Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

“The most important thing,” he says to Crito in his prison cell shortly before execution, “is not life, but the good life.”

“Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.”

This is the basic task of a liberal education—not to deliver truths, but to cultivate the life-altering disposition to look inward even as one looks outward.

Thomas Hobbes put it this way: “So, in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”

Augustine opened a question for me that, once I started asking it, has proved to be extraordinarily fertile: To what extent am I—and others—motivated by an urge to dominate, to impose our will, to subjugate others?

Suddenly, he was filled with holy love and sobering shame. Angry with himself, he turned his eyes on his friend and said to him: “Tell me, I beg you, what do we hope to achieve with our labors? What is our aim in life? What is the motive of our service to the state?”19 On the margin of my book in 1992, I wrote next to this passage: “The Questions.”

instead of asking how to make a living, liberal education asks what living is for.