Donald Kagan

As there is about everything.

Uh, most of what I have come to admire about Pericles was due in part to reading Don Kagan's, the great Don Kagan, historian at Yale, his book, his biography of Pericles.

Mm-hmm.

Pericles of Athens.

that's really quite dangerous, actually, for political community.

The podcast that just got released was my conversation with Hillsdale's Paul Ray about eminent Yale University classics professor Donald Kagan, who made it his life's mission to defend the integrity of liberal education, specifically what he described, the education and formation of the complete man and the complete woman against soulless education in technique.

I want to ask you this before we move on to the next essay of Rational Conduct.

Has the fight for liberal education, has the fight to mold our young people into the complete man and complete woman, are we on our last dying breaths or is there hope? What's your sense about that?

Indeed, he is.

Americans like, well, he's from, born in Lithuania, but Donald Kagan will always make that case also.

Yeah.

Of course, he wrote that great four-volume study of the Peloponnesian War.

What are they really up to? What do they really want? What do these moves mean? So the skills that he developed himself, but that he passed on to his students, were skills in trying to see behind the headlines, so to speak.

Um, you know, if, if, if, if back in the days when we had newspapers, uh, you know, if, if you were to read the New York times, Don Kagan would say, who wrote the piece? What's the agenda of the person who wrote the piece? Does it come out in the piece? Um, the person who's giving the interview, uh, The people who are providing information to the reporter, what's their agenda? Right.

So in other words, in some sense, Don Kagan taught you how to read a newspaper, read between the lines.

And the other thing I'd say about him, He was born before World War II.

He came of age, so to speak, during World War II.

They didn't know the full details until later, but they had a pretty good idea.

So he followed it very closely.

And a lot of what made the American University when I was a student, I started at Cornell in 1967, graduated from Yale in 1971, went to Oxford from 71 to 74 on a Rhodes Scholarship, came back to Yale, did a PhD with Don Kagan from 74 to 77.