Great Lives & Languages, vs. Great Books?

What Proponents of the Great Books Can Learn from Alex Petkas, Despite His Calling Us “Losers,” “Dilettantes,” etc.

Most of the criticisms which have been expressed represent misunderstandings. They do not create genuine issues between us and our would-be opponents. They accuse us for the most part of making claims for the great books that we do not make; they impute to us theories we do not hold; they attribute to us aims we do not have, or goals we do not seek.

Mortimer Adler, “Great Books, Past and Present,” Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, 318

…frankness…is the greatest and most potent medicine in friendship, always needing, however, all care to hit the right occasion, and a tempering with moderation.

Plutarch, “How to Tell a Friend from a Flatterer,” Moralia, 74d.

Alex Petkas

Here’s how Alex Petkas describes himself to prospective participants in his Men’ Leadership Retreat:

Alex Petkas… holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University… is the host of The Cost of Glory podcast. He has been leading educational and professional development trips in the ancient Mediterranean world for 10 years. He has published extensively on classical rhetoric... He taught at various universities, eventually leaving a successful academic career and a tenure-track job to work in new media and leadership training.

Impressive. And do check out The Cost of Glory. I only learned about it this summer, and was hoping to introduce it to Pomocon in a post about my and other scholars’ growing interest in Plutarch. Petkas uses the series to retell and mediate on Plutarch’s Lives, some of the Moralia essays, and related works by other classical authors.

As befits his familiarity with the ancient rhetorical tradition, he deploys his voice and writes his scripts with great care. And as befits his being a classics scholar, he does all this with an attention to detail, though his details do not serve pedantry, but the dramatic impact of the stories. Plutarch is telegraphic at points, often because he assumes his reader will be familiar with the main history relevant to this or that life; Petkas fill-ins his informational silences, or otherwise adds to the narrative. I’d like a bit more direct quotation from the Lives, as well as more comment on Plutarch’s thematic choices, but Petkas has hit upon a method that can draw in persons unfamiliar with the ancient era. The end result are episode-sequences which relate a single “Life,” such as that about Caius Marius, in three or four podcasts, giving you a running time several times longer than you’d get from a straight reading of it. The additional material also features reflections pitched to the contemporary interest in manliness-for-personal-development. One yt commenter called it the best podcast on things Roman available. He might well be right, and since Plutarch is the main guide, that praise could apply to things Greek as well.

So all praise to Petkas!

But unfortunately, and in contrast to the manner I’ve been describing, this November he gave us a rather unartful and spare provocation in which he seems to outright denounce the Great Books approach to higher education. So as a “pro-fessor” of that approach, and one who understands that the stakes connected to its reputation have become quite a bit higher in the wake of Trump’s sweeping victory, I find myself obliged to instead introduce Petkas to Pomocon by way of a rebuttal, or as I’d prefer to say, by way of a half-critical explainer. I welcome the task, however, because I think we can learn much about our options for re-attempting higher education (no, the word “reforming” can’t capture what we need anymore) by dialoguing with him.

Petkas’s Attack on Great Books Curricula

His piece is “Great Books’ Is for Losers: If You’re Making a List, You’ve Already Lost.” There’s no pressing need to read it first, as I’ll be quoting extensively. It begins:

…scan through some conservative responses to America’s education crisis, and you will find a uniquely American solution repeatedly proposed: start a “Great Books” curriculum.

The theory goes that a quality “liberal arts” education…consists mainly in reading, and thoroughly discussing, a series of important books… …Not just any book will do: only the “great” ones. Shakespeare, Milton, Dostoyevsky…and so on. The canon.

Notice the tone, and the scare quotes.

But anyone putting faith in such a “Great Books” education—whether begun in high school, or college, or through independent self-study—in the hopes of restoring American culture, should pause and ask himself: what exactly is being restored?

This a redeployment of a rhetorical move of Trump-prompted critique of existing conservatism: --nothing is being conserved! --existing conservative leaders are losers! --cucks! That is, this is a move first developed against a set of political leaders, applied here to a school of educational thought.

But the fit is poor, for first, proponents of Great Books have never had power in the field of higher education comparable to that which standard conservatives held in the field of politics circa 2016. Second, what applies to the conduct of partisan politics often fails to apply to intellectual work.

Third, it is off-target to charge us with failing to “restore American culture.” We never promised that. Notice, for example, that a top leader of the Great Books movement, Mortimer Adler, chose to subtitle his book The Opening of the American Mind, as opposed to a Re-Opening of it. We wouldn’t deny that obvious intellectual-life declines have occurred in America, from say, the Jefferson-Adams correspondence to now, the Faulkner-Ellison-O’Connor literary scene to now, or to use a humbling Petkas-provided fact, from the higher-ed landscape prior to 1912, at which point 17% of the top 155 colleges still “demanded Greek and Latin for a BA degree,” to now. But we never called America to return to this or that comparatively golden era by means of the Great Books. Our early leaders in fact had some criticisms of the classicism of many 19^th-century colleges, the model which Petkas inclines to, though they thought it had been superior to what had been replacing it before their eyes, namely, the emphasis on specialization and electives, and the German research university model.

After all, most of our key leaders were not political conservatives. Their vision for educational renewal had an “aristopopulist” bent,¹ in which “The best education for the best,” i.e., for the most promising students, would be offered as “the best education for all.”(Robert Hutchins) This vision was generally not tied to conservative theories of how to restore the healthiest aspects of American culture.

I hope Petkas’s piece does not give younger readers the impression that the GB movement ever had much sway. While it is true that in the 70s-thru-90s era the top conservative leader WFB Jr. praised Adler to the skies, alas, conservative parents did not send their kids to the few GB institutions, and conservative donors did not send significant support.² The flagship Great-Books-only school, St. John’s College, Annapolis, merely managed to found a single additional college, the one in Santa Fe, whose Graduate Institute I attended at the end of the 90s. And while there have been a lot of “classical education” institutions and home-school curricula at the primary and secondary level begun since 2000—using several distinct approaches--, in the same period there has been no explosion of thoroughly Great Books schools in higher ed. Limited programs spring up here and there at otherwise fairly standard institutions, with the GB component taking up as little as 15%-30% of a student’s coursework, sometimes as part of a required curriculum, but more typically, as an elective track. Oh, and the preeminent Catholic GB-college, Thomas Aquinas, founded a new campus in 2018, and this year the University of Austin was born, which even 60 Minutes knows is significant. So there are some signs--and lots of talk--suggesting that things are beginning to shift in a GB direction, but the overall dearth has long been the rule.

But back to Petkas. In a section titled “The Birth of a Cope,” he begins to outline his history of the GB movement. He sees it as a defensive reaction to the evisceration of classics requirements in the colleges after the Civil War.

Upon examination, an education based on a “Canon” of “Great Books” turns out to have been designed by, and for, losers. Moreover, it is foreign to the spirit of the Renaissance, the American founding, and Classical Antiquity itself. The whole concept is in fact quite new. And for anyone on the right, accepting the “Canon” premise is tantamount to admitting defeat.

His claim that the GB approach was largely new, a response to the 1870s-1920s trends, is largely true—despite many attempts, the GB movement cannot convincingly claim a neat precursor in the history of academia. But Petkas’s beef against the “canon premise” is unclear. As the idea of a canon recurs in all higher civilizations, what is so defeat-accepting about it? Does he hold that lists are a feature of civilizations’ “silver eras,” eras in which the decline is already well underway? That would be problematic, because Plutarch was definitely a retrospective spirit, one fairly canon-reliant (and canon-setting also). And surely Petkas, given his presentations of life-lessons from Plutarch’s works, must reject historicist premises, as well as the seeming-vitalism of the Futurist’s³ declamations against libraries and museums. But back to his history:

…Saint John’s College in Annapolis implemented a well-known [GB program] in 1936... The idea had only really been around since 1919, when Columbia University pioneered its famous Great-Books heavy “Western Civilization” sequence. …But perhaps the most famous and paradigmatic…program was that founded at the University of Chicago in 1931 by the school’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Mortimer J. Adler—the latter himself a graduate of Columbia’s program.

The spirit animating Chicago’s program and perhaps all such programs may be discerned in Encyclopedia Britannica’s subsequent publication of the Great Books of the Western World. In the 1940s, a committee of 35 distinguished scholars gathered ... Adler, the committee’s chair, charged the luminaries with cataloguing 500 of the West’s greatest “ideas.” These were then distilled down to …102... From this more pure isolate was then derived a list of certain Great Books which were determined to have contributed most to the formation or trajectory of those ideas.

It was an incredible labor, no doubt one of earnest love. Some 400,000 man-hours, many of them billable [cheap shot, Petkas], had to be entered into Britannica‘s ledger. But the first edition…emerged at last in 1952... …[and] an army of door-to-door salesmen eventually made the collection a bestseller...

1989 edition; a collection of Adler’s essays over the previous 50 years. The book that changed my life by leading me to St. John’s College, and then into doctoral study.

Petkas does capture something of the spirit of the thing, but it’s odd that he focuses here on a mere part of it, the effort to produce the Syntopicon and sell it with the Great Books set. The main item of this interesting book, which you can buy separately, is 102 Adler-authored essays on the Great Ideas, most of them pretty good, albeit tiresome in places. Each of them is followed by a frankly too-elaborate apparatus to locate further discussions of the said idea in the Great Books set.

He veers into error, however, to suggest that the selection of books was determined by what best fitted the needs of the Syntopicon. That forgets that the Columbia program and others put forward very similar lists prior to 1952. He should take a look at the final essay in Adler’s Reforming Education to get a better sense of how Britannica’s list was put together, or he could peek into the program-list for St. John’s College, which reflects decisions the faculty there have made to refine it for over 90 years now.

And he compounds this error with this:

…To cite but one non-classical feature, the “read and discuss the Canon” approach assumes the priority of timeless “ideas.” Yet “ideas” are themselves a thing whose metaphysical status has been debatable at least since Aristotle, and to assign them priority in education over, for example, people, events, or discrete historical institutions seems itself to be an accident of some transient historical circumstance.

A key aspect of the objection here seems to be that Adler organized the set and approach around his own Thomistic theory of Ideas, set out in his books like Intellect: Mind over Matter. Petkas doesn’t see that discussion of some number of perennial ideas has long been recognized, and by many who didn’t share Adler’s theory of their metaphysical status, as an inevitable aspect of philosophic education. Those thinkers included whoever it was in ancient times who added the subtitles “on justice,” “on moderation,” “on beauty,” etc., to Plato’s dialogues.

But having made those rejoinders, I urge the reader to notice the other, and more interesting, aspect of Petkas’s questioning: he is wondering whether philosophic discussion should be prioritized over a.) organized presentation of history, especially of key institutions, and b.), in the spirit of Plutarch, history-grounded but moral-instruction-focused study of great lives. He will soon add c.) attainment of a serious competence in Latin and Greek, and by studying another “salvo” of his, “A Paideia for the Network State,” we can see that he would also add d.) attainment of rhetorical excellence via imitative immersion in the best examples.

Those who wish could add to this list of sidelined educational aims—though Petkas might disagree-- e.) attainment of better use of language, via imitative immersion in the best literary works; and in the case of religious colleges, f.) advanced catechism, in which more standard catechism was enriched by some endorsed-by-the-institution best approach to theology and philosophy, such as the Thomistic one.⁴

He continues:

…in the 18th century, for example—American higher education in literature was dominated by what (Eric) Adler calls the Renaissance Humanism model, based almost entirely on careful study of the Greek and Roman classics. As he explains, “Renaissance humanists argued that classical Latin…was the key to the proper molding of individuals. Learning to write like the ancients would enable one to absorb their thoughts on moral philosophy.”

(Another Adler! For a fine introduction to Eric Adler’s thought, see what our Pavlos wrote for the Kirk Center.) But back to Petkas:

This educational paradigm eventually won purchase in those former bastions of medieval scholasticism, Oxford and Cambridge, whence it was subsequently transferred to [America]… This “Renaissance Humanism” model became the paradigm by which America’s colleges crafted figures like Cotton Mather, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson into public men…

The “humanist” model itself was not invented in the Renaissance, but based largely on the paradigms of education forged in the ancient Greek and Roman schools of oratory, attended by the likes of Demosthenes, Cicero, and Caesar. It was an education founded emphatically and rigorously on the bedrock of imitation…mimesis...the “emulation” of role models. This was an education for statesmen. In the past, it went by another name, which has become in our day so debased as to be unrecognizable: rhetoric, the “speaker’s art.”

And Petkas agrees with those Renaissance humanists who held that immersion in the classical languages is thus necessary for the success of this model:

The most telling sign of Great Books education’s toothlessness is its abandonment of any serious engagement with the classical languages. Hutchins himself wrote in 1936, “I do not suggest that learning the languages or the grammar in which the ancient classics were written is necessary to general education. Excellent translations of almost all of them now exist.”

Petkas detests this, as he holds that

…language facilitates mimesis. Indeed, it is the most powerful vector of mimesis, for language structures consciousness. A Renaissance man like Machiavelli wished to conform his entire person—his mind most of all—to the greatness he found trapped in the pages of ancient books. …the classical zealot knows that assimilating the actual thought patterns of the greats—by reading them in the original language—is the most powerful spell he can use in his quest. Faced with such magic, the “Great Books” dilettante can only stare in uncomprehending awe.

That is his piece’s final paragraph. I admit it is a hilariously imprudent ending, given its “dilettante” insult, its refusal to acknowledge that the GB-only colleges are the only ones which still have general requirements for classical languages, and its dumb move of making Machiavelli his Renaissance exemplar, needlessly disturbing the many Christian advocates of classical education, such as myself, whom he needs as allies.

But let’s return to his admiration of the 19th-century classicist model. And for more flesh on that model’s bones, we’ll quote another insightful writer on American higher ed, Anthony Kronman:

At Yale, which played a leading role in setting and defending curricular standards in the first half of the nineteenth century, freshmen read Livy, Horace, Homer, and Herodotus; sophomores, Cicero and Xenophon; and juniors, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Thucydides, and Demosthenes. In their senior year, Yale students read texts in logic and representative writings of the Scottish Enlightenment... Freshman began their study of mathematics with Euclid’s Elements and continued the next year with Dutton’s treatise on conic sections. Astronomy, geology, and chemistry were all taught using prescribed textbooks, as were geography and political economy…in every branch of study, the Yale curriculum before the Civil War was fixed in lockstep fashion, so that each student in each graduating class would have studied a nearly identical list of books… (Anthony Kronman, Education’s End, 53)⁵

It is obvious that having lost this is a real loss, but Petkas does not mention the ways this approach could be, and often was, botched. He makes no admission that it was ever or anywhere dominated by “classical dissectors and drill masters,” and by an “arid and empty formalism” which pushed “study of the classics for historical or philological reasons.”⁶ Nor does he mention how America’s colleges which upheld this model contributed to, and became entangled in, the rise of “Society,” as detailed by E. Digby Baltzell.

Rather, Petkas idealizes it—though oddly, he never explicitly calls for a return to the 19^th-century curricula--and pits it against a GB approach portrayed as being against its imitative methods, classical languages, and statesman-producing goals. He winds up giving us a Plutarchan gloss to this bogeyman version of the GB model v. his idealized picture of the classicist one: “Not Great Books but Great Men.”

The criterion for inclusion in this “canon” has little to do with “ideas,” and is more akin to the Homeric concept of aretē, understood as frightening manly excellence. Indeed, it is …more a canon of “Great Men” worth imitating. …It was this paradigm that made not Virgil, not Catullus, not Plato or Aristotle, not even Caesar, but the mimesis-obsessed Parallel Lives of Plutarch the most popular ancient book (besides the Bible) in the American colonies.

A very interesting argument, but to let him continue:

…Eric Adler’s book catalogs how, by the beginning of the 20th century, many American colleges had been reoriented around a confusing and priorityless buffet of subjects, including new “disciplines” like Sociology, Comparative Literature, Economics, etc.—the array of soft subjects ever expanding as specialization-hungry Ph.Ds searched for more niches in which to produce new “knowledge.” Among these subjects was the newfangled discipline of English Literature—Shakespeare, mind you, was not found on any college “canon” prior to the late 19th century...

…To open up the “market” in this way, by placing all subjects on a supposedly equal footing, was a brilliant and devious method for sidelining tradition-heavy and authority-heavy disciplines…the game was rigged: a discipline like Classics, imposing formidable hurdles like the mastery of Greek and Latin and an extensive body of mandatory content (similarly Theology and Biblical Studies…) were doomed to lose to “relevant” and easy fields like “Psychology.”

…The Classics had already lost by the time the “Great Books” paradigm was born... To be sure, we should be grateful to Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and others for their efforts. Something had to be done, after all, to stanch the bleeding. But if ever for a moment they thought of themselves as defending the classics, then they were already losers.

There’s a lot here worth thinking about, though that’s quite off, that last admission of partial gratitude to Hutchins and Adler, combined with a rhetorical consignment of them and their followers to loser-dom. That consignment only partakes of the logical if one sees that for Petkas, the charge is that the GB-ers had lost sight of the essence of classical studies. So more precisely stated, the problem wasn’t so much that they lost, since any model out of step with the German research model was bound to mostly lose with the American public during the 1880s-1960s period, but that their classics-misunderstanding sort won the top leadership of the dissenters’ position in America’s educational debate. That is, Petkas feels the GB movement wound up being a mere “cope” because the issue was not drawn as sharply as it needed to, and too much was conceded to the classics-dismantlers from the outset.

But is Petkas right about the essence of such studies? And that such studies have such benefit that the prospect of excluding Shakespeare or Dostoevsky from a 21st curricula modelled upon them should be entertained? He is obviously right that the GB movement has been guilty of under-emphasizing the importance of the classical languages. But we can readily imagine how we might begin to correct for that error, for the very idea of posing Great Languages against Great Books makes little sense. Moreover, we’ll be forced to admit that the most serious exponents of the GB model, St. John’s College and Thomas Aquinas College, from day one went a good deal of way towards the correction Petkas is seeking, given the requirements in Greek and French, at St. John’s (4 years total), and in Latin (2 years total), at Thomas Aquinas.

Great Lives

More difficult to handle, however, and yet more interesting to think about, is his charge that “great lives” are being neglected, and the suggestion that this connects to the GB model’s neglect of the “ideal orator-writer,” and of an “education for statesmen.”

A problem for Petkas, as perusal of my key essay “The Five Wonderful Lives of the Ancient World” illustrates, is that while the statesman is undeniably the archetypal life most held up for emulation by classical schoolmasters of rhetoric, it is not the only one. There are also the lives of the hero, the philosopher, the poet, and the holy-man.

Insofar as a good deal of the admiration of the hero had to be rechanneled into that for the general and/or statesman, given the battlefield devaluing of any one individual’s raw fighting prowess in every post-archaic and especially in every post-gunpowder era, the hero poses no problem for Petkas’s line of argument. That is, as the heroes necessarily become more Plutarchan, or as I might add, more Odysseus-like, the similar yet distinct claims of the statesman’s way of life become obvious. And insofar as poetic excellence can be seen as primarily serving the cause of better language, and thus better rhetoric, it can seem there is no problem on that front either. But the lives of the philosopher and the holy-man cannot but remind us, and rather vividly, that the five great life-models can, and indeed must, come into fundamental conflict with one another. The philosopher Stilpo can look the tyrannical Demetrius in the face and in essence say, “You cannot take my wisdom from me, even if I see you’ve taken most of the freedom away from my dear city Megara.” And the philosopher Diogenes, who sometimes enjoyed sunbathing, can dare to ask Alexander the Great, a statesman/hero who according to Plutarch’s account was particularly haunted by the alternative of the philosophic life, “Would you please get out of the way of the sunlight?”

I say Petkas’s educational vision obscures the conflicts between the main archetypes of the Great Lives, whereas they remained vivid to a thinker like Plutarch, and also leap out to present-day Great Books scholars like myself.

Raphael’s frescoes of the great poets at Parnassus, and the great philosophers at Athens. In the Stanza della Segnatura of the Raphael rooms in the Vatican, where the third (unshown) fresco is “The Disputation of the Holy Sacraments,” featuring a number of Bible and church figures. I.e., this Renaissance humanist chose to here celebrate the exemplars of philosophic, poetic, and holy lives, and contrary to the spirit of Petkas, to omit those of the political and heroic lives.

In my essay on the great lives, I did admit the prominence of rhetoric in classical education, a fact which Petkas rests too much of his argument upon. But what I said is that “Rhetoric becomes so central to classical education, and shapes a good deal of historical writing as well, because it is the art that, at least potentially, most mixes statesmanship, poetry, and philosophy; later, its importance to preaching will preserve its importance in times with fewer opportunities for open political deliberation.”

But here is how Petkas highlights, in his 2023 “Paideia” essay, rhetoric’s dominance of curricula in classical era:

To a Classical Greek or a Republican Roman, it would be unthinkable to call any education “liberal” that did not inculcate toughness, ambition, and the will to order people around. Liberal education was for those who aspired to be successful and lead; in Latin, a liberalis is a maximally free individual—the opposite of a slave. In other words, the aim of this ancient training was to secure maximum sovereignty for yourself, your family, and your state. …You were more of a failed human if you lacked that awe inspiring spirit of freedom and mastery than if you lacked the ability to give a coherent definition of virtue or play a wind instrument.

For the ancients, the consummate political education was called paideia, a complete mental and physical training in cultural, intellectual, and personal maturity. No Classical Athenian, Theban, Corinthian, or Syracusan father would dream of having his son educated in the intellectual arts without also training him in the arts of war: gymnastics, wrestling, spears, swords, horsemanship, hoplite armor, etc. To neglect these would have meant envisioning a future for your son as some rich man’s secretary-slave or worse. The citizen was responsible for ensuring his own personal sovereignty as a contribution to the collective sovereignty of the polis.

What follows from this for Petkas is the idea that it would be wise for those promoting the liberal arts to rebrand them as “the sovereign arts,” because just as classical fathers will want wrestling alongside rhetoric for their sons, today’s parents will want robotics alongside rhetoric for their sons and daughters.

James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, forecasted in The Sovereign Individual that tech would empower individuals at the expense of large states and legacy institutions. …parents and students have good reason to want an early start not just on contemplating great ideas but also developing relevant skills to thrive in the twenty-first century.

…it might make sense to rebrand. Rather than liberal education, how about calling it the sovereign arts? The Ancient Greek idea of paideia for eleutheroi (education for the free), or the Roman artes liberales, have connotations closer to something we would sooner call “sovereignty” than “liberality” in English. They are certainly not about being open-minded or tolerant, although the confidence of mastery is a strong basis for such emotions. Rhetoric, poetry, history, and other sovereign arts were disciplines the ancients used to gain and consolidate positions of authority...

To speak of cultural education as a training in the classical arts of sovereignty clarifies the overarching goals for students. History is a discipline for the founders (or refounders) of tomorrow’s states. But future leaders in business and statecraft will also need a whole lot more. For example, they must know how to learn new and challenging technical subjects quickly... They will have to know how to talk to robots or else they will be outmaneuvered by people who can.

This is fresh thinking, and sensible. I have no objection per se to the founding of schools or programs which combine GB education with the learning of these kinds of skills. Successful models of this are out there, after all, and as for the robotics suggestion, the University of Austin has outright adopted it. Yes, it is the case that leaders of the GB movement like Adler set down various arguments against the incorporation of vocational education into liberal education, and that these deserve to be taken quite seriously.⁷ For one thing, who can really know if a specific technical training, such as robotics, will prove all that “sovereign” an art in the long run? But these days I detect among many GB advocates a good deal of openness to various experimental approaches to branding and organizing education, and I am ready to encourage them to try them out.

That said, look at the final argument Petkas makes for rhetoric as a sovereign art:

…if the classical (Christian) education movement is going to grow to its potential, its promoters need to articulate how the rich and rigorous cultural education they offer can fit with other skills that are useful for twenty-first century students. In ancient Athens, for every idealist studying philosophy for virtuous reasons, fifty took seriously the sophist’s claims that he could help them make more money, win more offices, and beat their enemies in court. In antiquity, the sophists won that debate—most philosophers in the Roman empire either had to be independently wealthy or make their money teaching rhetoric, because people knew it worked and was worth the money. And it still is. If classical education understood in this broad way still works, it’s worth marketing in ways likely to win more buyers.

This should cause concern. The very Plutarchan (and Adlerian, Thomistic, Ciceronian, and Aristotelian) linkage of philosophy and virtue-education has been reduced to the sort of thing that only weirdo 1-out-of-50 “idealists” are attracted to. The promotion of philosophic education seen in Aristophanes’ Clouds, meant to be a comic warning to Socratics, a warning Plato’s Republic evinces many signs of taking very seriously,⁸ is here accepted as just the Way Things Are. Petkas seems to say that ancient examples teach us that if you’re going to run any school of liberal arts which can survive, and especially in the coming ages of institution-abandonment, you’re going to have to center it on rhetoric, and you’re going to have to promote it in the spirit of, well, Gorgias. It’s as if for Petkas, Plato’s dialogue of that name, and book VI of the Republic, do not exist. As if the Clouds is a how-to guide!

General Objections, and a Plea for Clarification

But beyond the danger that ‘philosophy & rhetoric’ pursued in a sophistic spirt poses to the common good, and to philosophy itself, notice that rhetoric’s big sales appeal diminishes whenever public deliberation becomes detached from, and discouraged by, actual power. Consider the situation of pre-conversion Augustine and his friends described in Confessions, VI, chapters 6, 10, and 14: their place-seeking in a courtly form of rhetoric-centered and emperor-flattering “politics” is wearing down their souls, and their eyes increasingly turn with longing towards the lives of the philosophers and monks. I am not saying that we have again entered such times where political life, or what’s left of it, becomes radically unattractive, but I am stressing that there are other kinds of excellences than the political kind. Moreover—notice what Callicles has become forced to realize by the end of the Gorgias—-political excellence can never be a primarily self-sufficient sort of excellence. I.e., you can master the most sovereign of arts but get nearly no share of community sovereignty from it, and you can even find yourself forced to choose between enslaving yourself to the community’s vices and injustices, or becoming a “loser.” And I am suggesting that a St. John’s graduate will be better prepared to understand this, and readier to make shifts of life-plans in accordance with the fortune of free politics, than an imagined “Petkas-school” graduate.

Petkas claims the classical, Renaissance, and founding-era educators were on the same basic page, pitting all of them against the GB approach. But weren’t the best classics-emphasizing educators of the Renaissance quite aware of the ways-of-life conflicts I have just highlighted, having read their Plato and Augustine? And weren’t they particularly aware that they were seeking out classical texts as way to counter-balance, and in some cases to outright damn, the otherworldly and metaphysical emphases of medieval Christendom? Doesn’t that have to mean that their educational approach was distinct at bottom from that of the typical schools of the classical eras? More fundamentally, didn’t men like Cicero know that there was a potential divide between the study of rhetoric and the study of philosophy, even if he sought to build bridges between them? So contrary to what Petkas implies, there have been differing aims in past educational practices labelled “classicist,” which suggests the innovations of the 20th-century GB approach ought not to be so readily condemned.

Again, I think Petkas’s pushing us to envision a liberal education less centered upon philosophic discussion may be fruitful. I do want greater focus upon great lives, and upon emulation-encouraging virtue education than one finds in typical GB programs, and I particularly agree that the focus on the philosophic becomes harmful when conducted in the spirit of “critical thinking.” Patrick Deneen made some excellent points on this score back in the day, which I won’t repeat here, other than to say that the lining-up of the supposed demands of what is needed for critical thinking, and the stale dogmas of pluralism, is quite suspicious.

And speaking of Deneen, I also have to ask this: where is the place for a democratic hope in “great citizenries” in Petkas’s vision? Isn’t his vision too “aristo” and not enough “populist?” Is there a place in it for something like Wilson Carey McWilliams’s celebration of the Aristotelian (and Tocquevillean) “ruling and being ruled in turn” in his key essay “Democracy and the Citizen?” A place for something like Ralph Ellison’s celebration of lower- and middle- class connoisseurship of fine arts in his key essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station?” A place for a lefty like Earl Shorris celebrating what little GB programs did for the personal development and organizing capacities of both convicts and McDonald’s workers? A place for the feminist George Eliot providing in her Middlemarch the character of (Plutarch-loving) Mary Garth as a model of middle-class and motherly excellence?

I don’t see it. I don’t even know if there is a place for the American Political Tradition more constitutionally conceived—e.g., for Publius and Lincoln to be taught alongside Cicero and Xenophon.

And is there a place for Christian models?

Little is clear here since Petkas never puts forward, or feels he is unable to within the confines of the two 1,000 word pieces mentioned, his curricular alternative. Would he recommend something close to the Yale program of the mid-19th-century? Would he exclude Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Strauss…etc.? We can’t know—we need another and longer essay, or a podcast lecture, from him, which would outline his recommended program. (One task those dilletantes who run the GB-only programs undertake year after year is to make the hard decisions— e.g., “Do we chuck the Jeremiah, Montaigne, and Tolstoy readings to make more room for the study of the Greek particles?”—which Petkas remains silent about,)

I would love to see a group of scholars try such a thing as a Petkas-led version of the old Yale curriculum. For one thing, I would expect more long-term benefits from such a clear model, than from the University of Austin’s still pretty-unclear one, which is apparently centered on the values of free-speech and dissident-celebrity. But I remain far from recommending the (admittedly yet-to-be-spelled-out) Petkas model as a general one, or as one preferrable to the GB approach.

Why Political Toughness in Our Day Requires Philosophy

I have given a hint or two why philosophic discussion ought to still be given priority in good curricula, but I will conclude with one particular reason, a strange fact about the politics of the modern democratic ages, which particularly hit me when reading Daniel Mahoney’s fine little book Statesman as Thinker: Portaits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation. This is the contemporary work perhaps closest to the Plutarchan model, as it provides quick portraits of six modern statesmen particularly esteemed by conservatives: Burke, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Churchill, De Gaulle, and Havel.

The peculiar fact it highlights is that while Plutarch showed us that successful statesmen of the classical republican era usually had to master generalship, Mahoney illustrated, and without intending to, that the most beneficial statesmen of our eras have had to philosophically grasp the danger posed to democracies by ideology. I ended my review with this:

Our comparison of his book to Plutarch’s might even suggest that as much as the study of war was important to classical leaders--to the degree that Plutarch’s Lives just about merited the title The Statesman as General--, so is the study of philosophic political thinking to modern ones.

Dare we envision a liberal or sovereign-arts education of our day that does not convey to the undergraduate at least some of the anti-totalitarianism teachings in, say, Burke, Tocqueville, Solzhenitsyn, Strauss, Arendt, and Milosz? And doesn’t the grasping of such teachings require education in philosophy? (And in the poetic arts?)

Looking back at the end of 2024, we can see that, alas, nearly the entire classicist fraternity, including big names like Pelling, Beard, and Cartledge that classics-scholars proudly cite in their works, refused to stand against Woke demagoguery when it reared its head at Petkas’s alma mater of Princeton in the form of disgusting attacks on the free speech of classics professor Joshua Katz. It mattered zilch that the academic couple of Harriet and Michael Flower, who are respectively expert in a certain period of Roman history, and in Xenophon, and who thus knew the stories of the demagogic tribunes of Marius’s era and of the imprudent hyper-democratic revolt against Xenophon’s leadership in the latter stages of the Anabasis, were there in the Princeton classics department. They caved to and enabled totalitarian impulses which emerged in their own institution, and nothing in their rigorous classics-training imparted to them a willingness to stand against the mob. And as far as I am aware, none of Katz’s classicist colleagues at other institutions raised serious questions about what Princeton was doing to him.

Lest Petkas think I am unfairly linking him with the sins of his old school, or have some special grudge against classicists, we can also see that, alas, both campuses of St. John’s College joined in academia’s nearly-universal apostasy from basic principles of natural right in their insistence upon vaccine mandates.

So we desperately need, against our era’s subtle patterns of totalitarian equality-purism, scientistic-managerialism, and ideological policing, men and women who are capable of providing a “coherent definition of virtue,” and well enough so to understand the importance of fighting for virtue’s principles. No, Petkas, that fighting is not going to be much connected to skill in wrestling. A literary politics which upholds classical-era aesthetics of manly fighting skill, ancient sovereign arts, and Homeric and Attic Greek, but which cannot cultivate the spiritual and intellectual toughness needed to stand against the “tyrants next door,” as Naomi Wolf describes them in her important Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age, is worse than useless. For these despotism-enablers are the ones who come alongside you in your institution—and perhaps also in your “conservative” institution or start-up—and kindly ask you to play your oh-so-little part in their quiet imposition of suppression and dictate.

I can recommend no magic educational key to unlock that spiritual and intellectual toughness, the virtue that makes one more like the Stilpo, and less like the Stratocles, we meet in Plutarch’s life of Demetrius, but I do think some study of 19th and 20th century philosophers, historians, political theorists, and philosophic “poets” (such as Dostoevsky, or the film-maker Florian von Donnersmarck) who made themselves scholars of democratic despotism and totalitarianism, is necessary to this. And I think more serious study of the Bible is also.

That is, one problem with a Petkas-styled classics-centered curricula is it that it would provide too few pathways into the anti-totalitarian thinking our societies so need. Another is that it would not adequately inform the student of the centrality of Biblical religion to the full story of the West, nor encourage imitation of the Bible’s heroic witnesses.

The GB approach remains less exposed to these weaknesses, though again, I must regretfully admit that we did not see the faculty of the two St. John’s Colleges decisively stand against the wave of Covid-tyranny.

Conclusion:

I see no reason we might not have classical languages and Great Lives emulation as key aspects of an approach still centered on the Great Books. I don’t think Petkas clarifies the core issues, or realistically paves the way to a better curriculum, when he opposes these against the GB approach.

Obviously, the provocation of his piece got me thinking, and in my judgment prods us to lean in the right direction, so he can claim success on that score. But as a whole, it is a failure: silent about the nitty-gritty of curricular decisions, and apt to repel those who most need to learn from Petkas. It is too shaped by certain rhetorical tropes of the alternative right which are becoming too rote, short-hand, and indiscriminately applied. They are getting in the way of the thinking they ought to serve, and getting us too blasé about dialogic justice and moderation.

I sincerely ask him to try again.

1. I first saw this helpful term in Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change. For what it might mean in education, see this from Leo Strauss: “Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but "specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart." Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness. “What Is Liberal Education?” in Liberalism, Ancient & Modern, 5. A paragraph or so before, Strauss had said of the idea of “democracy as originally meant,” that it would necessarily be “…a regime in which all or most adults are virtuous and wise, or the society in which all or most adults have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy.”

2. Conservatives and Higher Ed, 1970s-to-2020: they grumbled here and there, voiced support for small reforms, but seldom lifted a finger to defend those of us conservatives, orthodox Biblical-religionists, and GB-ers trying to make a go within the system. They seemed resigned to the eternal continuance of it, and its structural discrimination against our kinds. Witness their no-strings-attached enthusiasm for college sports programs, their no-strings-attached support for student loans and state-funding of universities, and especially, their continuing to bow before and personally invest in the prestige claims of the top institutions—this is the sadly resigned stance that sent Ross Douthat to Harvard, J.D. Vance to Yale. They kept sending their money and children to institutions which, as they easily could have learned, were more and more becoming their outright enemies.

3. By “Futurist,” I refer to the Italy-based arts-focused but proto-fascist movement of the early 1900s.

4. See this recent critique of Thomas Aquinas College, from a traditionalist and Thomistic Catholic who wants a college to do actual instruction in Thomism, as opposed to what TAC presently offers, a GB approach open to considering all schools and ideas, though with the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Aquinas at the center of its program.

5. Those interested to see how a Spinozian/Whitmanian pantheist and an “old school liberal” would defend GB education against the usual progressivist/research-ideal slop will enjoy his book, as well as his monumental Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.

6. Hutchins, “The Great Conversation,” Adler, “Tradition and Progress in Education,” Reforming, 66.

7. Start with what might be Adler’s very best essay in Reforming, “Labor, Leisure, and Education,” which echoes some points made by Josef Pieper.

8. Mary Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community.