Catherine Zuckert, Council University of Notre Dame

Catherine Zuckert, University of Notre Dame
Council, 2007-09

Catherine Zuckert is a Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.  She also currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Review of Politics .

Education:  B.A. Cornell University (1964); Ph.D. University of Chicago (1970).

Honors:  Zuckert’s book on Natural Right and the American Imagination:  Political Philosophy in Novel Form won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for the best book written in philosophy and religion by the American Association of Publishers in 1990.  Understanding the Political Spirit:  From Socrates to Nietzsche, edited by Zuckert, received a Choice award as one of the best books published in political theory in 1989.

Zuckert has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Bradley and Earhart Foundations. Most recently she has been awarded a 2007-08 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanitites to write a book-length study of "Machiavelli's politics." She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, has been listed in several editions of Who’s Who in America, and was selected as a member of the Templeton Honor Role in 1998.

Research Interests:  Zuckert writes primarily about the history of political philosophy and the relation between literature and politics. 

She is currently completing a book manuscript on Plato’s Philosophers.  In this book she argues that the coherence of the Platonic corpus can be seen, if one pays attention to the dramatic dates indicated for the specific dialogues.  So read, the dialogues trace the rise and development of Socratic philosophy.  Plato brings out the limitations of Socratic philosophy by contrasting him and his arguments with those of his other “philosophers,” Parmenides, Timaeus, the Athenian Stranger and the Eleatic Stranger.  Socrates nevertheless clearly remains the central, most exemplary character in the dialogues.  The problems Plato dramatizes in Socratic arguments show why Plato thought that philosophy would always constitute a search for wisdom and not the possession of knowledge.

Most Recent Publications:  In The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2006) Catherine and her co-author Michael Zuckert begin by tracing the spate of media attention to this scholarly student of the history of political philosophy as the “brains” behind, or philosophical inspiration for, the war in Iraq, first to stories produced by writers for the Lyndon LaRouche organization and ultimately to the criticism of Strauss by Shadia Drury.  They then give an account of what Strauss actually taught and wrote in response to his critics.  The book concludes with an examination of the different ways some of the “first generation” of Strauss’s students applied his thought to the study of American political institutions and principles.