Lorraine Smith Pangle

Reclaiming the Core: Liberal Education in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract Colleges and faculties of liberal arts are facing potentially devastating declines in enrollments, driven in part by their own loss of clear purpose. To stem the tide and regain their rightful place at the center of the university, liberal arts faculties need to rethink the meaning of liberal education. This article argues that education in the liberal arts should be directed above all to cultivating practical wisdom, for which a deep inquiry into the central questions of political science is especially valuable. It discusses the relation of liberal education to civic education, the proper tasks of civic education at the university level, the benefits of dialectical inquiry, and the means by which students’ thoughtless relativism can be replaced with habit of moral reasoning suitable to a modern cosmopolitan society.

Xenophon on the Psychology of Supreme Political Ambition

This study illuminates Xenophons teaching about the underlying psychological motives of the most fully developed political ambition. An analysis of what the Cyropaedia portrays as the interplay among Cyruss spiritedness, justice, benevolence, piety, and cultivation of an aura of divinity leads to an unveiling of supreme ambitions deepest root: not the desire for power as such, nor the love of justice, but the desire to be a quasi-divine benefactor. The article traces the development of this ambition from its earliest manifestations in the young Cyruss puppylike spiritedness, through his hope-filled rise to power, to his grim mature rein and his death, showing how a shadowy concern for immortality drives him in ways he is reluctant to see or acknowledge.