Peter Leithart and James Wood sit down with Michael Lamb for a conversation on Augustine, political hope, the common good, rhetoric, coercion, the Church, and the possibilities and limits of political life.
Michael Lamb is the F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, Executive Director of the Program for Leadership and Character, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Oxford Character Project. His research focuses on leadership, character, and the role of virtues in public life, and he is the author of A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2022).
In this conversation, Lamb introduces the major modern interpretations of Augustine’s political thought, from Augustinian liberalism and realism to communitarian and civic republican readings. Against portrayals of Augustine as simply pessimistic about politics, Lamb argues that Augustine offers a more complex account of hope as a virtue - one that resists both despair and presumption while making room for meaningful political action within the limits of the present age.
The conversation explores Augustine’s understanding of temporal and eternal goods, the common good, political persuasion, civic peace, and the role of rhetoric in forming both judgment and desire. Leithart, Wood, and Lamb discuss whether political actors should seek to “win,” how Augustine engages opponents on their own terms, and how his training in rhetoric shapes the way he argues, exhorts, and seeks to cultivate virtue.
The discussion also turns to some of the more difficult questions in Augustine’s political theology, including his defense of coercion in the Donatist controversy, his understanding of liberty as freedom from domination, and his complicated relationship to Christian rulers and imperial power. The episode concludes by considering the political significance of the Church: not as a pure community standing outside the world, but as a mixed body, a school of virtue, and the place where worship, sacrifice, mercy, and the right ordering of loves give concrete form to Augustine’s vision of civic and theological life.
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