Those who do not study tyranny—if I may offer a somber twist on an old cliché—are condemned to endure it.

This seemed to be the view of the great teacher of political philosophy Leo Strauss, who memorably scorned the fecklessness of twentieth-century, value-free social science. “When we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past,” Strauss observed, “our political science failed to recognize it.” Among his students, none has written more comprehensively on the theoretical and philosophical questions surrounding tyranny than Waller R. Newell, a professor of political science and philosophy and a co-director of the Centre for Liberal Education and Public Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Of his several books, Newell’s first foray into this all-too-relevant topic is in many ways my favorite. Ruling Passion: The Erotics of Statecraft in Platonic Political Philosophy, published in 2000, argued that, “for Plato, tyranny is a misguided longing for erotic satisfaction that can be corrected by the education of eros toward the proper objects of its pleasure: civic virtue and philosophy.” This moderate form of politically responsible philosophy, which Newell calls “Socratic statesmanship,” stands in sharp contrast to the fanatical utopianism that emerged two millennia later in modern philosophy.

“For Plato, tyranny is a misguided longing for erotic satisfaction that can be corrected by the education of eros toward the proper objects of its