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What’s in a Word?
The definition of sheer joy is the reaction of a conservative on learning that a book entitled Manliness has just been published.
(Page 2 of 4)
“…Undying admiration: Coriolanus and Custer.”
“…Forgotten manliness: the nameless English soldier who fashioned a cross for Joan of Arc from the wood of her pyre.”
These are just some lump-in-the-throat examples of manliness that I expected to find in this book, but Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard professor of government, delivers nothing but a lump, the fatal kind that metastasizes whenever the faculty lounge and the University Press join hands and lock jaws.
p>Instead of pumping us up, he tells us everything we’ve always wanted to know about Plato’s presentation of thumos in The Republic ; women and akuron in Aristotle’s Politics ; virtu in Machiavelli (“To be altogether bad you have to be good at being bad, thus good”); Nietzsche’s nihilism, Hobbes’s Leviathan
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