Meet the Spartans.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Gunther

Athens and Sparta were not only the great powers of classical Greece, but also exponents of sharply diverging visions of what a fulfilled human life might be. Sparta idealized self-effacement and engaged in constant training and readiness to defend itself. Athens, by contrast, prided itself on cherishing the pleasures of private life without succumbing to a self-indulgent disregard of its civic and military duties. At least this was the flattering description offered by Pericles after the first years of the great war with Sparta and its allies in 430 BC.

Athens may have been the first democracy, with architecture and drama second to none, but until the nineteenth century Athenian politics enjoyed a dismal reputation. Its democratic assemblies provided a cautionary tale of turbulence and disorder, proof that an ignorant mob was incapable of self-government. Ancient commentators were no better disposed to the rule of the demos; their warnings were taken to heart by the American founders, who sought, as far as possible, to shield government from the depredations of direct popular rule. Since then, of course, the barriers have steadily fallen and the stock of Athens commensurately risen. Now Paul A. Rahe seeks to restore the earlier veneration of Sparta. His aim is to teach, or at least remind, Americans of the difference between a republic and a democracy, a distinction that he believes has been effaced to our peril.

Rahe's view of America could hardly be direr. In his massive Republics Ancient and Modern, which was published in 1992, the same year as Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, Rahe first offered his meditations on the future of the American republic. Both Rahe and Fukuyama have been deeply influenced by the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who emphasized the gulf (alluded to in the title of Rahe's book) between ancients and moderns. But unlike Fukuyama, whose reaction to the outcome of the fall of the Soviet Union was mixed, Rahe took no comfort from it at all. Quite the contrary: he maintained that there was nothing to be complacent about. The United States had long ago abandoned the ideals of a virtuous republic, replacing them with an administrative state that coddled its wards from cradle to grave. Since then, Rahe has offered similarly despondent verdicts in a series of erudite studies of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Tocqueville. Though his latest studies of Sparta do not comment explicitly on the decadence of the West, their warm embrace of Spartan ways, particularly when read in light of his previous works, may be taken as an implicit condemnation. Indeed, essential chapters of Rahe's Republics have been incorporated into the present Regime.

Rahe's political pugnacity may help explain why such a prolific scholar, whose books appear under the auspices of eminent university presses, teaches at Hillsdale College in southern Michigan. Hillsdale presents itself as a nondenominational Christian institution whose mission is to guide its students back to the precepts and ideals of the Founding Fathers. As Erik Eckholm observed in the New York Times, scholars at Hillsdale allege that the American tradition, as laid out in its founding documents, "has been desecrated by a century of governmental overreach, including the New Deal and Obamacare." Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale, and a former president of the Claremont Institute, which forms something of a redoubt of West Coast Straussians, declared that 2017 augured a "beginning to restore limited government." Rahe himself has denounced everything from progressivism to the New Deal with gusto, pointing to a "steady erosion of our political and our private rights" in his book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift. A staunch fiscal and moral conservative, Rahe described Trump on his personal blog in November 2016 as a "swine" and "no conservative," but stated that the depravity of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party meant that "you should hold your nose and vote for the slimeball anyway."

For all his zest for polemics, however, Rahe is careful not to allow it to mar his scrupulous scholarship. His latest works, The Spartan Regime and The Grand Strategy of Sparta, thus offer a fine opportunity to examine the legendary warrior society. He covers a wide swath of territory, seeking to understand Sparta as it understood itself. Throughout, Rahe displays an unruffled temper in carefully weighing the evidence and in deciphering Greek and Oriental sources, apart from his disdain for social scientists. "Thou shalt not," he might say along with Auden, "commit a social science."

Since the very concept of "society" could not be predicated of the ancient polis, there is nothing for social scientists to study. If there is no society, then the primacy of politics becomes obvious. Indeed, the first volume of Republics Ancient and Modern begins with a chapter entitled "The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece." Ancient thinkers may not have had the concept of a society in their kit bags, but that doesn't bar us from using it in a cautious way if we find things that look like and talk like "society." The concept of politeia, which Rahe terms "regime," (a practice popularized by Strauss) is expansive enough to include almost anything societal. Xenophon, for example, begins his Politeia of the Lacedaemonians with a disquisition on Spartan childbirth and marriage practices. Rahe, like the rest of us, is bound to have recourse to contemporary criteria, just as his interest in Sparta may have some of its sources in...