2024 WINNER
Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, by James Hankins
A dazzlingly ambitious reappraisal of Renaissance political thought by one of our generation’s foremost intellectual historians, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker.
James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming laws or institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than constitutions, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the humanities.
$27.95
2024 Shortlist
Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, by R. V. Young
Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour, by Scott Samuelson
Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, by Harvey Mansfield
The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, by Jason M. Baxter
Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, by James Hankins
2023 WINNER
From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith, by Louis Markos
In ways that might surprise us, Christians throughout the history of the church and even today have inherited aspects of the ancient Greek philosophy of Plato, who was both Socrates’s student and Aristotle’s teacher.
To help us understand the influence of Platonic thought on the Christian faith, Louis Markos offers careful readings of some of Plato’s best-known texts and then traces the ways that his work shaped the faith of some of Christianity’s most beloved theologians, including Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Dante, and C. S. Lewis.