Robert Faulkner's subject is a certain kind of politician: the one with what ancient Greeks called megalopsuchia, greatness of soul (or the Latinate “magnanimity”). In politics, this greatness takes the form of “honorable” or “noble ambition.” Faulkner analyzes the treatment of this greatness and ambition by classical philosophers and historians (Thucidides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle) while attacking its neglect by contemporary theorists who ignore or bury the concept (John Rawls, instigated by Kant); get it wrong (Douglass Adair, whose focus on the fame motive shifts attention from noble duties to fickle reputations); or relativize it, whether benignly (Hannah Arendt) or not (Nietzsche). Faulkner believes that free, republican regimes must study the great souled, not just to know our likely enemies but also to discern our likely saviors and friends and ensure that they stay such.

Faulkner's accounts of the ancient authors defy summary, like most properly close readings, but still merit praise. His treatment of megalopsuchia in Aristotle's Ethics will instruct even those who think they have read the famous passages with care; his care is greater. The reasons why the great are reluctant to acknowledge debts to others (p. 42) are particularly striking: Briefly put, the desire for independence may seem closer to ingratitude than it is. The chapter on the Education of Cyrus, Xenophon's masterpiece, vindicates Faulkner's thesis that this is a more realistic work on political success than Machiavelli's Prince—precisely because Xenophon treats apprehensions of justice, evil, and tragedy as insights into reality, rather than distractions from it (p. 130). Faulkner's treatments of the two Platonic Alcibiades dialogues (possibly, some would say probably, not written by Plato himself—as Faulkner acknowledges but rightly puts to one side as beside the substantive point) are perhaps a bit less searching, but they still will play their intended role as apt reminders to those whose ambition for power is not matched by knowledge of how to use it well.

The critical chapters are somewhat less successful. Criticizing Rawls for not respecting the qualities of extraordinary politicians is certainly justified, but a bit too easy. Rawls's defenders would by and large cheerfully grant that his “ideal theory” abstracts from the preconditions of real politics, including its reliance on unpredictable qualities of character: So much the worse, in their view, for “nonideal” politics. A respectful critique of Adair for slighting the difference between fame and duty would have profited from a closer treatment of the literature since antiquity—at once deep and ironic—on how the search for fame can distract from virtue. In particular, a book that argues, in effect, that the love of praise should take second place to that of duty or praiseworthiness would have done well to consider Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Faulkner's reading of Arendt, again respectful, is on the mark in questioning her attempt to separate greatness from all character qualities, but errs in portraying her as favoring “political beginning as such” (p. 213); for, as readers of Arendt will know, the need to institutionalize and constitutionalize revolutionary innovations is the central theme of her On Revolution.

The book displays, to an unusual degree, the cardinal Straussian virtue: a determination to learn, through close reading, from thinkers who tell us unaccustomed things. Absent this virtue, political theorists can resort only to congratulating one another for asserting shared prejudices with ever-greater zeal. On the other hand, the common flaws and idiosyncratic assumptions of that school are also evident. This book simply disregards the non-Straussian secondary literature, which on the subject of megalopsuchia is hardly lacking. Its attitude towards democracy is only moderately favorable; while Faulkner certainly prefers “rather democratic” republics over dictatorships (p. 199; cf. 178), what counts as a laudably moderate democracy apparently includes the Athenian regime of the Five Thousand, a broad-based oligarchy with a middle-class property qualification for political rights (p. 76). His attack on “the doctrine of equal dignity”—not just equal political dignity but equal moral dignity (p. 23; cf. 15, 21, 66, 202, 205)—seems excessive and unnecessary, partly because he skates over (pp. 203–4) the ubiquitous distinction between the equal respect that modern democracy assumes and equal esteem, a doctrine preached by few and practiced by none.

The author's praise for the “gentleman-statesman” and his apparent lack of disapproval toward some famous or infamous glosses on what that figure looks like (for Aristotle, the magnanimous man, being serious, must have a “deep voice” [p. 39]), while de rigeur in some circles, will raise legitimate doubts in others. In general, whether women might be great is left unclear; the only ones mentioned are Margaret Thatcher (as an aside, p. 5) and Panthea, a Xenophon character who displays greatness only by choosing a great man to love (pp. 153–57). That grand politics has in most times and places been a man's game is obvious, but Faulkner might have paused a bit longer to note the questions of justice that this raises, as well as whether the presence of women might affect the analysis of magnanimity. (If the answer is “not at all,” that too would be an interesting claim, and certainly a shock to Xenophon and Aristotle.) In short, while Faulkner's aristocratic and traditionalist assumptions are mild by the standard of his Straussian compatriots—he allots genuine if “lesser” respect to nongreat figures like union leaders, businessmen, and civil servants (p. 207), and seeks to mix the “good and true” with the “strong and great” (p. 242)—they will unfortunately lead many outside that school to neglect a larger argument that would in many respects instruct them.

This book not merely advocates greatness but seeks to tame it—through a rehabilitation of the “mirrors to princes,” in which philosophers aimed at flattering the great while redirecting the modes and objects of their ambitions. Faulkner suggests that it takes a great philosopher to both counsel and correct a great politician, and that the philosopher, in turn, shows his or her own insight by taking as raw material not common opinion but the opinion of the great (pp. 26, 31, 36, 38, 40, and especially 55: “greatness of soul is to defer somewhat to greatness of mind”). The mirror aims at turning the great away from mere ambition toward something better: toward respect for justice, toward legislation and founding rather than conquest (pp. 52, 91), or, not surprisingly, toward philosophy and away from politics altogether: “the true crown is within” (p. 35; cf. 52, 173–74).

Faulkner's goal of diverting tyrants is admirable, his treatment, subtle. (That moralizing at the ambitious may only drive them in the direction of crusades [pp. 108 ff] is a fine and original point.) But the whole enterprise of talking cures for tyrants is oddly unmodern. Recent political theory has by no means neglected greatness. It has merely swapped methods of addressing it, trading the philosophical mirrors that aspire to “limitations within the soul” (p. 186) for more reliable, that is, external, remedies: constitutions, institutional checks on arbitrary power backed up by popular accountability, and an educated public opinion. Faulkner claims that the “dangers to free politics that grand ambition often poses” were “provided against by a Plato or Aristotle” (p. 199). But Plato and Aristotle provided nothing of the sort; they merely argued against the dangers. To provide against them would have required institutionalizing mechanisms to bind the great from outside their own souls. But that is precisely what this book refuses to countenance. The great are to be given wise trainers but no reins.

In treating Machiavelli, Bacon, and occasionally Hobbes as the exemplars of “enlightenment” (or, less problematically, “modern”) philosophy (pp. 9, 10, 18, 130, 178, 182, 221), Faulkner comes to judge mostly negatively the modern aspiration to tame politics through scientific knowledge, rather than qualities of soul. But this early modern trio lacked knowledge of modern constitutional and representative regimes, let alone mass-democratic ones. To take them as the paradigm moderns is to attack the aspiration to political knowledge without examining the actual knowledge to which it led. Generations of political theorists who have reflected on both souls and carefully gathered political experience—Hume, Adams, Publius, Tocqueville, Mill, and Weber, and their contemporary heirs—have discovered and propagated institutions unknowable to the Greeks. These include independent legislatures and judiciaries, the free press, uniform systems of private property and public provision, professional armies and police forces, and not least, the public prison, with impartial administration and limited terms. By ignoring how such institutions check and channel greatness, Faulkner ends up treating modern greatness like an absurdist play: all character, no scenery.

Faulkner approvingly cites Plutarch: “[T]he Athenian democracy could not live with Alicibiades … and it could not live without him” (p. 59). True. But that was Athens. A modern constitutional democracy, by design, can do both.