This volume is a collection of essays in political philosophy designed to investigate what exactly the mastery of nature is (p. 1). It is not simply the use of nature, nor an activity engaging with the natural world, but is “all-encompassing” and “a moral and political horizon” (p. 2). Seeking to explain both the foundation and criticism of this worldview, Mastery of Nature is organized thematically, with essays treating “The Project for Mastery” in the first part, “Ancient Alternatives and Anticipations” in the second, and “Consequences, Critiques, and Corrections” in the third. The editors locate the mastery project in the Renaissance, Early Modern, and Enlightenment periods, thus grouping chapters on Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Montesquieu, and Benjamin Franklin in the first section. In the middle, there are three “Alternatives” offered from Aristotle and Plato, Xenophon, and Lucretius. Those who belong in the “Critiques” category begin in the Enlightenment and include Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary scientists and quantum mechanicians.

If the orderings of the sections and chapters were not immediately indicative, this volume emerges from a particular interpretive school in political philosophy, informed by the ancient/modern divide made flesh in Leo Strauss’s work. The individual chapters are stand-alone interpretations of primary texts and authors; as a whole, however, the contributions combine into a meta-interpretation that is found in each piece at a microcosmic level. The thesis is that the presumption that we can master nature is a modern disease, and one that obscures the insight that nature always delivers more questions than answers. The Ancients knew this. And the great political philosophers of modernity have (for the most part) known this, in thinking with the Ancients. But moderns do not. There is a dual argument at play always: firstly, that the ancient/modern divide in thinking about nature exists (hence, the division between “The Project for Mastery” and “Ancient Alternatives”); and, secondly, that in great philosophy this division does not exist at all insofar as true thinkers know that the “mastery project” obfuscates reality.

Harvey Mansfield’s opening essay on Machiavelli illuminates this dual argumentation well in casting Machiavelli as the first “modern,” while also painting him as decidedly anti-modern through his setting of the stage for the modern reliance on “facts” (which present “nature” in understandable units), and simultaneously relying only on the “effectual truth” (p. 21). This interpretive mode continues. Svetozar Y. Minkov writes that Francis Bacon (the scientific modern) invokes parables and fables —the Promethean fable in particular—to illuminate the status of “science” as itself one of Bacon’s Idols, suggesting that Bacon knew that nature defied mastery and comprehensibility. Devin Stauffer’s short piece (expanded upon in his book) offers a Hobbes who wished for progress and civilization to decay the powerful memory of the state of nature, but this “vision does not mean, however, that, for Hobbes himself . . . the doubts could ever fully disappear” (p. 53). Stuart D. Warner presents a Descartes who (like Minkov’s Bacon) constructed the power of science as a fable to decrease the power of Christianity. Diana J. Schaub’s Montesquieu is a figure who, despite his presentation of himself as a “follower of nature” (p. 83), saw nature only as “a palette with which one can paint” (p. 84). The section concludes with Jerry Weinberger’s piece on the unfortunate Benjamin Franklin (a “full blown Baconian” [p. 85]), who “thought the mastery of nature a very good thing” (p. 96), thus outing himself as a decidedly modern politician.

The three contributions on the Ancients serve as the antidotes to the philosophical contortions to which our great thinkers had to stretch themselves in presenting nature and its (apparent) mastery to a— projected or existing—modern audience. Robert C. Bartlett offers a defense of contemplative virtue in Aristotle and Plato, Christopher Nadon a piece on Xenophon, and Paul Ludwig a piece on Lucretius (to which I will return).

In the third section, we encounter the thinkers who exist following the antinomy thus far organizationally constructed in the volume between Masterers and Ancients. Arthur Melzer’s piece on Rousseau and Richard Velkley’s piece on Kant make an excellent pair, both complicating the relationship we take Rousseau and Kant to have with the mastery project. In both contributions we are, too, reminded that—in Ancient fashion—nature properly understood presents us only with questions, and most importantly with questions about ourselves. This is the moment in the volume when man truly becomes the center. As Velkley writes of Kant, it is the human being that has “the aptitude for purposes generally” (p. 168), and so nature understood in this manner is purposeless without man, who is himself a contradiction of freedom and “the demands of nature” (p. 159). Michael A. Gillespie’s piece on Hegel follows, along with Lise van Boxel’s on Nietzsche and Mark Blitz’s on Heidegger. Blitz on Heidegger once again brings to the fore the dual argumentation of the volume. Heidegger argues that the distinctively modern “technology” in fact allows us “to notice what is missing: the being and man always overlooked but always there. . . . The mastery of nature finally permits us to see what we cannot master” (pp. 199–200).

Heidegger’s window into what we cannot see is, in his work, through the pre-Socratics; none of whom are afforded their own chapter. The volume does conclude, however, with two essays addressing contemporary science: Adam Schulman’s contribution on the relevance of Aristotle, and Bernhardt L. Trout’s piece on quantum mechanics and its political and philosophic implications: “[I]n principle, the fact that there are underlying particles in nature that constitute each thing is, via quantum mechanics, compatible with the notion that there are independent wholes that must be understood on their own terms” (p. 232). It seems that in conclusion, we have returned to the very beginning: a reinvocation of that ancient wisdom of the missing Leucippus and Democritus. So, too, is this final contribution reaffirming the methodology of each part as well as the whole: There is a vast abyss between the ancient and modern worlds in their approach to the mastery of nature, and so too is there no abyss for those who know that nature cannot be mastered. Everything new is old again.

So what are we to make of the project, Mastery of Nature? This is a volume on a topic whose whole purpose is to reveal the topic as moot. Even those who promulgated the mastery of nature did not truly believe that it could be mastered. Those who believe it could be mastered are (as invoked in Ralph Lerner’s Preface) simply members of Lagado’s Academy of Projectors. We are left only, then, with questions about what nature is, and how we ought to live. As Paul Ludwig remarks in his piece on Lucretius: “[T]he modern project has requisitioned [Lucretius’s] atomic view of nature, by and large, without taking the ethical consequences—the way to live happily—that came with it” (p. 122). All new contributions here reaffirm what is old, at the expense of the titled topic at hand entirely. What exists beyond this and us, is, as it always has been, nature herself and questions about how to live, about which this volume—certainly intentionally—provides no answers.