The Warrior-Scholar Ideal Revisited

For centuries and millennia, in cultures throughout the world, what Jack Kerwick and Al Ridenhour here refer to as the persona of "the Warrior-Scholar" was extolled as an ideal of human excellence to be embodied by those upon whom the social order depended for its preservation and success. This ideal has largely been lost, and lost particularly to the contemporary Western world. It is the authors' contention that the West would be well-served by restoring this ideal to the pride of place that it once enjoyed.

While it's undoubtedly true that, in the vast majority of instances, the Warrior-Scholar ideal was equated with an ideal of manhood, from early on in its recorded history, no less a figure than Plato argued for the inclusion of women among the guardian class in his ideal Republic. The authors do not intend to second guess Plato. Rather, they make it clear that while the Warrior-Scholar ideal certainly offers an ideal of manhood, it offers females an ideal worth pursuing as well. The martial dispositions of the warrior, the intellectual strengths of the scholar, and the seamless combination of these two sets of virtues in one and the same person are equally available to men and women alike.

Kerwick and Ridenhour don't presume to offer an historical analysis of either the rise or demise of the Warrior-Scholar throughout the ages. What their essays supply us with is a vision, a moral vision, and some guidance for how, here and now, individuals who are interested in manifesting this vision in their own lives can begin doing so.