The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood

In The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood Chris Altieri contends that the forma mentis of the founders of the political society often viewed--by its members and by those external to it--as the non plus ultra of modernity i.e. the United States of America is really steeped in the more ancient tradition of thinking that began in Athens and continued through the Christian centuries. Engaging the twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Cavell--in critical conversation with the founding fathers--the author shows that a broad conversation regarding the constitution of society is constitutively present in the public discourse of the people that began to recognize itself during the imperial crisis of the late eighteenth-century British America; that the participants in that conversation have at least an inchoate awareness of society as at once cosmic and anthropological; and that that political society is therefore an apt field of study in and for the general science of order. The Soul of a Nation is a masterful enquiry into what essentially America is. Altieri gives us good reason to believe that the American project now in a precarious state is well worth preserving and furthering for it corresponds in important ways to mans natural aspirations. --Kevin Flannery Professor of Philosophy The Pontifical Gregorian University Altieri gives us something rare in theological-political thought: sustained theoretical reflection on the idea of America. What orders and disorders that idea? To hold such a book in your hands and then to read it is to participate in fundamental questions about the soul of a nation. It is a sign of its great value that it inspired me to contemplate the representation of an order that also precedes and transcends it. --C. C. Pecknold Associate Professor of Theology The Catholic University of America Washington DC; Associate Editor Nova et Vetera: English Edition; Consulting Editor Communio: International Catholic Review Christopher R. Altieri is a philosopher living in Rome Italy with his wife Ester and two children. To keep the lights on he works as a journalist and has taught comparative religion at the crossroads of political theology and cultural anthropology in the IES Abroad Rome program. He defended his PhD dissertation The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood in 2010 at the Pontifical Gregorian University.