Abstract

Josef Pieper [1904-1997], a popular and prolific German philosopher, is probably best known for his small volume Leisure: The basis of culture . The book in review, Tradition: Concept and claim, was published originally in 1970, but the first English translation came out in 2008. Undoubtedly, Pieper, if he were still alive, would claim that the message of Tradition bears the same kind of importance today as it did in 1970—perhaps of even greater significance today due to the further development of such phenomena as postmodernist philosophy and secularism in Western culture. In ninety-nine pages, the book has a Table of Contents, Translator’s Preface and Introduction, six chapters, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. In this book the author attempts to describe the nature of tradition . The “kind of importance” characterizing tradition, according to the author, is capsulized in the final sentence of the book: “…real unity among human beings has its roots in nothing else but the common possession of tradition in the strict sense—I mean our sharing the sacred tradition that goes back to God’s words”