Douglas Woodruff's witty reimagining of Plato turns the Republic into a comic diagnosis of modern America. Socrates, Lysis, Phaelon, and Agathon debate an American who tried to buy the Parthenon, then launch into a satirical tour of the nation's manners, politics, and myths. From Xantippe's surprising success lecturing women's clubs to the strange power of American women and the overworked, restless men around them, the dialogue skewers gender roles, ambition, and social vanity. As the conversation widens, America emerges as a country devoted to Progress, quantity, and the automobile, a civilization so driven by motion and expansion that even home and human life seem destined to become car-bound. Socrates traces this spirit to the nation's size, wealth, immigrant energy, and the Civil War's strengthening of central power, arguing that manufacturers, preachers, and businessmen shape opinion through propaganda, slogans, and the craving for majority approval. He also probes immigration, citizenship, and the uneasy balance between individuality and belonging. When Socrates brings these ideas to Hootsville, his praise of Greek reason, justice, and fate meets comic outrage, exposing a society that prizes commerce over contemplation and practicality over wisdom. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Woodruff, Douglas

Douglas Woodruff was an English journalist, editor, and Catholic intellectual whose career unfolded across the first half of the twentieth century, a period marked by war, political upheaval, and intense debate about the role of ideas in public life. Best known for his sharp-minded essays, criticism, and editorial work, he brought a rare combination of literary elegance, historical awareness, and moral seriousness to everything he wrote. His most enduring achievement was his ability to connect classical thought with modern political and cultural questions, writing with clarity about democracy, tradition, education, religion, and the responsibilities of citizenship. Much of his work reflects a deep concern with the health of public discourse and the dangers of intellectual complacency, making him feel strikingly contemporary in an age still wrestling with polarization, civic distrust, and the tension between principle and expediency. Woodruff’s legacy lies in his disciplined, humane intelligence and in his insistence that public life is impoverished when it loses contact with moral and philosophical depth. Readers today will find him especially rewarding if they enjoy reflective political writing, Catholic thought, or essays that bridge the classical world and modern concerns with wit, rigor, and grace.