When he was charting a course in the study of illiberalism at the University of Toronto, he ran aground on a 20th-century taboo.

The horrors of Nazi ideology had become a canard that stifled inquiry into the thinkers he had chosen to focus on in his dissertation—Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Alexander Dugin, and others.

Thrust into the spotlight as a “banned scholar,” Michael perceived the crisis of higher education, the death of free inquiry, and the censorship of debate.

This crisis was an outgrowth of modernity’s crisis, the very subject in political philosophy that he had chosen to study.

His quest led back to the first stirrings of political thought, to misunderstood texts like Plato’s Republic and controversial scholars like Leo Strauss. As a translator and correspondent of Alexander Dugin, Michael became known as the foremost expert on the philosophical background to the culture wars—and geopolitical wars—raging in our headlines.

At the Millerman School, we study ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims, modern and postmodern theorists and critics—and applying their ideas to the present.

Whether discussion begins with a current event, a novel, a historical period, or a philosopher, the crisis of modernity is a lens in which political philosophy always enters the foreground. As the foremost part of the “life-world” we inhabit, political perspectives color all our inquiry and enable us to restore order to our knowledge.