S T Levin

The author, born and living in New York City (for as long as Socrates lived in Athens) has watched his culture and country first rise to supreme greatness and then decline. For the last 40-50 years that cascading decline was inseparable from the cterminus rise of professions and professionalized higher education in influence and expense. As the years passed, this no longer seemed coincidental. For over 30 years, from endless but skeptically critical rereading of Plato and Xenophon and Herodotus and Thucydides, and the less complete study of more modern interpreters of same such as George Grote in the 19th century and Bertrand Russel, Karl Raymond Popper and Thomas Sowell in the 20th, certain patterns of thought and culture were revealed. This book is a product of an non-credentialed amateur's quest for the truth of "why" and "how" this American decline pattern is a repetition of happened more than 24 centuries ago in the freest and wealthiest society the western world had ever known - up until then.