A Noble Republican, Thinking to Himself

All government is in our liberal humanisitic age is a promise.

It always has been and always will be.

Democracy is the ideal of the ideal, the promise that can never come true promising to come true in the most difficult of circumstances.

Don't any of our citizens recognize this? Don't any of them have an education in the classics?

The ancient Greeks believed politics to be the most important sphere of life, and a statesman to be the very highest human embodiment of their culture.

The state, as conceived by Socrates as reported by Plato and as presented in Werner Jaeger's Paideia, v. 2, 'The Divine Center', chapter 6, The Educator as Statesman, is a spiritual being with spiritual aspirations run by statesmen who have struggled with their souls to the degree that they have freed themselves from ignorance and found their way to the true welfare of the whole.

Jaeger calls this a "strange new attitude to politics" (p.158), that right conduct is based on knowledge of the highest values, and that to understand them was "the work of the highest type of cognition possible for human intellect."

Therefore, a statesmen in the classic Greek philosophical conception of the term, being the ideal man, has not yet existed.