There are few blessings in life that one could hope for,

maybe aside from having good parents, then having good teachers.

And Joshua Mitchell's been a great teacher for me personally.

This is an extraordinary book, and I'm very happy to have him.

Joshua Mitchell is a professor of government at Georgetown

University. He's written books about religion and politics, about Plato, about Augustine,

about Toekville. And this is a book that's really unlike all the other books that he's written.

Those books, if you'll permit me to say, those books are really engaged in the types of textual analysis

that we've been engaged in over the past week and a half.

This book is hard to put into a specific genre. It's not exegesis of the kind of political theory that he's used to.

This book is partially a memoir of a set of extraordinary experiences.

It's partially the bearing of years and years of study that's brought to bear on a number of contemporary events.

You could think about the book as a kind of sequel in a very different key to works like Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind,

in as much as he invites us to reflect on the souls of the young.

In truth, the closest analog that I can think of

is actually a work by a Greek thinker named Herodotus.

Herodotus task is to go and investigate the way they do things in other

places and come back to the Greek city states and report on them. To say this is how they honor the

gods there. This is how they govern themselves there. And in a very different setting, some years later, Plato asked to give a name to that

type of activity, calls that political theory.

So I think what you have here is actually an instantiation of what political theory meant

in its original sense, a recovery of something very deep,

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