Daniel J. Mahoney — conservative scholar, public intellectual, acclaimed author, and trustee of National Review Institute — has been a close friend for four decades, since we first gallivanted at College of the Holy Cross. His 2022 book, The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation (Encounter Books) has met with great praise, including in NR, where Paul Rahe blamed its greatness for causing him to miss a meeting:
The heart of Mahoney’s book is not, however, this theoretical discussion. It is the portraiture designed to illustrate his claims, which is found in the subsequent chapters, where he introduces us to Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and, finally, Václav Havel. Here — except in the case of Tocqueville, who was, as he readily admitted himself, a flop as a statesman — we have Mahoney’s exemplars: all of them towering statesmen and all of them Christian or profoundly influenced by Christianity. I found the chapters on Burke, Lincoln, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel luminous — so much so that I got lost in the book and missed the first half of a committee meeting that I, in my guise as its chair, had called.
So, Dan Mahoney won. What exactly? The prestigious Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Paolucci Award for the Conservative Book of the Year. ISI heralds The Stateman as Thinker and its author for numerous reasons, including:
Mahoney makes sense of the mixture of magnanimity and moderation that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.
The Paolucci Award tradition is to honor those books making “most significant contributions to the conservative canon.” That rightly describes The Statesman as Thinker. Kudos, Dan.