Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation Lamar Alexander spent six decades inside American political institutions — as governor of Tennessee, as Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, and as a two-term U.S. Senator — and The Education of a Senator is his attempt to account for what that time taught him. The book is less a score-settling memoir than a practitioner's chronicle: how power actually works in Washington, what legislative craftsmanship requires, and what a political career costs and yields over the long run. Alexander writes from the vantage of someone who arrived in public life when Senate norms still enforced a kind of enforced patience, and who left when those norms were dissolving. Readers drawn to political biography, students of American governance, and anyone trying to understand how institutional culture shapes individual decision-making will find the book useful. It belongs on the same shelf as Richard Lugar's memoir or Howard Baker's recollections — the testimony of a figure who believed that competence and civility were not opposed to conviction. SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created**: Alexander's implicit premise is that human beings are capable of genuine public service — that civic life is a legitimate arena for the exercise of reason, skill, and care for others. This maps onto the Created premise of the CCMMP that the person is ordered toward the common good by nature, not merely by social contract. The book's respect for institutional design reflects what Aquinas, in the *Summa Theologiae* I-II, calls the rational capacity to order means to ends in community. - **Fallen**: The memoir's honest account of partisan deterioration, legislative gridlock, and the erosion of deliberative norms registers the Fallen condition without naming it theologically. Disordered ambition, factional loyalty displacing truth-seeking, and the structural temptation to prioritize re-election over right judgment — these are the forms concupiscence takes in political life, and Alexander's narrative makes them visible without sentimentalizing the past. - **Redeemed**: The Redeemed thread is thinner here than in explicitly theological texts, but it appears in Alexander's sustained belief that institutions can be reformed, that individual legislators can choose cooperation over faction, and that political apprenticeship — learning from mentors, absorbing the customs of the Senate — is a genuine path of formation. This is not grace in the theological sense, but it is the natural analogue: the person shaped toward the good by habituation and relationship. - **Prudence (memory and civic wisdom)**: The book's deepest virtue contribution is to prudence-as-memory. Alexander reconstructs decisions across decades to show how past experience accumulates into the judgment a statesman needs. This is precisely what Aquinas means by *memoria* as an integral part of prudence — not nostalgia but the disciplined retention of experience that makes right action in new circumstances possible. - **Prudence (good counsel)**: A recurring motif in political memoirs of this type is the figure of the wise counselor — the mentor who redirects ambition, the colleague who names what no one else will say. To the extent Alexander traces those relationships, the book illustrates why Aquinas treats *eubulia* (good counsel) as a distinct virtue: the capacity to seek and receive guidance is not a weakness but a constitutive element of practical wisdom.
✓ Strengths
- ✓Alexander's six-decade retrospective models prudence-as-memory: he traces how early experiences in Tennessee politics shaped later decisions at the federal level, giving readers a case study in how accumulated experience informs sound judgment.
- ✓The book treats public service as genuine vocation rather than career, grounding civic participation in a sense of obligation to the common good — a disposition Aquinas would recognize as political justice.
- ✓Alexander's account of working across partisan lines in both the Senate and the Department of Education illustrates the virtue of friendliness (affabilitas) as a political necessity, not merely a personal nicety.
- ✓By narrating failures alongside successes — including legislative defeats and political miscalculations — the memoir resists the triumphalism that flattens the moral realism needed for authentic formation.
- ✓The arc from state-level work through Cabinet service to Senate leadership demonstrates foresight as an acquired skill: Alexander shows how a statesman learns to read institutional constraints and long-term consequences rather than reacting to immediate pressures.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's framework is implicitly secular and civic-humanist; Catholic readers will need to supply the theological anthropology themselves, since the work does not address questions of transcendence, sin, or redemption as categories of political life.
- ⚠The memoir form is susceptible to retrospective rationalization — presenting past decisions as more coherent than they were at the time — which can obscure rather than instruct the reader in genuine prudential reasoning.