The Quest for Character

What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders

By: Massimo Pigliucci

Narrated by: Alan Carlson

What Socrates’s greatest failure reveals about an ancient question: Can we teach our leaders to be better people?

Is good character something that can be taught? In 430 BCE, Socrates set out to teach the vain, power-seeking Athenian statesman Alcibiades how to be a good person—and failed spectacularly. Alcibiades went on to beguile his city into a hopeless war with Syracuse, and all of Athens paid the price.

In The Quest for Character, philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci tells this famous story and asks what we can learn from it. He blends ancient sources with modern interpretations to give a full picture of the philosophy and cultivation of character, virtue, and personal excellence—what the Greeks called arete. At heart, The Quest for Character isn’t simply about what makes a good leader. Drawing on Socrates as well as his followers among the Stoics, this book gives us lessons perhaps even more crucial: how we can each lead an excellent life.

Transformational Reading

This is a great foundational guild to the path of virtue and the building blocks of a good and worthy character.

Thought Provoking

This book presents an age-old question and provides us thoughts from wise people on what it takes to develop and maintain a good character. The list provided at the end is superb. The sources cited are ones I will investigate in my journey.

another great work by Massimo

only suggestion would be to include a PDF of the syllabus in last chapter with the audio book

The best stoic character text

Concise. Excellent reading. Will listen again and again, and recommend it to others. Thank you.

Character and politics.

I found most interesting the sources used. Alcibiades, Laertius, Xenophon, Epictetus. Books that are not read in most philosophy programs! Of course , this oddity is expalined in the book. Excellent reading.