Not Thinking Like a Liberal

Robert Paul Wolff in his own blog:

Several days ago, I received from Raymond Geuss a copy of his new book, Not Thinking like a Liberal, which has just been published by Harvard. It is an intense, complex, deeply interior account of his philosophical development first as a boy in a Catholic private school and then as an undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia University.  Geuss, as I am sure you all know, is a distinguished philosopher now retired from Cambridge University, the author of a number of books.

Geuss and I come from backgrounds so different from one another that it is hard to believe we could ever inhabit the same world and yet, for a span of time in the 1960s and a little bit beyond, our lives intersected on the seventh floor of Philosophy Hall at Columbia University.  Geuss arrived at Columbia as a 16-year-old freshman in 1963, graduated summa cum laude, and earned his doctorate in the philosophy department in 1971. I joined the philosophy department as an associate professor in 1964 and resigned my professorship to go to the University of Massachusetts in 1971. Both of us took the year 1967 – 68 off from Columbia, I to teach at Rutgers while continuing to live across the street from the Columbia campus and he to spend the year in Germany.

In this book, Ray gives an intense contemplative complexly thought through account of the life process by which he arrived eventually at the condition he describes as “not thinking like a liberal,” beginning with his education at a Catholic boarding school outside of Philadelphia staffed in large part by Hungarian priests who had fled the communist regime.

More here.