The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

that the social world around us is not just the result of wrongheaded thinking or systematic injustice, as his father and Jeremy Bentham believed. It reflects a complex organic historical development and consists of institutions that give meaning and purpose to the lives of ordinary people, however pointless they may seem to the ivory tower philosopher. Social reality has a hidden purpose, Coleridge taught—a purpose that, like Nature herself, we tamper with at our peril.31 Then Coleridge and Macaulay both showed him that the first task of an intellectual is not to trash and overturn existing institutions of his society, as both Bentham and Marx tried to do. It is to understand first of all how and why they came about. By doing so, we can discover certain basic principles of human nature to serve as the basis of thoughtful reform instead of headlong revolution.32