Remembering the Limits of Politics

Elshtain's book is remarkable in many ways, but especially in her ability to bring some of the key concepts Augustine used to explain politics to bear on the very different political realities of our time. Democracies are not empires, modernity is not antiquity, class structures have changed entirely, but the human heart remains the human heart. And few theologians in the Christian tradition wrestled with the enigma that is the human heart with greater insight than Augustine.