Claes G. Ryn is Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America (C.U.A.), where he was Chairman of his department for six years. He has taught also at Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and Louisiana State University. A naturalized American, he was a doctoral and undergraduate student at Uppsala University in his native Sweden. Ryn has lived for most of his adult life in Washington, D.C. His teaching and research have been predominantly philosophical but interdisciplinary, combining study of ethics, culture, epistemology, and the history of Western political thought with study of American political thought, U.S. foreign policy, and international relations. His many books include America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire; A Common Human Ground: Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural Age; Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community; Will, Imagination and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality; and the recent novelA Desperate Man, a moral-political drama. In 2011 Ryn received the C.U.A. Provost’s award for most distinguished Achievement in Research. In 1992 The Graduate Students Association at C.U.A. named him Outstanding Graduate Professor at C.U.A. He is Editor of the scholarly journal Humanitas. Ryn was Chairman and co-founder of the National Humanities Institute. He was President of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters, of which he was also co-founder, and President of the Philadelphia Society. He has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia, especially China. A frequent visitor to China, he gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Peking University in 2000. In 2012 he was named Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University. Three of his books and many of his articles have been published in China. He is an Honorary Member of Heimdal at Uppsala University, Sweden’s oldest and largest student association.