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Book Review: Political Philosophy Cross-Examined1 7 1Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax, eds., Political Philosophy Cross-Examined: Perennial Challenges to the Philosophic Life. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2013, 214 pp., $90.M ic h a e l H a r di ngMontgomery College Germantownmichael.harding@montgomerycollege.eduPolitical Philosophy Cross-Examined, the new festschrift in honor of HeinrichMeier, does an excellent job of addressing the responses of various thinkersto the challenges presented to the philosophic life by the claims of politics,religion, and even reason itself. If there is a deficiency to be found in theessays collected in this volume, it is this: each essay could itself serve asthe introduction to a book in its own right. The attentive reader will findthese essays to be thought-provoking and insightful. That alone is enough tocommend this book to the attention of anyone serious about philosophy asa way of life. The volume itself spans Western intellectual history, aspiringto “reopen the case for the philosophic life in the face of, and while doingjustice to, its most severe challengers” (1). Such a reopening of the case isparticularly necessary today, when something called philosophy has becomeaccepted and respectable—and in the process, perhaps become “blurred” 1 ordomesticated. The essays in the book cover Plato’s presentation of Protagorasand sophistry, Aristotle, the Bible, Tacitus, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Bacon,Hobbes, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and (lastly) return again toPlato’s Socrates. The authors are all accomplished scholars, and, as expected,the essays are of very high quality indeed. A short review cannot, of course,delve deeply into each individual essay, so I will briefly present overviews of1Leo Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 127.© 2015 Interpretation, Inc.