Ancient Greece and American Conservatism: Classical Influence on the Modern Right

US conservatives have repeatedly turned to classical Greece for inspiration and rhetorical power. In the 1950s they used Plato to defend moral absolutism; in the 1960s it was Aristotle as a means to develop a uniquely conservative social science; and then Thucydides helped to justify a more assertive foreign policy in the 1990s.
By tracing this phenomenon and analysing these, and various other, examples of selectivity, subversion and adaptation within their broader social and political conte...