The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West

A few days ago, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation bestowed one of its storied Bradley Prizes on James Hankins, a sometime professor of history at Harvard University, now at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and co-author of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. (Actually, Hankins is the sole author of Volume I of The Golden Thread, which tells the story of the Western tradition from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC through the Renaissance. Volume II, which picks up the story with the Reformation, is by the historian Allen Guelzo.) This is the moment when I note for the record that, being the publisher of these magnificent books at Encounter Books, I have what is called in the trade an “interest.” But don’t take my word for the adjective “magnificent.” The reception of these books has been nothing short of ecstatic. Perhaps the most searching review is by Spencer Klavan and appears in the current number of The Claremont Review of Books. 

Listening to Jim Hankins’s remarks at the Bradley event prompts me to reprise a few thoughts about what we are up to with The Golden Thread. The phrase names not only these two books but also a larger project that Encounter is undertaking with several partners to change the conversation about—well, I was going to say “about education.” But really, it is about that vibrant thing that the soporific word “education” designates, namely, opening the treasure chest of the past in order to confront and ultimately to emulate greatness.

“Greatness” is not a word you hear much in the once-hallowed halls of academia these days. But that does not mean it is irrelevant to what is supposed to be going on there. In the preface to a collection of essays called Giants and Dwarfs, Allan Bloom insisted that “the essence of education is the experience of greatness.” Almost everything that Bloom wrote about the university (The Closing of the American Mind, for example) flowed from this fundamental conviction. And it was just this, of course, that got him branded an enemy of democracy.