Review: Roosevelt Montás’s “Rescuing Socrates”

“In this rousing story, [Roosevelt] Montás concentrates on four particular ‘great authors’ that embody and encapsulate the human condition who shaped him: Saint Augustine, Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi.”

It is an unfortunate state of affairs nowadays that we must justify the importance of the liberal arts. Despite the negative public attitude toward the liberal arts, including by guardians and teachers of the discipline who caution for a more “disinterred” rather than enthusiastic embrace of the humanist tradition, there remains a cadre of new books published every year articulating a passionate apologia for the liberal arts. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation is one of those passionate pleas for why the “great books” still matter, and it brilliantly achieves that much needed defense of the liberal arts against its many critics.

As citizens in a free country and a political system that nominally affirms the importance of an informed and engaged citizenry participating in political decision-making, the liberal arts are essential to our way of life. As Montás highlights from the very beginning of his book, “To this day, democracies depend on a citizenry capable of discharging the duties for which a liberal education prepared Athenian citizens. Indeed, the possibility of democracy hinges on the success or failure of liberal education.” In our current decade of democratic malaise and fatigue, the liberal arts take on another level of critical importance. It is not only about the wrestling with the human condition we feel to be threatened by the tyranny of technology; it is also about the continued improvement and survival of our great experiment of democratic-republican self-governance. “Far from a pointless indulgence for the elite,” Montás writes, “liberal education is, in fact, the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down.”

Montás’s inspiring defense of the humanities is as galvanizing as his own story. A native son of the Dominican Republic, he arrived in New York as a young immigrant fleeing political oppression and societal strife in 1985. Culturally in exile and with no knowledge of English, Montás tirelessly pursued a personal education that brought him into the halls of prestige and cultural and social capital: Columbia University. It is there that he remains as a professor of the humanities, no doubt inspiring new generations of students just as his illustrious predecessors did.