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.

Colmo's portrait of ancient political philosophy is the most difficult part of his thesis to accept. (Because Alfarabi never confronted modern political philosophy, Colmo reasonably reserves his conjectures on how Alfarabi might have viewed it until the conclusion.) To show the novelty of Alfarabi's enterprise, Colmo must show that Plato and Aristotle are well worth breaking from. Unfortunately, the bulk of this argument has little to do with the political teaching of either author. Of course, this is not by chance; Colmo argues from the first that Alfarabi abandons the metaphysical foundation of Plato and Aristotle for a new “methodological” ground. Alfarabi is like the moderns in focusing on method. Because of this focus, the two key chapters of the book are Chapters 4 and 9. In Chapter 4, through an analysis of Alfarabi's Short Commentary on Aristotle's “Prior Analytics,” Colmo attempts to show that Alfarabi proves Aristotle's demonstrative syllogistic method to be wholly circular—quite an accusation against the father of logic. I leave to another scholar better versed in Aristotelian logic and a review for a different journal the occasion to address the details of this argument. I agree with the view of both Miriam Galston and Descartes that Aristotle's logic was not intended as a method of discovery (p. 140)—that need not make it circular, however. I believe that it was intended primarily to insulate the novice from falling prey to the wiles of sophistry.

In Chapter 9, Colmo attempts to show that Alfarabi adumbrates an alternative to Aristotelian method, though only in the course of giving an overview of the sciences so dependent on Aristotle that it becomes difficult to establish the depth of the break. Colmo argues that in his Attainment of Happiness (AH), Alfarabi intends to show that Aristotle believes mistakenly that he can ascend from the principles of instruction to the principles of being. Colmo claims that we are restricted to and will never break free from the principles of instruction. Because Alfarabi's discussion of these two sets of principles is extremely abstract, the reader should not be frustrated with me for failing to define or exemplify these two sets of principles. Alfarabi barely does, and Colmo hardly does any better. Yet Colmo disagrees with Muhsin Mahdi's understanding of the distinction between these two sets of principles (as Aristotle's distinction between what is first for us and what is first by nature), though the substance of his disagreement is elusive (cf. p. 135 with pp. 139–46). I offer one striking indication that Alfarabi's method in AH can hardly be his consummate method of discovery: When he presents his list of methods in AH, he omits the method (of discovery) Colmo ascribes to him throughout Breaking with Athens, namely, “dialectic” (cf. AH, sect. 2, with Breaking, p. 132). Even if we were to grant that Alfarabi offers a novel method, we would need from Colmo a clear presentation of how Alfarabi's political teaching, especially in AH, embodies this new method. We get none for AH, though politics is treated at great length there. The closest Colmo comes to such a presentation may be Chapter 6; however, I was unable to determine how the political teaching of Alfarabi's Book of Religion constitutes a complete break from the teachings of Plato or Aristotle.

The heart of Colmo's substantive interpretation of Alfarabi as an opponent of the ancients is surely Chapter 5. In this chapter, he attempts to establish that Plato's political philosophy rests upon a metaphysical foundation that is wholly circular. The emblem of this foundation is what he calls the “doctrine” of recollection (p. 58). Now, Colmo is the first to admit that “recollection” is not mentioned in the relevant Alfarabian text, the Philosophy of Plato (PP). Yet he claims to find a smoking gun in PP (sect. 22). There, Alfarabi's Plato claims that the philosopher and the king possess the same skill. Through that skill human beings can know their perfection (knowledge of the substance of each of the beings, PP, sect. 3) and their desired way of life or happiness (PP, sect. 2). Above all, the philosopher and king know these “from the outset” (sect. 22). According to Colmo, this claim “from the outset” means that, according to Plato, the philosopher knows all beings and what his own perfection is from the outset of his inquiry or he can never know them at all (pp. 66–67)—a shockingly literal reading of recollection. Colmo abstracts from what dialog or dialogs Alfarabi is discussing here (either Lovers or Laches, almost certainly the former). As Christopher Bruell has shown so clearly in On the Socratic Education (1999), the shorter Platonic dialogs revolve around two themes: youthful belief that without ever having inquired into it, one possesses adequate knowledge of one's own good, and for that matter the good of all human beings, and sophistry. Colmo ascribes to Alfarabi's Plato what Bruell shows the young and excessively ambitious believe about themselves. To confirm this, the reader should consider Colmo's reading of the opening of PP (pp. 58–59). Alfarabi opens PP with an interpretation of Alcibiades Major. According to that opening, we desire perfection that will make us enviable to others. What could better capture the attitude of Alcibiades and a whole host of other young men peopling Plato's shorter dialogs? According to Colmo, Alfarabi intends to ascribe this youthful hubris to the mature Plato or Socrates (p. 59). For one, I am not convinced.

I am the first to admit that Alfarabi makes it extremely difficult to determine where the significant differences between himself and his Greek predecessors lie. Are these differences largely a matter of adapting Plato and Aristotle to fit the setting of a revealed community, as Strauss argues? (In which case, we might learn from Alfarabi, among other things, how better to understand the political teaching of Plato and Aristotle.) Or has Alfarabi made a nearly wholesale break with ancient thought, as Colmo argues? (In which case, Alfarabi might deserve the dubious honor of being the first protomodern—or the true honor of being perhaps the first thinker, to my knowledge, to escape altogether the alternatives, ancient or modern.) In this review, I have tried to show that in key instances, Colmo's claims for Alfarabian novelty are bought at the price of a distorted Plato and Aristotle—a Plato and Aristotle I am not persuaded that Alfarabi seeks to uncover for us.