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.