Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder. By Christopher A. Colmo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 210p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The thesis of this book is novel and provocative. Christopher Colmo argues that Alfarabi breaks with Plato and Aristotle. In other words, contrary to Leo Strauss and others (among whom I count myself), Alfarabi is not, among other things, a useful guide to the recovery of a forgotten Plato and Aristotle. At his most ambitious, Colmo insinuates that Alfarabi offers a third path between the metaphysically grounded politics of the ancients and the moderns' excessive reliance on philosophic concepts such as human rights (p. 168). This third way is often referred to as the “autonomy of politics” from theory. Although Colmo is tentative about it, like all claims to a third way, it offers the utopian hope of escaping all of the pitfalls of the other two.