by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

History With a Moral

Spoiler alert: Arthur Herman is an Ayn Rand-boosting libertarian who sees all of history tending toward the triumph of the American-style free market, which, he reports, won World War II in spite of FDR-ordered big government.

The Rand connection emerges in the last fifty pages of The Cave and the Light, Herman’s account of the long-running conflict between the ideas of Plato and those of Aristotle.

“Popular history” is what history of this kind is called, but the term isn’t right: the work is too sophisticated to be characterized by its relationship to a large audience it probably will not find.  “Explanatory history” is too general.  “History of ideas” is closer, but misses the worldliness of the book – which is as much about the consequences of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas as the ideas themselves.  “Big-picture history” catches the author’s ambitions; “high-concept history” captures the feel of the book, in which a tremendous body of material is clustered around the high concept that Western intellectual and cultural life can be characterized as a struggle between idealism and empiricism, between the a priori approach and the a posteriori.

What this book really is, I think, is “history with a moral”: and that is why it comes as such as a surprise that the moral – the one about the free market, stated at the end – is as simple as an election-year position paper put out by the American Enterprise Institute, where Herman is a scholar.

But there is plenty to learn along the way.  Take the chapter on Aristotle’s greatest exponent.  He was a nobleman, the son of a count.  He was of German, not Italian, origin.  He was a Benedictine before he was a Dominican.  He was offered the abbacy of Monte Cassino outside Rome, but turned it down.  He was named by the pope to head up a council exploring Catholic-Orthodox reunion.  He was the author of “a seminal treatise on the nature of evil and another on building aqueducts and military siege operations.”  He was Tommaso d'Aquino, a k a St. Thomas Aquinas – a philosopher I thought I knew something about, but who appears as new in Herman’s vivid, incisive portrait.

Philosophy of this kind is said to be orphaned in the academy right now, and yet there are enough strong trade books dealing with this material – James Miller’s Examined Lives and Carlin Romano’s America the Philosophical come to mind – for the onetime philosophy major to take a refresher course every year or two.

The painting of Aquinas is on display at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington.