PatH, never having read Riddle of the Sands, I thought from the title that it was about some mystery set in the Middle East or North Africa.
Socrates was an individualist - something of a no-no in the direct democracy of Greece at the time. He spent very little time being involved in the deliberations of the Athenian Assembly and knew little of the procedures of conducting the democracy's business. He believed that good citizenship started with the "individual moral conscience and intellectual integrity" with "civic virtues" being secondary. Civic virtues being things like community involvement, and self-sacrifice for the common good, or communalism (community centered). Socratic Citizenship has five chapters. The first is an almost 60 page attempt to describe Socratic citizenship. The last four chapters discuss the works of John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss and their struggles with "the question of philosophical citizenship in an age of democratization and "mass" politics." The author also states that "they all took strong stands on the relevance of Socratic moral individualism to modern politics. Not real lite reading.
It just occurred to me that we don't have a philosophy discussion group, do we? The closest we have is Robby's discussion group of The Story of Civilization which includes just about everything under the sink and above including philosophy.
