"Pierre Manent: here in his conversation are the charm and the wisdom of a man who says very simply that he wants to understand what is." - Harvey Mansfield is Professor of Government at Harvard University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Pierre Manent is probably most deeply original, broadly erudite, and genuinely politically engaged thinker alive today. Not only that, he is the European today who walks most closely in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville in at least this way: He actually has experienced and described the singular greatness of America. He reminds us that anyone who's anyone wants to study and teach in America, because in our country at its best is the place where people "invest their pride and glory in the universities," as "a matter of honor, rather than profit" Manent tells us that it's "Christian-democratic-capitalist America" that "sums up" the strong and confident modern soul that remains "distinctive of the West" in our country, but "was distinctive of the West in Europe." This book is the indispensable introduction to Manent's often difficult and elusive other books. Its form opens us to the whole life of a strange and wonderful man, his development as teacher, thinker, Christian, and citizen of the nation of France. And each of the pithy and user-friendly yet precisely detailed responses to a wide variety of personal questions both perennial and timely is meant to draw in or "turn around" attentive seekers.

Every great thinker should be graced with a book like this, where the dialogue is directed (unlike, say, the dialogues we have about Socrates) by the man himself. - Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Political Science at Berry College, executive editor of Perspectives on Political Science, and author or editor of 18 books, including Allergic to Crazy (St. Augustine's Press). Book jacket.