Table of contents : I. Essays : 1. Leo Strauss: 1899-1973 -- 2. What is politics? an interpretation of Aristotle's politics -- 3. The limits of politics an interpretation of King Lear, act I, Scene I -- 4. The virtue of a nation of cities on the Jeffersonian paradoxes -- 5. Political obligation and the American political tradition -- 6. Reflections on Thoreau and Lincoln civil disobedience and the American tradition -- 7. What is equality? the declaration of independence revisited -- 8. Partly federal, partly nation on the political theory of the American civil war -- 9. Crisis of the house divided a new introduction -- 10. Tom Sawyer hero of middle America -- 11. The conditions of freedom -- II. Criticism and controversy : 12. Slavery a battle revisited -- 13. Letters of a patriot -- 14. Portrait of a patriot -- 15. Lincoln and the cause of freedom -- 16. Reconstruction old and new -- 17. The truth about war -- 18. What about the Dardanelles? -- 19. Amoral America and the liberal dilemma.