Fullilove demonstrates that America's global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century was enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his five extraordinary representatives from 1939-1941. Together these men and their president took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world.

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle,...