Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today again by Mark Blitz,

Professor of Political Philosophy at Claremont Mechanical College, teacher Mai, way back many,

decades ago at Harvard, my first class I took there on Plato and Nietzsche, both of whom feature

prominently. We'll feature, I think, someone in our discussion today. Mark's written books on

on Plato and Heidegger, books on liberal democracy and liberalism, I guess someone might say,

and they all, in a sense, come together, I think, in your new book on reason and politics, the nature

of political phenomena, so I thought we could talk about that and not about what's discussed

in the book, I guess, we don't need to know. People, of course, should go out and buy the book that

goes out saying that they can learn from this discussion, even if they don't happen to have read

the book yet or even maybe even though it's a horrifying thought, even if they're not planning on

reading it in the very future. Anyway, thanks, Mark, for joining me. So this is a very ambitious,

dense, but clear at the same time, I'd say, readable book, and it requires some study,

reason and politics, the nature of political phenomena. And so I'm just beginning with that. What is it?

I mean, I guess normally one would think about politics and, you know, they're different,

they're historical, political politics is a political regime's or historical phenomena,

political developments, and that's a lot we could say about that and they're patterned maybe,

but what does it mean to say that political phenomena have a nature and somehow that's involved

with recent politics? Yeah, so I mean, that's right. You think of politics often as quite contingent

and dealing with changeable things. So what I wanted to do is really to examine how much you could

say that's true, you know, reasonably true, about these basic phenomena such as freedom and virtue

and rights, what's good, what's common, and nature is kind of the the correlative of reason.

It's what reason wants to know the way I think of natural laws of physics. So the nature of political

...