 In his last public lecture , which was published posthumously , Havelock addressed the political implications of his own scholarly work . Delivered at Harvard on 16 March 1988 , less than three weeks before his death , the lecture is framed principally in opposition to the University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss . Strauss had published a detailed and extensive critique of Havelock 's The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics in March 1959 , as " The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy " in the journal Review of Metaphysics . ( Strauss died 14 years later in 1973 , the same year in which Havelock retired . ) Havelock 's 1988 lecture claims to contain a systematic account of Plato 's politics ; Havelock argues that Plato 's idealism applies a mathematical strictness to politics , countering his old teacher Cornford 's assertion that Platonic arguments that morality must be <unk> in arithmetical terms cannot be serious . This way of thinking about politics , Havelock concluded , could not be used as a model for understanding or shaping inherently <unk> interactions : " The stuff of human politics is conflict and compromise . " 
