Romanticism and Civilization examines romantic alternatives to modern life in Rousseau's foundational novel Julie. It argues that Julie is a response to the ills of modern civilization, and that Rousseau saw that the Enlightenment's combination of science and of democracy degraded human life by making it bourgeois. The bourgeois is man uprooted by science and attached to nothing but himself. He lives a commercial life and his materialism and calculations penetrate all aspects of his existence. He is neither citizen, nor family man, nor lover in any serious sense: his life is meaningless. Rousseau's romanticism in Julie is an attempt to find connectedness through the sentiments of private life and wholeness through love, marriage, and family.

It had been thought that theCleitophon was a spurious dialogue. Its brevity and the fact that Socrates does not respond to accusations from Cleitophon suggested to scholars that it was only a fragment. However, in the last fifteen years, the complete and authentic dialogue was rediscovered. Upon its discovery, scholars have almost universally agreed that the Cleitophon is the introduction to Plato'sRepublic. In Plato's Cleitophon: On Socrates and the Modern Mind editor, translator, and author, Mark Kremer, has mined some of the best scholarship on the relationship of Plato's Cleitophon and its relationship to modern thought. It is the contention of the editor that the Cleitophon, is an ancient example of the psychic, social, cultural, and moral strain that is put upon the citizens of a republic when their society begins to erode on all fronts. This work has the potential to afford readers an ancient perspective on ourselves by showing us how we appear in Plato's mind. It should be read by anyone who has ever read Plato'sRepublic; as well as anyone who is concerned about the social, psychic, cultural, and moral effects of postmodernity and globalization.

Plato and Xenophon: Apologies compares two key dialogues on the death of Socrates. Socrates was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth of ancient Athens and was tried, convicted, imprisoned, and executed. Both Plato and Xenophon make clear that the charges were not brought forward in the spirit of true piety, and that Socrates was a man of real virtue and beneficence. To this day, his trial and execution remain a mark upon the democracy that put him to death.

These dialogues underscore the limitations of democratic relativism and emphasize the nature of philosophy or the free mind. Plato's Apology of Socrates is both poetry and an act of reformation, justifying the life of philosophy, challenging the authority of the pagan gods and heroes, and introducing Socrates as a heroic and even divine figure. In contrast, Xenophon's Socrates is not dialectical and otherworldly, but makes a different appeal for philosophy. From Xenophon emerges the heroic tradition of Plutarch with its reflections on the virtues and vices of great historical men.

Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato and Xenophon's immediate audience.