Ruling Passion: The Erotics of Statecraft in Platonic Political Philosophy.(Review) (book review)

By Waller R. Newell. Lanham/Boulder, New York/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 205p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This extremely interesting book contains a subtle and finely detailed reflection on one of the main problems in Plato: the relation between eros and thumos (spiritedness). The text is dense but not obscure. On the contrary, it makes a multiplicity of observations that are at once original and yet so plausible that one is tempted to ask at countless points in the argument: "How could it have been otherwise"? At the same time, Newell's treatment of the ...

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