Political Consequences of the Sophists

"It was the clear relativism of the Sophists, not the mystical insights of Plato, nor Aristotle's aspiration after the Supreme Good, which dominated the thinking of the classical Greeks in their decadence. The failure of the Greeks to find an enduring popular religious sanction for the order of civilization had been a main cause of the collapse of the world of the polis."

~Russel Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 93-94.