Rarely today does one come across a book of political philosophy that freshly illuminates the nature of reality as well as the great questions informing the western tradition of political reflection. In the face of too much theorizing, the phenomena of moral and political life in all their complexity and amplitude are obscured. The Boston College political theorist Robert Faulkner has written that rare book that helps one see the world better and more deeply. His book is a summa of learning, reflection, and wisdom, the product of a truly mature effort to overcome “those obscuring theories” that get in the way of an appreciation of “honorable or statesmanlike ambition.”
Aristotle reveals the limits of all moral virtue shorn of philosophical reflection.
Faulkner’s starting point is the “big divide” between, on the one hand, “thoughtful citizens” and “appreciative historians” who still acknowledge those great statesmen whose qualities of soul are indispensable for “defending, reforming, and founding a free country,” and, on the other hand, the various theorists who have succumbed to skepticism, cynicism, and doctrinaire egalitarianism regarding the great and the good. In the tradition of Leo Strauss, Faulkner establishes that the common-sense distinctions between honorable ambition, time-serving mediocrity, and the truly rapacious kind of ambition shorn of “justice, love, nobility, and friendship” are essential to any reasonable comprehension of human affairs. Drawing on Plato’s, Xenophon’s, and Aristotle’s insights into ambition and its limits, Faulkner recovers the fundamental and enduring difference between the ambition of a noble
