Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton Monographs in Philosophy)

As described!

This is how you write creative political philosophy. Raymond Geuss, ever the iconoclast - albeit the most erudite iconoclast you'll ever come across - turns to history to tackle the distinction between the public and private, showing it for the cobbled together and multi-dimensional difference that it in fact is. Which is to say, certainly not something to underwrite certain liberal theories of politics in any substantial way. Making his case through three exemplary instances of Western antiquity - Diogenes' masturbation in the public square, Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon (against orders from the Roman senate), and Augustine's spiritual withdrawal from the world - Geuss hammers home just how messy the public/private distinction can really be.While on its own not quite enough to unravel the threads of liberalism, Geuss's little book does pull at just enough wool to sting - no one in its wake would, at the very least, be able to take the distinction for granted, and even then, one would have to tiptoe around the coals cast upon it by this work. Otherwise though, this is just a marvelously fun read. Geuss is at least as much a classicist as he is a philosopher, and to be furnished by his insights into say, the nature of shame in ancient Greece, the etymology and concept of the 'res publica' in the Roman empire, and the role of love in Augustine's religious epistemology, is to be edified by one the of sharpest intellects writing in the English language. If not for the critique of liberalism, for those tidbits alone would this be worth one's time (and not much of it at that).