Are Plato and Tocqueville right to claim that democracy tends to foster a democratic soul that is incapable of ranking or ordering its desires, making democracy ungovernable? They prescribe the education of an elite of true aristoi to remedy democracy’s worst tendencies. But on campus today is the greater problem that students are awash with tyrannical ambition, or that they are apathetic and unwilling to take any risks?

This talk argues that Tocqueville was right to fear low horizons for our desires. Harvard’s curriculum must be both philosophical and poetic if it is to produce the leaders America needs.