In 1900, perhaps the greatest Victorian historian of ideas, Leslie Stephen, released his three-volume English Utilitarians. Coming to grips with the political thought of the century that had just ended, he believed, required considering the “dominant beliefs of the adherents of this school.” So privileged a point of access was offered by what we would now call “classical utilitarianism” that a study of it could serve as a “sequel” to his previous History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The utilitarians, Stephen was confident, could serve as a kind of synecdoche for a whole age. Further, if the utilitarians did not grasp the whole truth, there was no doubt that their “creed” would make up part of the “definitive system” that would arrive in due time.

Xenophon's reputation as a thinker of the highest order has been rehabilitated thanks principally to the work of Leo Strauss, his students, and his students’ students in political theory. Evidence of Xenophon's rehabilitated reputation is also the recent growth in Xenophon studies in academic fields outside political theory—classics, history, and philosophy—by scholars who are unaffiliated with Strauss, some of whom are even deeply critical of him, among them Paul Cartledge, Louis-André Dorion, Vivienne Gray, and Christopher Tuplin. There is also the success of the Landmark editions of Xenophon's Hellenika and Anabasis. To this growing body of scholarly literature, three monographs devoted to Xenophon's Socratic writings are now added. Thomas Pangle has written two excellent books, The Socratic Way of Life: Xenophon's “Memorabilia” and Socrates Founding Political Philosophy in Xenophon's “Economist,” “Symposium,” and “Apology.” Additionally, Dustin Sebell has written a penetrating analysis of Book IV of Xenophon's Memorabilia, titled Xenophon's Socratic Education: Reason, Religion, and the Limits of Politics.