John Armstrong hails from Scotland and is currently philosopher in residence at the Melbourne Business School. He is well known for several popular but elegant works on, broadly speaking, aesthetic matters: among them, Conditions of Love (2002), The Secret Power of Beauty (2004) and Love, Life, Goethe (2006). His recent book is more ambitious than its predecessors, but remains essentially in their fold.

Armstrong’s project in In Search of Civilization is to ‘get to the heart of civilization and uncover its secret meaning’. He is interested, not in exposing how other people have defined civilisation but in discovering how it should be defined. This requires philosophical investigation, for philosophy, Armstrong states – in a definition at once too narrow and too broad – ‘is the project of discovering and creating the ideas we need’.