 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 analyzable 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 nonmathematical interactions: "The stuff of human politics is conflict and compromise."
