As its title indicates, Matthew Wright’s book offers a defense of the goodness of political activity. More specifically, Wright contends for the intrinsic goodness of political life. Almost everyone would agree that politics is necessary. At least, human beings have not yet found a way to dispense with it. Acknowledging the necessity of politics, however, might imply that it is only good instrumentally; that is, it is necessary only to protect essentially nonpolitical goods like, say, private property or the sanctity of contracts.

Wright, in contrast, holds that politics is necessary in a higher or fuller sense. Political activity, performing the duties or functions of the citizen, is, he argues, one of the key elements of human flourishing. To borrow the terms used by Glaucon at the outset of Plato’s Republic, Wright contends that politics—like justice itself—is not mere “drudgery” but is instead one of the things properly chosen both for its own sake and for its consequences. The author argues primarily within the natural law tradition, drawing on Aquinas and Aristotle, and seeking especially to critically engage, among recent thinkers, the legal philosopher John Finnis.

Wright begins by considering the family. Although this discussion is in a sense preliminary to his central argument, it is also essential to its proper elucidation. An examination of the family and a consideration of its own goodness not only set the stage for Wright’s later argument about the intrinsic goodness of politics, but also point to the proper limits of politics. On the one hand, the family is perhaps the most obvious and least controversial example of an association of human beings valued for its own sake. In a healthy family, each member views the other members as good in themselves, desiring their well-being for its own sake. Moreover, as Wright astutely notes, family members do not just desire the good of the other members as individuals. They seek the good of the family itself, understood as a set of ongoing relationships among the members. Family members seek not only what is good for the other members separately, but also what is good for them altogether, for the good that they share, their common good. These considerations point to the possibility of the intrinsic goodness of other forms of human association, such as the political community.

On the other hand, Wright’s account of the intrinsic goodness of the family also reminds us of the proper limits of politics. Wright intends to argue that political activity is intrinsically good, but he is careful to establish that it is not the only intrinsic good. If politics should not be understood as merely instrumental in relation to other goods, neither should other goods—the goods of the sub-political institutions of civil society—be understood as merely instrumental with a view to politics and the good of the political community. Thus, while defending the dignity of politics, Wright avoids extreme conceptions of its absolute primacy, such as the view of some Classical Greeks that the family is to be understood as just a factory for producing citizens, to say nothing of modern forms of totalitarianism that subordinate all the institutions of civil society to the state.

Ultimately, Wright vindicates the intrinsic goodness of politics by giving an account of the possibility of civic friendship. Here he makes all the reasonable qualifications to his argument that one would expect. Civic friendship is not the same as personal friendship. Fellow citizens do not ordinarily love each other with the same intensity as family members. Also, there is admittedly an element of utility and calculation in relationships among citizens, inhabiting, as they do, a larger, less personal, and rule-based public order. Nevertheless, Wright persuasively contends that human beings are capable of loving their fellow citizens for their own sake and of seeking the good of the political community for its own sake. This is, after all, just the idealistic patriotism that we do not encounter as often as we would wish, but the importance of which is acknowledged by the praise we ordinarily bestow when we do encounter it. Although citizens may often fail to achieve true civic friendship (just as most human beings tend to fall short in most of the virtues most of the time), the way they speak about political issues shows that they genuinely aspire to it.

The most interesting and valuable aspect of A Vindication of Politics is Wright’s argument that civic friendship is most fully realized by participating in a political tradition. Drawing on the thought of Edmund Burke, Wright contends that human beings experience an elevation of mind and soul unavailable in other activities when they appropriate their country’s tradition of liberty as (to use Burke’s expression) an “entailed inheritance”—that is, as a good they are fortunate to receive from their ancestors and are obligated to transmit to their successors. Here citizens experience a kind of friendship not only with other presently living fellow citizens but also with citizens of past and future generations. Here both reason and the moral imagination are engaged, and so the whole human person is fulfilled. On this basis Wright suggests that the teaching of citizenship should involve instruction not only in the nuts and bolts of political participation but also in the development of the country’s political history.

This might sound like a distinctively conservative understanding of citizenship, and admittedly, Burke is famous as a conservative thinker. Nevertheless, Wright argues persuasively for its wider application. After all, in the mainstream American context, Abraham Lincoln’s political career was informed and elevated by his attempt to think and feel politically according to the terms established by the American Founding and the Declaration of Independence—learning the nation’s foundational principles of equality and freedom from its past, applying them to its present, and seeking to perpetuate them for the sake of future generations. One might add that even activists and leaders of the Left often understand themselves as carrying on a tradition of reform, linking their efforts to those of noble figures who have gone before them.

Wright’s insight here addresses a long-standing limitation of most political theory: its abstraction. From Plato to the present, most political theorists think in terms of universal goods such as equality, liberty, virtue, or justice. Although the quest for such standards is necessary, political theory often seems to overlook the fact that in every existing political community its citizens are also interested in perpetuating, living out, and transmitting that community’s existing character as something good in itself.

Wright’s meditations are particularly welcome at the present moment. After a period of apparent dormancy, patriotism and nationalism are again showing their strength, inspiring some and frightening others. Political science should neither simply praise nor denounce these powerful and persistent passions, but instead ask whether they can be reasonably understood, justified, and limited. A Vindication of Politics is a worthy contribution to this necessary intellectual endeavor.