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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
Page:   12 3 4  

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About the Author

Florence King is the author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, The Florence King Reader, and, most recently, STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002 (National Review Press).

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