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...