Abstract

Thomas Fleming is an erudite political philosopher with a flair for language. Almost every page of his book on human nature includes colorful distillations of legal, ethical, and biological concepts drawn from a lifetime of study. Fleming also pokes fun at pompous naïfs: for example, when he observes that historians "like Philipe Aries and Lawrence Stone are forever discovering that some aspect of family life--conjugal intimacy or affection for children--was invented during the sixteenth or seventeenth century." From such playful phrases and from learned references an argument takes shape in favor of the existence of a normative social morality based on the constancy of human nature. An enthusiastic classicist, an avid reader of the social and natural sciences, and a devout Lutheran, Fleming believes that Athens and Jerusalem have much in common, starting with a view of the social good. He looks for overlaps between the social practices of the Western and non-Western worlds and between classical and biblical morality.