This book explains Rousseau’s most profound exploration and articulation of his own life, personality, soul, and thought as “the man of nature enlightened by reason.” Rousseau’s final work is shown to be the fullest embodiment of the experiential wisdom from which flows and to which points Rousseau’s political and moral philosophy, his theology, an...

Rousseau's and Socrates's competing conceptions of the life of wisdom or of the sage.

The radical theologico-political dimensions of Cervantes's masterpiece.

Socrates’s founding of economic science has been largely unnoted, and the crucial texts (of Xenophon) have not been studied with the needed interpretative care and skill—even though the Socratic conception of what it means to conduct a proper science of economics confronts our contemporary conceptions of economic science with grave theoretical chal...

Socrates’s marriage made his way of life start overlapping, in one major respect, with the way of life of the conventional gentleman. This gives a sharp new point of focus for the comparison and contrast between the two ways of life. But the philosopher had a more profound theoretical reason for his intense interest in hearing about the gentleman’s...

This chapter exposes and focuses upon something scandalous about Socrates that one would never guess from reading the Memorabilia: well into his maturity, the philosopher by his own confession neither practiced nor understood “virtue” (aretē). Xenophon presents Socrates telling of the great day on which he underwent a radical transformation—when he...

Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates to the Jurors spotlights the “greatness of soul” (megalopsychia), or self-consciousness of superiority, and hence of worthiness of being honored, that distinguishes Socrates, in comparison and contrast with the greatness of soul of the conventional gentleman—who is here exemplified by a peculiarly unorthodox outlier,...

In his Symposium Xenophon lets us be “flies on the wall” at a private drinking party in which gradual inebriation loosens the tongues of all present, including Socrates—making manifest the gulf, and how that gulf is tenuously bridged, between the philosophically erotic playfulness of the Socratic circle and the erotic playfulness of conventionally...

Socrates limns the pros and cons of the economic life at the base of each of the two most fundamental, adversarial, political alternatives—republican freedom from domination, vs. ambition for empire over others. What is most remarkable about Socrates’s praise of the life of free Greek farmers is his speaking in such a way as to bring out not the ci...

The freedom and the gentlemanliness that the gentleman’s lawful regime produces is more paternalistic, and much more profit-loving, than the freedom and gentlemanliness that is aimed at by the lawful regime of Sparta (see The Regime of the Lacedaemonians), or that is produced by the lawful regime of Xenophon’s imaginary improvement on Sparta, the o...

Socrates’s founding of economic science has been largely unnoted, and the crucial texts (of Xenophon) have not been studied with the needed interpretative care and skill—even though the Socratic conception of what it means to conduct a proper science of economics confronts our contemporary conceptions of economic science with grave theoretical chal...

Xenophon has his Socrates present the gentleman concluding his teaching of the philosopher with a peroration almost diametrically opposed to the peroration with which Xenophon has his poet Simonides conclude his teaching of the tyrant in Hiero, or One Skilled in Tyranny. Not the least of the polar opposites is the latter’s complete silence on the g...

Xenophon's ironic defense of Socrates against the charge of not believing in the gods of the city allows one to discern the true meaning of the philosopher's famous daimonion, the path breaking character of his study of nature as a whole, and the manner of his highly rhetorical or exoteric public speech regarding piety and the gods.

Xenophon returns to a defense of Socrates’s “much talked about” claim that he was given unique “guidance by an uncanny divine thing (daimonion).” Xenophon now takes for granted the conformity to lawful belief of Socrates’s daimonion—as having been previously established. Here, Xenophon rebuts the objection someone might raise, to the effect that by...

The third division of the second part shows how Socrates benefitted those reaching out for the kalon—the noble or beautiful, the morally compelling, that which lends dignity, the virtues—and did so by leading such persons to begin to recognize self-critically, and to think profoundly about, their deep ignorance of that goal that gives meaning and p...

The second division of the second part has as its theme Socrates’s beneficial wrestling with, and teaching on, the problematic of philia (loved ones)—first familial, and then extra-familial. We follow Xenophon as he shows how Socrates benefitted by reconciling first his wife and son, then quarreling brothers. We proceed to the philosopher's teachin...

The fourth and last major section of the second part presents the philosopher in his activity as a private spiritual tutor of select, individually beloved, Athenian youths—employing as a paradigmatic case Socrates's education of the beautiful Euthydemus. Xenophon interrupts the account of the seduction and education of the latter by showing Socrate...

The first division of the second part of the Memorabilia consists of seven subsections (1.3–2.1) showing how Socrates benefited his companions in regard to, and through, his exemplary piety and mastery over his appetites. Sections on the philosopher’s piety alternate with sections on his self-mastery. Xenophon illuminates Socrates's singular concep...

Xenophon's ironic defense of Socrates against the charge of corrupting the young allows one to discern the precise character of the profoundly transformative educational and political influence the philosopher exerted on highly promising but problematic young Athenians, above all Critias and Alcibiades, and more subtly, young Xenophon himself.

The Socratic Way of Life is the first book length study in English of the philosophic teaching of Xenophon’s masterwork. It shows that Xenophon depicts more authentically than does Plato the true teachings and way of life of the citizen philosopher Socrates, founder of political philosophy.

A Discussion of Daniel A. Bell’s The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy - Volume 14 Issue 1 - Thomas L. Pangle

In trying to understand the deepest moral and philosophic foundations on which the American founders built our constitutional order, it is indispensable that we at some point address in a sustained way their views on the place and role of religion within the new republic.

This book introduces readers to analytical interpretation of seminal writings and thinkers in the history of political thought, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, and Nietzsche. Chronologically arranged, each chapter in the book is devoted to...

The rather complex private correspondence between Leo Strauss (1899–1973) and Gerhard Krüger (1902–72) runs from late 1929 through 1935.1 Readers will presumably be acquainted with Strauss, but a few words are in order to introduce Krüger—whose fulfillment of his great promise was severely hindered by the oppression of National Socialism and then,...

Aristotle begins Book VII of the Politics by setting a somewhat provocative twofold agenda: “It is necessary,” not only “to agree first on what is the most choiceworthy way of life for everyone, so to speak”; “after this,” it is then necessary to agree on whether it is “the same or different in common and separately/apart” (1323a19–21; see Newman,1...

The chapters of this book have a common theme: philosophy as a mode of existence put into question. Political societies frequently regard philosophers as potential threats to morality and religion, and those who speak for politics often demand a defense of philosophy. Beyond politics, theoretical people, too, advance a sophisticated panoply of char...

It is widely believed that the Politics originated as a written record of a series of lectures given by Aristotle, and scholars have relied on that fact to explain seeming inconsistencies and instances of discontinuity throughout the text. Breaking from this tradition, Pangle makes the work’s origin his starting point, reconceiving the Politics as...

Largely due to the cultural and political shift of the Enlightenment, Western societies in the eighteenth century emerged from sectarian conflict and embraced a more religiously moderate path. The book ask whether exporting the Enlightenment solution is possible—or even desirable—today. It begins by revisiting the Enlightenment's restructuring of t...

Recent scholars (e.g., Bodéüs 1993; Mara 2000; Smith 2001; Tessitore 1996) have fruitfully proposed that we must strive to understand Aristotle’s distinctive didactic strategy as a writer. By attending more to the interrelationship between the Ethics and the Politics, and to the contrast with modern liberal theorizing on the issue of educative stra...

The Roman Platonist Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 b.c.), the last great republican statesman of antiquity, has left us in his philosophical writings the fullest doctrinal elaboration of Socratic political theory in its implications for international affairs. Through his modifi cation of Stoicism, Cicero erected the basic conceptual framework of the...

This interpretative commentary recovers the largely overlooked significance of a work that illuminates, by portraying in a subtle comic drama, the new perspective on existence, the new way of life, that Socrates introduced in and through his founding of political philosophy. The famous “problem of Socrates” as a turning point of world history (Niet...

he Spirit of the Laws—Montesquieu’s huge, complex, and enormously influential work—is considered one of the central texts of the Enlightenment, laying the foundation for the liberally democratic political regimes that were to embody its values. In his penetrating analysis, Thomas L. Pangle brilliantly argues that the inherently theological project...

Ours is an era in which democracy is bent on proliferating itself with an energy that is breathtaking. The European Union, having mushroomed to twenty-seven member nations, is now committed to maintaining democracy among a vast Eastern population that within our lifetime was once regarded as hopelessly under the heel of communist totalitarianism. P...

Jeffrey Tulis's classic study traces the central dilemmas of today's presidency to Woodrow Wilson's invention of the full-blown "rhetorical presidency": a radicalized version of Theodore Roosevelt's essential rhetorical supplement to the Founders' inadequate conception of the office. But what is Tulis's teaching as to how we ought to evaluate this...

I'm honored by and grateful for the thoughtfulness and the sharply stimulating character of Prof. Lawler's critical reflections prompted by my book. Lawler states felicitously what divides us, in the following words: "Maybe we only disagree (only!) on what sort of God is the image of perfection beyond all human experience to which the deepest human...

This is the first comprehensive, accurate, and non-polemical introduction to Leo Strauss’s mature political philosophy and intellectual legacy. The author, Thomas L. Pangle, is a leading student of the thought of Strauss. He has collected and edited writings of Strauss, and has written well-known essays interpreting Strauss. Here he provides an int...

In this book noted scholar Thomas L. Pangle brings back a lost and crucial dimension of political theory: the mutually illuminating encounter between skeptically rationalist political philosophy and faith-based political theology guided ultimately by the authority of the Bible. Focusing on the chapters of Genesis in which the foundation of the Bibl...

In Democracy’s Discontent, Michael Sandel contrasts the civic republican approach to American politics with that of liberal neutrality and shows how the two views have played out over the course of US history. Sandel argues that liberal neutrality is overwhelmingly dominant today, and he urges a return to a more Aristotelian, republican politics; b...

The post-Cold War era has provoked a revival of various implicit as well as explicit returns to Stoic cosmopolitan theory as a possible source of a normative conceptual framework for international relations and global community. This article confronts this revival of interest in Stoicism with an analysis of Cicero's constructive critique of origina...

A crucial but largely neglected dimension of the political thought of Plate and Aristotle is examined here. The aim is, first, to clarify their theories of justice by considering how those theories deal with the moral challenges posed in the international arena; and, second, to indicate the outlines of a Platonic-Aristotelian normative framework fo...

American schools are in a state of crisis. At the root of our current perplexity, beneath the difficulties with funding, social problems, and low test scores, festers a serious uncertainty as to what the focus and goals of education should be. We are increasingly haunted by the suspicion that our educational theories and institutions have lost sigh...

The notion of Natural Rights or Human Rights has constituted the moral center of liberalism since its inception in the seventeenth century. Yet not long after the great founders, Spinoza and Locke, had laid the foundations, there emerged within the liberal tradition certain penetrating notes of skepticism as regards the political wisdom--and even,...

The philosophic correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, stretching over thirty years, sheds some helpful light on each of the thinkers’ philosophic positions. To be sure, only a few of the letters seem truly significant, and it would of course be a mistake to allow the rather informal and ad hoc remarks in any of the letters to eclips...

The Spirit of Modern Republicanism sets forth a radical reinterpretation of the foundations on which the American regime was constructed. Thomas L. Pangle argues that the Founders had a dramatically new vision of civic virtue, religious faith, and intellectual life, rooted in an unprecedented commitment to private and economic liberties. It is in t...

The overall aim of the seminar on “The Philosophical Roots of the Bill of Rights” was to gain a better understanding of the basic presuppositions and implications of our Constitutional commitments as expressed in the Bill of Rights, especially as viewed from the perspective of the original debates and compromises that led finally to the enactment o...

"The Spirit of Modern Republicanism" sets forth a radical reinterpretation of the foundations on which the American regime was constructed. Thomas L. Pangle argues that the Founders had a dramatically new vision of civic virtue, religious faith, and intellectual life, rooted in an unprecedented commitment to private and economic liberties. It is in...