About Korais, one could say what Voltaire wrote about Dante: “Everyone praises him, but few have read him.” Although he is the most unknown great figure of Greek political history, his brilliant name holds a prominent place in the history of European thought.
A bearer of high Greek intellectual tradition, he mingled with the most renowned intellectuals of Western Europe in the 18th century and was regarded by them as the most brilliant and complete intellectual figure. He co-authored, despite his deeply undermined health, with youthful vigor and profound knowledge of the intellectual state of his time. Even his last political texts exude a marvelous strength and a constantly renewing intellectual material.
Korais' main demand was to grasp antiquity again in all its cultural breadth. The central focus of his scientific studies on Greek classical texts is directed towards the educational and political meaning of ancient Greek civilization.
This humanistic component of his reflections, under which many outstanding minds from various peoples of the Western hemisphere naturally connect, can still serve today the same purposes, for mutual spiritual understanding of the European nations, which have been inevitably intertwined with each other through close spiritual ties throughout history.
Korais is rightly considered one of the best representatives of political science. His texts keep alive and cultivate with enchanting skill the tradition of that civilization, with the legacy and preservation of which all the peoples of the Western world are connected.
