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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Thumos!

A Strauss Primer, With Glossy Mansfield Finish - washingtonpost.com

An esteemed professor who has held forth on political science at Harvard for more than 40 years and the author of a book titled "Manliness," Mansfield is a master scholar on the big names of political thought -- Plato and Machiavelli among them -- who were the wellsprings of Leo Strauss's cantankerous worldview. His speech, the first intellectually substantial Jefferson Lecture since the tenure of NEH Chairman Bruce Cole began in 2001, was complex, elliptical, erudite and wry.