And the Welcome to Conversations, I'm Bill Crystal.

Joining me today is Mark Blitz,

Professor of Political Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College,

author recently of a book Plato's political

philosophy and earlier of works on Martin Heidegger and on American

liberal democracy. Welcome Mark. Thank you Bill. Mark you've been teaching and writing on political philosophy for 40 plus years, I guess.

40 plus years indeed, yes.

And how did you, why political philosophy?

I took the introductory government course at Harvard when I was a freshman.

Back then it was called Gov 1A and 1B.

It was now inflated up, all the numbers inflated up along the way,

everything else inflates up.

And the section man, as it was called then,

teaching assistant basically,

fellow named Morton Harrowitz,

indicated that political philosophy was the most important subject.

And the whole second half of the course was political philosophy.

So that's how I first became interested in it.

Then what happened is sophomore year, Harvard had a system where you have a tutorial that you take connected to the house in which you

you're living.

And the tutorial to which I was assigned was on a subject in which I was completely uninterested. I was walking across Harvard

Yard, ran into a friend of mine who had been in Harvey Mansfield's Gov 1B section. I started moaning and whining and complaining to my friend.

...