Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Thucydides is interesting partly as a representative of “classical rationalism,” a type of rationalism that may help us to correct, or at least understand, the limitations of modern rationalism. Interpreters who approach the classical authors with this purpose in mind tend to presume that...