virtues for Manent’s vision of thought and action. For Manent, action is never an end in it but must always be guided by the virtues. As Manent argues in Natural Law and Hursan Rights, there is such a thing as “right action, whose declensions are courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—in brief, action that takes on its form and color according to the catalogues of virtues.” Here Manent channels and renews core insights of Aristotle, Cicero, and St. Thomas and perhaps Tocqueville, too. We moderns must recover an understanding of “commanding action” which is always “the commandment of right action” guided by right reason. It is the opposite of willfulness. Such action initiates and commands, but is never merely arbitrary. It is action informed by practical reason and the cardinal virtues. Deneen gets one thing wrong in his admirable “Preface” to Manent’s essay: Manent does not envision a new republic, or a rejection of liberal institutions. Rather, he wants to reinvigorate those institutions by recovering a true understanding of the wellsprings of thought and action. This is a tall order, indeed, but perhaps the most promising way out of our ever-deepening modern crisis. As Wilson Carey McWilliams (a teacher and scholar esteemed by both Deneen and myself) once wrote, one of the preeminent tasks today for all those who love truth and civilization is to “bring old gods,” the full weight of classical and Christian wisdom, “to a new city.” That injunction perfectly describes Manent’s project as I understand it. It is a liberal conservative vision par excellence.