Macchiavelli is a must, agreed. I have the Mansfield translation, which I should read. He put it well: “If you think my translation is bad, make your own. If you think it is good, learn Italian.”

There is a lot to be said for reading the Iliad, now that I think about it. You can divide people into two groups: (1) Those who scratch their heads and say, why did they have us read that rambling, violent, pointless old thing? (a large majority), and (2) those who say, nothing ever really changes, does it?

Naturally, given my background I’d prefer Thucydides to Plato but Plato’s Republic is a book no undergrad should get through college without reading, IMHO.

Machiavelli, I prefer to de Tocqueville because his application is broader but the latter is a key text for understanding America and a fantastic example of how an outsider can have greater insights at times than the native.

I’ve read the Marquis de Custine too – his Empire of the Czar doesn’t rise to the intellectual level of Democracy in America but it was a solid work and the best available for half-century at least.

Amen. I thank God for the U of C common core and Western Civ sequences, and several other courses.

I would have said Thucydides and Tocquevile if I had to pick just two, but we also read Plato and Machiavelli, and those guys were pretty good as well.

The Humanities are great, they are the bedrock of intellectual life. My problem isn’t with the humanities but with those professors who try to circumscribe them to fit political dogma.

If I was advocating eliminating studies of race or gender, you might have a beef. I’m not. Where they’re relevant they add an important dimension but that dimension shouldn’t be the focus of higher education or of the staffing of history departments because doing so leaves out major fields of inquiry.

Undergraduate students need the basics and not just the au courant, politically monochromatic, interdisciplinary studies of recent vintage. Students will get a hell of a lot more out of Plato or Machiavelli than Cornel West or Andrea Dworkin

“I would argue that this represents a decades long trend to progressively devalue the actions of anyone not an articulate intellectual”

Very true. I think it might also be the results of a decades long trend to progressively degrade the definition of what we consider to be an “articulate intellectual”. we’ve ended up with a lot of imperious, jargon-users who are mentally closed to anything outside their micro-domains.

Mace, you may be right.

When the liberal-arts in the 60’s decided they would be political activist first and academics second, they sealed their doom. They become progressively more irrelevant to day to day life and people see less and less a reason to fund them.

That really bugs me too.

One of the differences between a politician and a statesman is the comprehension of strategy. Henry Stimson did not try to micromanage Eisenhower and Marshall, much less Patton, Bradley or some LTC wading ashore at Normandy

It would also be nice to get the political class to understand the differnce between tactics and strategy. Everytime I hear someone elected use the word strategy and describe a tactical action, I’m reminded intelligence is not a requirement for political office.