Platonic Power and Political Realism

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Platonic Power and Political Realism

John R. WallachHunter College & The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, NY 10065, USA

[email protected]

Abstract

Despite often being condemned for having a paradigmatically unrealistic or dangerous conception of power, Plato expends much effort in constructing his distinctive con-ception of power. In the wake of Socrates’ trial and execution, Plato writes (in Gorgias and Republic I) about conventional (Polus’, Polemarchus’), elitist (Callicles’), and radi-cally unethical (Thrasymachus’) conceptions of power only to ‘refute’ them on behalf of a favoured conception of power allied with justice. Are his arguments as pathetic or wrong-headed as many theorists make them out to be – from Machiavelli to contem-porary political realists, from ‘political’ critics of Plato ranging from Popper to Arendt? And if not, has our understanding of power been impoverished? This question has been surprisingly unasked, and it is one I address by asking Plato and his critics: What are the dialectical moves Plato makes in refuting Socrates’s opponents and construct-ing his own conception of legitimate (i.e., just) power? Exactly how does he interweave his conception of power with a kind of ethics? How does it compare to recent concep-tions of political realism and the power-politics/ethics relationship – e.g., after Marx and Foucault? While addressing these questions I also attend to the issue of Plato’s historicity: to what extent do the limits of his language and world affect our reading of Plato and his political critics? Ultimately, I argue that and how Plato’s conception of power and its political dimensions realistically have much to teach us that we have not learned.

Keywords

Plato – power – realism – political – democracy – theory & history

From his contemporaries to Machiavelli to ours, Plato is often faulted for being either woefully naive in his understanding of worldly power or blithely and

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inhumanely arrogant in the way he believes that philosophy can usefully inform politics. Yet Plato developed his thinking about politics by directly engaging those who used and had views about power. And given his highly developed political and philosophical antennae, it is unlikely that his views about power were blind, cruel, or obtusely unrealistic. Moreover, it’s not as if Plato’s principal dialogical opponents for constructing his own view of power – primarily Meletus, Callicles, and Thrasymachus – have modern proponents that make their ancient predecessors mere fall-guys. Yet, current proponents of political realism and critics of his view of political power and knowledge make Plato a fall-guy for them and arguably have impeded our appreciation of Plato’s conception(s) of power and thereby power more generally. This paper would alter this intellectual condition by identifying the chief constituents of the ideas of power Plato favours in his dialogues. Ultimately, I argue that the most irritating features of his account of just power stem from his radically anti-conventional and dialectical views – which are not politically unrealistic nor radically anti-democratic – and the existential uncertainty of personal and political judgment. Insofar as ‘democracy’, literally understood, is unconven-tional relative to the currently authoritative character and distribution of power – after all, nowhere does a contemporary incarnation of the demos exer-cise kratos – my argument can improve our understanding of the ethical, intel-lectual, and political dimensions of power – particularly democratic power. After recalling critiques of Plato made by modern, primarily political realist, interpreters of Platonic political theory (Part I), I analyze three pivotal moments in Plato’s dialogues – from The Apology of Socrates, Gorgias, and Republic – that construct compatible views of power (Parts II-IV), and close by finding lessons from Platonic power (Part V).1

Two hurdles face this endeavour at its outset but also disclose part of its value. The first is linguistic. There is no exact equivalent in Attic Greek for the

1 Other dialogues that treat ‘power’ indirectly or from ideas in other dialogues – e.g., Protagoras, Statesman and Laws – only will be mentioned in passing. For a monograph on Plato on power, see Kimon Lycos, Plato on Justice and Power: Reading Book I of Plato’s Republic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987). For accounts via analytical classical philosophy, see Terry Penner, ‘Desire and Power in Socrates: The Argument of Gorgias 466A-468E that Orators and Tyrants Have No Power in the City’, Apeiron, 24.3 (1991), pp. 147-202, Heda Segvic, ‘No One Errs Willingly: The Meaning of Socratic Intellectualism’, in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 19 (2000), pp. 1-45. I owe these references to Malcolm Schofield. The most recent, thorough treatment of Plato’s political philosophy is Malcolm Schofield, Plato: Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Schofield offers insightful accounts of Plato’s views of power, but he does not differentiate dunamis and kratos (cf. below) and does not directly thematize or theorize Plato’s conception of power.

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English word, ‘power’.2 Instead, the semantic range of the English word ‘power’ is mostly covered by two words in Attic Greek, the denotations of which are not mutually exclusive. One is dunamis, often translated as capacity, ability, potency, or potentiality, as well as power. Dunamis is a necessary feature of social practice; it may be but is not necessarily good. It is composed of desire, motives, habits, and skills. The other is kratos, translated as force as often as power. It implies the use of force that, unlike dunamis, faces determined (not ‘natural’) resistance. For example, demokratia constantly has to overcome and resist oligarchical tendencies in society, even as it also was said by many to produce the most possible political good. Insofar as the meaning of each potentially leaks into that of the other – after all, powerful members of the political elite were known as dunatoi – I shall attend to instances of both (and their cognates, such as strength and violence, ischus and bia) as contributing to a Platonic notion of power.3

The second hurdle is historical and stems from radically different features of Plato’s political context compared to ‘ours’. Plato’s political world was intensely human, lacking in hardened institutional barriers to political action. It was not a world inflected by monotheistic religious traditions and hierarchies, states, standing armies, capital and its offsprings, programmatic ideologies, totalitar-ian or inverted totalitarian regimes, carceral continuums, political orders whose populations top one billion human beings, vast inequalities of wealth, nuclear-tipped drones, or looming climactic disasters. In the Athenian polis (Plato’s prototypical exemplar for ‘the political’), political power inherently expressed human agency, and judgments about its quality concerned individu-als or associations of individuals (koinoniai). These historical differences should condition our understanding of Platonic power, but they do not fore-stall inquiry into its meaning or utility. Initially, we simply need to attend to the various iterations of dunamis (primarily) and kratos, which together make up what we call ‘power’, in those Platonic dialogues where their political character is best expressed. Then, we recognize the extent to which their meanings are

2 The Oxford English Dictionary identifies initial usages of ‘power’ (derived from the Latin, potere, in the late 13th century), but its first major treatments in political theory and philoso-phy occur (interestingly!) in the relatively liberal works of Hobbes (Leviathan) and Locke (Essay Concerning Human Understanding).

3 In his book on Plato’s view of justice and power (supra, n. 1), Lycos connects ‘Socratic justice’ in Book I with dunamis. He finds in Plato valuable counterpoints to modern-day, individual-ist conceptions of political ethics. However, his straight-up reading of the complementarity of ‘power’ (mostly understood as dunamis) and ‘justice’ does not adequately account for the tension Plato recognizes between his logos of power and its usage in the world, especially as kratos – a tension which itself is part of Plato’s conception.



historically conditioned. Finally, we assume critical responsibility in identify-ing the effects of these conditions in situ as well as for us as we make sense and use of the Platonic conception of power. Throughout, I conceptualize Plato’s conceptions of power as efforts to reject conceptions of power that fail to pro-mote justice.

I ‘Modern’ Critiques of Platonic Power

Two sets of political thinkers take aim at Plato. The first and most durable set took shape principally via Machiavelli’s dismissal of political idealism in The Prince:

For many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist. However, how men live is so different from how they should live that a ruler who does not do what is generally done, but persists in doing what ought to be done, will undermine his power [piuttosto] rather than maintain it.4

Machiavelli probably had in mind contemporary Christian authors who drew on Cicero or Augustine’s imagined ‘city of God’ more than Plato when he wrote the above passage, but it certainly applies to Plato; for Plato notably shunned estimations of practical success as the principal guide of good political rule.5 Plato seems to have urged his readers (understood more as citizens than actual rulers) to act personally and politically according to a city (polis) constructed in reason (logos) as a paradigm (paradeigma – hypothetical model) rather than according to political conventions.6 This could lead them either to seek shelter from the political storm under the umbrella of philosophy or to enact a plausible link between his conception of logos and the resistance posed by ergon – which may call one to clash with ruling authorities. Above all, it should be seen as sanctioning the merits of thought and theory for constituting – not dominating – political action. Plato seemed to have chosen both courses of linking logos and ergon in his life in Athens in the wake of Socrates’ trial and

4 Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 54.

5 On Machiavelli’s intentions in writing The Prince, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought – Vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), especially pp. 118-38.

6 See Plato, Republic, 592 a-b.

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execution. Mostly, he stayed out of practical politics, writing dialogues while establishing and leading the Academy. But he also tried (and failed) to educate Dionysius II of Syracuse (in Syracuse) so as to make him a better, philosophi-cally inclined, and law-abiding ruler (Seventh Letter, 332d-e, 334c-d).

Plato constructed imaginary republics in both The Republic [Politeia] and The Laws [Nomoi]. In this respect, they fit Machiavelli’s bill. But Plato never was a ruler nor sought to be one, and cannot be said to have perversely used ruling power and authority based on these political paragdeigmata. None-theless, Machiavelli’s critique of an idealistic political perspective reasonably regards Plato as an idealist (though Plato would have regarded himself as a realist). The result launched an argument between political ‘idealists’ and ‘real-ists’ that remains current. In it, the latter presumptively win the debate because they grasp ‘reality’; consequences of political action; the future (!), and power better than leaders or ordinary citizens indebted to Platonic political thought. (Which is not to say that actual leaders adopt this perspective.7) In their con-ception of power, kratos dominates dunamis. Political realists assert the right-ness of their argument and the irrelevance of political ethics by claiming that they accurately account for necessities of political life – features of political action and practice that cannot be other than they are and hence are not sub-ject to ethical deliberation.

Apart from the Machiavellian-realist critique of Plato and his conception of power is a second set of Platonic critics that also charge that Plato has misun-derstood political reality. These ‘political’ critics of Plato have a larger, more diverse following – especially among contemporary political theorists who champions their own view of the nature of politics, the political realm, or political knowledge. Here’s a recount of the now familiar list: liberal positivists, such as Karl Popper, identify Plato’s political thought as the ancestral ground of (anti-political) totalitarianism; doctrinal elitists, such as Leo Strauss, view

7 Note the virtually universal condemnation by International Relations ‘realists’ of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. See John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy, 134 (2003), pp. 51-9, and their petition signed by thousands of American academics. Of course, many theorists of International Relations have been notoriously wrong about the ‘real power’ of the Soviet Union in the 1980s or autocratic Arab states before the Arab Spring. One is reminded of the highly remunerated expertise of macro-economists for their supposed grasp of reality, despite being regularly disproved by actual economic activity. I should say here that I am not referring to the contextual realism perspec-tive of Raymond Geuss, who uses the terms ‘real’ or ‘realistic’ mostly to encourage attention to political action, practical displacement over time, and effective discourses of legitimation over the intuitive doctrinalism of contemporary liberal (i.e., Rawlsian) political theory. Geuss recognizes a constitutive but secondary role for ethics, belief, and motivation in politics. See Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).



Plato as authoring ideas of Truth and Virtue that have authoritative, perennial and political value over and against any constitutive significance to ‘power’; ethical liberals, such as Isaiah Berlin and Gregory Vlastos, associate Plato’s political ideas with authoritarianism, and modern-day advocates of reviving a republican or democratic enactment of ‘the political’, namely Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, read Plato as anti-political because he improperly views political power through the frame of single-gauged ideas displayed as a techne (craft, skill). Other notable critics (e.g., Foucault, Rorty, Connolly) regard Plato’s efforts to identify notions of knowledge, virtue, or truth as ineluctably arguing for Knowledge, Virtue, or Truth, which reveals how Plato has lost touch with the complexity and ambiguity of political life.8 But I have argued that these theorists, whose political perspectives can stand on their own, do not fully appreciate how Plato insistently identifies the importance of linking logos and ergon via judgment and distinguishes a political techne from other forms of technai.9 These interpretive mistakes impede one’s grasp of the Platonic conception of power. But I mostly do not take issue here with the ‘political’ critics of Plato – partly because each clearly positions their reading of Plato within a Weltanschauung that does not depend on Plato (except for providing arguments – or anti-arguments – from a towering intellectual figure) and mostly because my aim is to give a Platonic conception of power its due – taking particular note of how its ethical dimensions connect to justice, politi-cally or personally. Instead, I shall focus on the realist critique of Plato’s conception of political power.

8 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1 – The Spell of Plato (Princeton, 1964 [1945]; Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1994); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), Ch. 2. Foucault acutely comments on Plato’s political texts in The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Yet he notably avoids analyzing them in terms of power. Haber-mas offers a trenchant critique of Arendt’s political theory for not adequately accounting for ‘power’ in ‘Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power’, Social Research, 44.1 (1977), pp. 3-24. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1995).

9 On the importance of the links and disjunctures between logos and ergon in Plato’s political thought and the differences between the political art from other kinds of technai in Plato’s dialogues, see John R. Wallach, The Platonic Political Art: A Study of Critical Reason and Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

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II Apology of Socrates: Power as Collective Opinion

I begin with Plato’s Apology of Socrates, because its account of the trial and death of Socrates in 399 provides a relatively genuine historical source and practical anchor for Plato’s thinking about power that is at least partially independent of Plato’s own experience. It exhibits the nature and limitations of the ‘power’ (dunamis and kratos) of Socrates’ own logos and character, in the face of the accumulated force of collective opinion and its effect on Athenian laws and politicians. The conflict between the excellence or virtue (arete) of Socrates and the Athenians’ practice of their demokratia – itself a combination of the dunamis of the demos and its active exercise as kratos – created what has been called ‘Plato’s Socratic Problem’.10 In the dialogue, however, that problem is only intimated. We simply see Socrates coming up against both the brunt of the power (dunamis and kratos) of collective institutions he distrusts (juries, the Assembly) and a history of prejudice that he believes has domed him no matter what he argues cogently in his apologia. Since Plato’s Socrates believes that he ought to live, that he is innocent of all charges against him (the infor-mal ones identifying him as a reckless sophist and speculative materialist cos-mologist and the legal indictments lodged by Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon for corrupting the young and impiety) and argues that he is a good Athenian – despite which his accusers win the backing of the majority of the jurors (280-221) to convict him as a law-breaker and punish him with death – we need to understand the nature of both Socratic and anti-Socratic power expressed at the trial, particularly the extent to which each is democratic. Doing so sets us on the most revealing path for understanding the conception of power Plato later promotes in his less historically anchored dialogues.

The principal manifestation of kratos in Plato’s Apology of Socrates results from collective discourse – that is, not discourse, character, or force expressed by individuals as discrete agents but collectivized as prejudice or imperson-ated by influential politicians. Plato’s Socrates, if not the historical Socrates, here takes issue with the potential of this discourse and its agents – i.e., the demos, as an anonymous, personified, or institutionalized agent – to act arbi-trarily if not tyrannically – qua demos tyrannos.11 The historical Socrates adds a

10 See John R. Wallach, ‘Plato’s Socratic Problem, and Ours’, History of Political Thought, 18 (1997), pp. 377-98, and The Platonic Political Art.

11 Democracy was lampooned in comedy as demos tyrannos. But since the democratization of Athens after the constitutional reforms of Kleisthenes and their extension by Miltiades, democracy was mostly hailed as the antidote to tyranny. Note the association of the birth of democracy with the late sixth-century tyrannicides but also its subsequent problema-



philosophical coating to criticisms of Athenian democracy, even as he does not regard it as beyond redemption, in five charges levied at it in Plato’s Apology of Socrates.12 They are: first, the manner of speaking sanctioned in a trial – in which the defendant is encouraged to appeal to hundreds of jurors by engag-ing their emotions more than their reason (and may encounter roars of shock or disapproval – thoruboi – as Socrates did a number of times at his trial); sec-ond, the history of collective views about Socrates that prejudice the opinions of the jurors (which catalyzed the informal charges against him); third, the support behind Socrates’ accusers (who surely had previously garnered sup-port for their indictment against Socrates); fourth, the presumption that politi-cal institutions and associations produce arete (pace Meletus vs. Socrates’ elenchus about who improves the young), and fifth, the sacred character of the honours Socrates lampoons (when he suggests that his punishment should be free meals at the Pyrtaneum).13

Insofar as the opponents of Socrates acted during the Athenians’ democracy and utilized its institutions to promote their aims, their actions reflected the workings of Athenian democracy. But their actions and power (dunamis and kratos) more specifically stem from their ability to legally empower the force of unnecessarily ignorant collective opinion. Such discourse does not directly manifest the practical reason or deliberated judgment of democratic citizens as much as it does ephemeral conditions and sanctioned institutional, but legally loose, power. (Socrates was indicted under the notoriously malleable impiety decree.) In other words, the opposition to Socrates does not come from the Athenians as individuals or from the demos per se but from the demos aggregated and guided not by critical knowledge but by an orchestrated singu-larity of opposition to Socrates’ way of being and speaking as a democratic citi-zen of Athens – even though it was arguably a valid manifestation of what it

tization in Thucydides and Athenian tragedy and comedy. As Athens and its democracy became wrapped up with its arche and war, its image became seriously tarnished. See Kathryn Morgan, ed. Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), particularly the essays by Raaflaub, Kallet, Henderson, Morgan, and Ober. For a recent interpretation by a political theorist of Aristophanes, see John Zumbrunnen, Aristophanic Comedy and the Challenge of Democratic Citizenship (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013).

12 On the importance of identifying the historical Socrates, see Gregory Vlastos, ‘The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy’, Political Theory, 11 (1983), pp. 495-516 and John R. Wallach, ‘Socratic Citizenship’, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), pp. 393-413.

13 For more recent illustrations of how demagogues whip up public opinion to act tyranni-cally, see the Norwegian realist playwright Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama, An Enemy of the People and the 2012 movie by the Norwegian filmmaker, Thomas Winterberg, The Hunt.

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meant to be a citizen in the Athenian democracy. (See the speech of ‘the Laws’ in Plato’s Crito). For Socrates, the demos may be using its dunamis to enact tyrannical kratos. But apart from expressing doubts about the inherent virtue of majorities, Plato’s Socrates never makes this point explicitly, and such a judgment is qualified by the democratic procedures followed by the (rela-tively) democratic jury designed to guard against its judgment and power (dunamis and kratos) from being tyrannical.14

Power suffused the social life of the Athenian polis and its democratic activ-ities. Socrates’ complaint about political power was not so much about its democratic character as its collective, political quality – which would surely accompany public action in other political regimes. In the Apology of Socrates, Socrates took issue with the Athenian politicians who presumptively claimed virtue (arete) for themselves and its major political institutions. Socrates did not believe this could be the case, and he spent his life searching for the mean-ing of virtue and inquiring about it in one-on-one dialogues with anyone he met in the Athenian agora – citizen or non-citizen (Apology, 30a). Insofar as a class of citizens acted as rulers who led others without their deliberate partici-pation, they formed a phalanx of power that prevented less powerful citizens from expressing the ethical dimensions of their own political potential. The ‘many’ lost their plurality and acted as ‘one’, potentially like a tyrant (tyrannos) – whether as a class, principal agents of the city, or supporters of the Athenian empire (arche).15 While this phenomenon occurs whenever a collec-tivity deliberates and comes to a singular decision, the consolidation surely results in epistemological and ethical compromises about what shall count as authoritative political knowledge. The resulting political monolith warrants critical discourse and challenges (parrhesia).16 But such a scenario does not directly anticipate the dichotomies of the powerful vs. the powerless, private vs. public, or the state vs. the citizenry, binary frameworks of the presence or

14 The burden of the Athenians’ arche as a tyrannos was famously articulated by Pericles (II.63.2) and Cleon (III.37.2) Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. For Thucydides, the tyrannos of the Athenian empire was a mordant observation that referred to Athens as a polis and a democracy. See W. Robert Connor, ‘Tyrannis Polis’, in Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Else, eds. J. H. D’Arms and J. W. Eadie (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1977), pp. 95-109. Early in the Fourth Century, the Athenians adopted more procedures to forestall rash judgments by the Assembly without diluting its power.

15 For literary accounts of popular tyranny or the effects of a demos tyrannos, see the articles by Kallet, Henderson, and Morgan in Kathryn Morgan, ed. Popular Tyranny.

16 On parrhesia in Plato, see Michel Foucault, The Government of the Self and Others and The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the College de France, ed. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011).



absence of kinds of power in political life that became central in the work of Machiavelli and from Hobbes forward.

The ethical relationship between agents of political power and their sub-jects was less well-defined, even more subtle, in ancient Athenian democracy. Two features of the discursive context in which Plato wrote make this clear. First, when treating the demos as a collective in the late fifth and early fourth century, literary criticism addressed problematics of politics in various politi-cal orders as much as democracy per se: dramatists addressed tyrannical actors; Plato and Aristotle found greater fault with oligarchies than with democracies.17 Democracy and political life are inextricably combined in 5th and 4th century Athenian practices, insofar as democracy is a kind of polity, which makes it impossible to tag responsibility for the Athenians’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War on its character as either a powerful polis or a reckless demos (a practical conflation that surely influenced the anti-imperialist Plato). ‘Mistakes were made’, one might say in the vein of contemporary political rhet-oric, because responsibility for them is difficult to pinpoint. Besides, they result from culture and politics as much as democracy. These factors also might have signified either the dark side of the otherwise beneficial possession of political power, or human beings’ natural proclivity for greed.18 The answer is impossi-ble to determine conclusively in scholarship. Critics of Plato, however, are prone to conflate them thoughtlessly, reading his criticism of politics as a derivative criticism of democracy or as a condemnation of politics per se.19 Secondly, asserting a clear gap between Platonic power and ethics ignores the extent to which virtue (arete) was a practice as well as an ethic and Plato aimed to enact virtue as a good in logos and ergon.

The power of ancient Greek virtue was distinctive and infused Plato’s dia-logues. In conventional discourse, virtue (arete) was supposed to exhibit power as dunamis, not kratos. Virtue signified effective goodness and, as exercised by its possessor, was supposed to generate beneficial consequences, results, or

17 On Plato, see Wallach, The Platonic Political Art, chapters 4-5; on Aristotle, Politics, IV.11. 18 On the role of pleonexia in Greek literature and political theory, see Ryan K. Balot, Greed

and Injustice in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).19 For example, Josiah Ober funnels Plato’s criticism of politics and democracy through the

lens of an anti-democratic political disposition. In this, he follows the interpretations of Plato offered by Popper and Vlastos. See his Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Six Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For a hierarchical view of the relationship between philosophical and political virtue, see Leo Strauss, ‘What Is Political Philosophy?’ in What Is Political Philosophy? and other studies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959). For a more differentiated view, see Wallach, The Platonic Political Art.

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outcomes. But that goodness was not guaranteed as one can count on the result of a mathematical function. It could be thwarted; it may lack kratos because his or her virtue failed them).20 This issue arises in the Apology, when Socrates employs the horse-metaphor to challenge the foundations of the charge against him of having actually corrupted the young. It reappears in the Gorgias and the Republic when Socrates argues that those with arete actu-ally have more power than tyrannical characters, who seem to be happier and more practically successful because of their propensity to push others around and commit injustice. The issues of the relation of a potential virtue in democ-racy and the power of virtue are best illuminated by interpreting Plato’s con-ception of power in the latter two dialogues.

III Gorgias and Republic I: Power in Rhetoric, Nature, and Political Rule

The confrontation between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias and between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Republic I present the classic sites for witness-ing Plato’s attempt to justify a conception of power rooted in arete and duna-mis rather than kratos. The rationales for doing so in each case relate to each other and, insofar as they deal with power in the public realm, harken back to Socrates’ confrontation with his accusers and the Athenian jury in the Apology. The differences between the Gorgias and Republic I do not evince philosophi-cal differences, although they assume unlike forms in response to related but not identical issues. Callicles enters the dialogue after two previous, interlocu-tors – the famous rhetorician, Gorgias, and one of his fans, Polus – have been pummelled by Socrates’ elenchus into agreeing that the effective power caused by their rhetorical conceptions and strategies is ‘actually’ an evanescent mirage – essentially useless except as a tool of tomfoolery. Thrasymachus enters the Republic after Socrates convinces Polemarchus (who continued a discussion about happiness and justice initiated by Socrates and Polemarchus’s father, Cephalus) that living an unjust life yields no benefits to its agent. In both dia-logues, Socrates builds his claim about the power of arete by denying episte-mological and ethical – and, hence, practical – authority to its conventional definitions. In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that conventional definitions of rhetoric as a skill (techne) actually lack authority; rhetoricians succeed only as

20 This phenomenon is known all too well to American citizens who watch their Congress, intended by Founder James Madison to manifest public virtue but now mostly wagged by their major financial contributors and the allure of personal-political kratos.



managers of ignorance – even amid their esteem in the politics of democratic Athens (cf. Cleon and Socrates’ accusers).21 In the Republic, Socrates intellectu-ally breaks the connection between justice and power as domination (law as kratos) by disputing a claim that he tags on Thrasymachus – that justice as power must exhibit features of a techne (and so serve its subject, antithetical to Thrasymachus’ initial claim that justice is in the interest of the stronger). Drawing on the shared features of arete and techne as practical, knowledge-able, social, and aesthetically approved – but transcending them by expressing socially valued standards of successful conduct for the individual as a whole – enabled Plato’s Socrates to argue that a tyrant lacked virtue and, hence, was powerless. Such claims by Plato’s Socrates in each dialogue rejected evidence stemming from conventional observations of personal and political success. Socrates denies that power (dunamis) reliably flows from the kind of domina-tion which convicted Socrates, because it fails to exhibit or promote arete.

These pivotal moments in the dialogues are typically read as illustrating Socrates’ or Plato’s ignorance about politics and the useless or dangerous polit-ical features of their philosophies. They justify not only the scorn of Callicles and Thrasymachus but also the early modern Machiavelli’s apparent disdain for Plato and the mid-20th century anger of Berlin and Arendt about the egre-gious effects of politically empowered philosophy, justifying the beliefs of all three in philosophy’s marginally useful role in determining ethical and politi-cal knowledge.22 In light of these Platonic arguments, what shall we say about their criticisms? Is Plato turning his back on the world, resentfully creating a path for vengeful philosophy to get back at unjust politics? Or, is something else going on? Arendt grounds her critique of Plato by charging him with exclusively using ordinary technai as a model or paradigm for his conception of politics.23 Indeed, analogies from technai and the generic features of a techne

21 See Thucydides, III.37-40, etc. For a sympathetic view of Cleon, see M. I. Finley, ‘Athenian Demagogues’, in his Democracy: Ancient and Modern, rev. ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), pp. 38-75. About the extent to which the dialogue encourages democratic or anti-democratic perspectives, see Benjamin Barber and J. Peter Euben’s articles in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, eds., Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies Ancient and Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

22 See Arendt, The Human Condition and ‘What is Authority?’; Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118-72; ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, in Against the Current (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 25-79 and ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 1-19.

23 See Arendt, The Human Condition and ‘What is Authority?’, from Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968).

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inform Socrates’ arguments in both the Gorgias and the Republic, but they are not models. Plato’s Socrates renders the highest intellectual art, dialektike, as a second-order art that supervises the use of ordinary technai. But is the use of techne as a touchstone amid a wholly unstructured and unguided field of polit-ical activity as reprehensible from a political or democratic point of view as Arendt makes it out to be, especially given its acceptance as a constituent of political deliberation by the Athenians’ democratic Ekklesia? Let us look more carefully at how the concept of techne informs Plato’s conception of power.

First, the Gorgias. There, Socrates employs the techne analogy to undermine logically the power and authority of conventional rhetoric and rhetoricians’ associated claims that they possess a distinctive kind of politically useful knowledge.24 Gorgias claims that the techne of his rhetorike was marked by its purely discursive, elevated character relative to other craft-arts (demiourgike techne) and its power (dunamis) to command them in ways that benefitted both rulers and the city as a whole in so far they exhibited knowledge about justice and injustice. (450b-460a). He vouchsafed that his rhetoric even could be more persuasive about medical matters than the knowledge and techne of a doctor. The key to its success was that the source of judgment and approval of rhetorical claims stems from that of a gathering, such as that which occurs in the Assembly or a ‘crowd’ (ochlos). It is not, therefore, engaged in teaching-persuasion but conviction-persuasion. (455a) This eventually leads Socrates in his subsequent discussion with Polus (Gorgias’s subsequent defender in the dialogue with Socrates) to tar rhetoric as nothing more than a knack (empeiria) – not an art (techne) – success in the practice of which depends on flattery and immediate gratification of the crowd’s desire for pleasure. (461e-465a) Socrates argues that rhetoric has no sturdier guidepost than that which satisfies the pleasures of the majority in a crowd, despite the fact that it presumes to be able to manage and direct the way in which citizens seek pleasure.25 Callicles, Polus’s successor, is horrified by this association, insofar as he associates his own power with the ability to transcend the character, knowledge, and experience of ordinary citizens (482c-486c). Moreover, Socrates now drags the most revered Athenian politicians and statesmen – Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Pericles – into the category of rhetori-

24 It is a more discursive and ethically neutral posture than that presented by the sophist Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras, where Protagoras believed that his distinctive techne provided a kind of politike techne and arete to citizens that would enable them to become better and more powerful in both private and public affairs (318a-b, 318e-319a),

25 As he did with regard to sophistry in Protagoras (351e-357e).



cians who fecklessly lead the multitude into making political blunders.26 (455e, 503c, 516a-518e) Plato’s Socrates has employed a highly dubious standard of political evaluation. If their leadership does not result in the political and edu-cational improvement of citizens, then they must not be practitioners of their art – a dubious claim that presupposes hospitable conditions for good listen-ing and acting, and judges the possession of art (techne) and power (dunamis) solely by the ‘success’ of its agents (which he rejected for judging his own dis-course about virtue).

Plato, of course, is writing in the wake of the Athenians’ loss of the Peloponnesian War as well as the trial and execution of Socrates. Perhaps more revealingly, he also is not writing in a Christian, post-Machiavellian, capitalist world which imagines the malleability of time and space by religion, politics, science, or capitalist technologies. There is no temporal trajectory of redemp-tion (pace Augustine); no calculus (of often dubious reliability) of conse-quences in the face of internecine city-state conflict; neither fortuna nor the interpretive screen of Christianity; no sense of knowledge as the power to change nature (pace Bacon or genetic modification), digitize or monetize our minds; no pressure to generate ever-larger quarterly profits; no power to digi-tize or practice of the basic elements of political knowledge or leadership. In turn, we also need to keep Plato’s different economic, ethical, and political world in mind when interpreting his conception of a techne. It is unhinged to ‘technology’; rather, it is a sign of a reliable, knowledgeably informed practice – nothing more presumptuous than that. To be sure, it is ‘anti-political’ in the Arendtian sense – for Plato relies on it to produce a critical point of reference for improving the conventional dynamic of politics as played out in public institutions among politically active citizens, traditional educational stan-dards, leaders who may lack minimal ethical or intellectual credentials, and rhetoricians. It also is anti- political insofar as philosophy is superior to politics as the best tool for overcoming civil strife (stasis) and attaining justice.27

This is the political and socio-cultural scene – the domain of logos-ergon – with which Plato is engaging as a philosophical dialectician interested in justi-fying a new kind of politics and philosophy that would complement one another (See Republic 473c-e). It is much less a complaint about ‘democracy’ per se (whose meaning we have great difficult truly imagining today) than it is

26 Political leaders in Athens had no official, executive power that enabled them to exer-cise political power without the endorsement of the demos.

27 This is hardly surprising, if we accept the well-known passage from the Seventh Letter (325e-326a) as evidence of Plato’s actual thoughts about his life and attitude toward the relationship of philosophy and politics.

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about the distance between contemporary politics – in e.g., the Athenians’ democracy, the Spartans’ oligarchy, or the Persians’ monarchy – and justice. His project is to generate greater authority for philosophy as a practice that could, when joined with political power (dunamis), alter politics so that it would be marked more by virtue (arete) than ignorance and force (kratos). To think that Plato believed that he could actually institutionalize kallipolis as if on a blank canvas – a paradeigma for its perfect articulation (501a-c) – indi-cates a post-Platonic view of philosophy as doctrinalism that is incompatible with both Plato’s embrace of dialogue and his view of education in the Republic. It also suggests a visceral aversion to the kind of radically unconventional political thought that Plato invented.28

Pivotal to the course of the discussion from now on in the Gorgias and simi-larly at a comparable turning point in Socrates’ discussion with Thrasymachus in Republic I, are two arguments. One relies on a unique (and controversial) definition of power (dunamis) in critical discourse (logos) and the linkage of that definition to new renderings of political knowledge that may be exhibited actually (in ergon) in an individual’s (or group’s) capacity to exercise power and effect good – i.e., to be an agent of virtue (arete). As mentioned previously, power as dunamis principally signified power in relation to ability rather than brute force (kratos). But that didn’t mean that dunamis had no relation to the capacity to get things done, accomplish matters of consequence, or make things happen. Moreover, power as dunamis could indicate domination over a resistant material or person. But for Socrates the measure of power as dunamis was understood in terms of its ultimate purpose rather than immediate signs of effective force – and that value was primarily derived from philosophical argument rather than religious belief, sheer force, or teleology.29 Thus, a doctor who failed to prescribe a cure that treated the illness, even if it temporarily

28 This view is hardly original and carries much scholarly support. See the views of George Grote and his mentor, J. S. Mill. For a full monograph on Grote and Athenian political thought, see Kyriakos N. Demetriou, George Grote on Plato and Athenian Democracy: A Study in Classical Reception (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999) as well as a series of his more recent studies, Studies on the Reception of Plato and Greek Political Thought in Victorian Britain (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011). For a brief account of Grote and Mill’s conceptualizations of Athenian democracy and Platonic thought, see Melissa Lane, Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind (London: Duckworth, 2001), pp. 23-8. For the first thorough account of the fertile mix of Victorian and Greek thought, from a more ideological perspective, see F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

29 Much of this argument is emphatically made by Schofield, Plato, pp. 66-70.



alleviated pain, was powerless as a doctor. In Book I of the Republic, that mis-take would reflect him acting as something other than a doctor, since crafts-men (demiourgoi) as such never make mistakes when they practice their craft (techne). The same analysis applies to a navigator who didn’t bring his ship to port, or a politician who didn’t improve the material and ethical condition of the citizens who trusted his leadership. Just as a doctor as such knows the techne that aids the health of his patients, a politician was supposed to exercise a techne for the souls of citizens! (Gorgias, 465c) Although this consideration appears presumptuous nowadays, when we don’t expect politicians to ensure our happiness or well-being, we expect them (in public discourse) to minimize unemployment and maximize access to appropriate and well-paid jobs; ensure competent healthcare for all; guarantee effective public education, and pro-vide for the common defence – which surely contribute to an individual’s potential for happiness or well-being.

The line of argument pursued by Plato’s Socrates here elaborates his attempt at the beginning of the Gorgias (447a) to transcend the dichotomous meta-phor of battling deeds and words. If rhetoric as a political discourse is simply war by other means (cf. Foucault), then it will be no better than war as a tool for settling conflicts according to justice. Brute force carries the day in war but does nothing in the aftermath to create a peaceable collective (or community – koinonia) among the previously warring parties. Socrates’ argument with Gorgias – and eventually Polus and Callicles – is that their practices of rhetoric may subdue their opponents temporarily, via power as force (kratos), but will not foster civility or promote the kind of mutual understanding that a political order requires. Rhetoric’s only ‘skill’ (in Plato’s framework) entails the ability to persuade members of a crowd to find ephemeral pleasure. As such, it is not a techne and does not have power as dunamis. (459e-460a; cf. Republic, 477d). Socrates tries to bring Gorgias along to his side by obtaining his agreement to the view that rhetoric is supposed to be useful to others and that such utility depends on an awareness of its effects, which have longer legs than immediate pleasure. Gorgias initially indicates a lack of concern about its effects – e.g., whether the acquisition of the art of rhetoric promotes justice or injustice – but affirms that he wants his art to be used for just purposes, even if there is no guarantee that his students will do so. (457b) (Here, Socrates is the consequen-tialist.) Plato’s Socrates rounds out his debate with Gorgias by noting in dia-logue with Polus that rhetoric, to be a techne, must be reliably grounded in knowledge about the purpose of the act and its just consequences. Power (dunamis) is a good (agathon), and it is effective, in general or as a techne, only if it does good, i.e., that for the sake of which it was intended. But this

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presupposes a reality in which no practice is long sustained by badness – kakon 465a, 466a-468e). Socrates, thereby, has transformed the legitimacy of rhetoric from a discursive tool of political schemers adept at demagoguery to a political discourse whose power depends upon knowledge, and educable citizens. But his presuppositions about the nature of reality sound goofy to Callicles and, in the Republic, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus.

In the Gorgias, Plato’s Socrates has moved much too far and too fast for Callicles’s taste in damning the power of rhetoric. After all, Socrates has not named an agent who either could know the substantive discourse (or logos) of goodness or enact it usefully as a constitutive element of political practice (or ergon). This is a political question, insofar as rhetoric was ipso facto a politi-cal discourse. (In the first part of the Fourth Century, when Plato wrote the Gorgias, politicians were called hoi rhetores.30) Callicles believes he has an answer to the problem of agency by affirming that rhetoric, indeed, is a tool, and should generate justice, but only justice which conforms with nature, not convention, and with the perceptions of the naturally superior few (e.g. The Thirty, which acted tyrannically against the well-being of Socrates and the pre-ponderance of Athenians) rather than with the inferior but numerous many who typically dictate cultural and political conventions (nomoi) (488b-e). Callicles, however, cannot say what counts as naturally superior or better, and Socrates contends that Callicles’ standards of successful rhetoric actually stem from the many whom he would dominate. The reader is left with two unseemly alternatives for identifying a proper art of rhetoric or political art: (1) Callicles’s practice of presumptively aristocratic demagoguery that satisfies the desires of ‘the best’, or (2) the conventional practices of Athenian democratic institu-tions, personified either by politicians identified by Socrates as incompetent or the demos (512e) which had been persuaded by rhetoricians and orators to judge that Socrates’ logos and arete legitimated his capital punishment.31 In the face of such accusations, Plato’s Socrates says that the ‘good’ produced by a genuine techne of rhetoric and politics is potentially available to all citizens (507e-508c). Plato ‘solves’ this problem of political agency, of identifying some practical figure or phenomenon that exemplifies his definition, by having Socrates counterfactually claim – the historical Socrates avoided the Assembly

30 See M. H. Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

31 ‘I won’t have anything to say . . . I shall be like a doctor on trial before a jury of children, with a chef as a prosecutor’ (521e, trans. Tom Griffith). One might think of respectable climatologists trying to make an argument before many Republicans in the Congress of the United States.



and Courts – that he is the only one able to practice the political art (politike techne), which replaces the art of rhetoric (521b).

Most interesting is the next political move Plato’s Socrates makes in both the Gorgias and Republic I. He flips the discussion from a political to a personal context, which enables him to address the question of agency in a personal as well as philosophical way. So what if Socrates’ practice of the political art led to his death? He will not be harmed, at least psychologically – which is most important – for it is worse to do injustice than to suffer injustice. A claim that Plato’s Socrates intimated in Plato’s Apology of Socrates receives philosophical substantiation in these two dialogues. The character of agency and its relation to justice is now relatively depoliticized, and rests solely on philosophical foundations. The justification used by Socrates in both dialogues does not depend on the exercise of political power. The criteria of Plato’s Socrates for arete in the Gorgias trump the life promoted by the ‘naturally’ superior Callicles and, in Republic I, silence Thrasymachus’s defence of the life of injustice as a powerful vehicle for achieving happiness. Republic I ends much like the Gorgias (before its closing myth). Just as Plato ironically or irreally has Socrates in the Gorgias claim that he, exemplar of virtue, is the master of the political art, so does Plato generate a Socrates in Republic I who seriously argues that no unjust, insufficiently virtuous person can exercise power. For he would not know how to have the trust and friendship necessary for cooperative action, a sine qua non of political power.

If Plato is actually interested in generating a feasible conception for a justly practiced art of rhetoric, the Gorgias only yields an empty set. The question then becomes, what has Plato been doing in this dialogue? Is he simply decon-structing conventional modes of political discourse that presume to exhibit useful political knowledge and techniques? Is he offering another venue for rejecting the demos as a political authority? Or is he demonstrating the difficulties facing the construction of a reliable, knowledgeable, and just mode of political discourse? Similar problems become evident in Republic I, in which Thrasymachus’ exasperation with Socrates’ unwillingness or inability to define justice per se lead him to barge into the discussion and affirm the con-ventional but unsettling definition of justice as the effect of the interest of the stronger – i.e., power as kratos. This not only turns on its head Socrates’ defini-tion offered in the Gorgias that political power (politike dunamis) only can be the effect of knowledge and virtue, i.e., justice; it motivates Glaucon and Adeimantus to challenge Socrates in the Republic to define justice in a world of potentially hospitable consequences for unjust action. Socrates has utilized philosophical argument to refute his opponents, but that argument still has no political complement; its practical dunamis awaits the rest of the Republic.

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IV Republic II-X: Power in Justice

The discourse of the Republic, to recall, is not supposed to articulate a notion of justice that has unhappy or harmful results. Plato conceptualizes justice (dikaiosune) as a good in itself in order to secure the philosophical merit of justice from dependence of justice on unjust, extant political institutions. He does not deny that it also has beneficial consequences. So Socrates begins to generate a conception of justice that relies on relatively ordinary ideas (what societies need to exist; how they grow, etc.); a belief that justice as a virtue for the soul (psyche) can be seen better in terms of the structure of a state (polis and politeia); a sense that societies are not naturally self-regulating, and so require some sort of expertise and virtue for political rule to make power just (which Socrates ultimately identifies as a hyper-critical form of political phi-losophy); citizens to care for each other despite the inevitable differences that accompany higher or lower status in the polis, and receptive conditions for belief in the virtue of philosophical intelligence. This is how he uses philoso-phy to set the baselines for a more virtuous and well-informed exercise of political power, the wherewithal for radical psychological and political educa-tion (as noted by Rousseau in Emile) and new social structures. These mea-sures, of course, are extremely problematic and invariably can be abused, but it is not as if any society has managed to sustain a coherent, adequately ethical identity without using them. Moreover, Plato obviously is aware of them, and demonstrates that awareness in his discussion of political and personal forms of injustice in Books VIII-IX of the Republic, as he narrates stories of four forms of injustice – timocracy or timarchy; oligarchy; democracy, and tyranny – that readily follow from the inability of philosophical guardians in a Platonic aristocracy to mate at the ‘right’ time. Notably, he describes these forms of injustice after he describes the shocking measures needed to establish a just polis.

The most troublesome parts of the Republic for us do not concern his critical construction of the need for philosophy and virtue as captains of power – although that is where he most directly engages ordinary political conventions and which traditionally attracts the most attention as ‘the third wave’. For us, no raw nerves are struck; imagining Ivy League or Oxbridge philosophers exer-cising authoritative political power is implausible on so many levels that it bothers no one. Rather, they concern how the kallipolis that would be a model for a just psyche could come into being. Since Plato does not endorse force as an instrument of education but only believes that radically unconventional political ideas can ground a good society, he constantly faces genuine conun-drums – conundrums that have bedevilled subsequent radical political theo-



rists in the history of Western political thought (such as Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Marx). How does one portray and justify radical political education that would make possible a more just, sustainable, and democratic society – espe-cially when the habits and prejudices of ordinary citizens (fortified by the powers that be) resist them? Plato, Rousseau, and Marx recognized these nearly insurmountable difficulties and envisioned improbable means to address them – e.g., the Noble Lie, the omniscient (but human) Lawgiver, and a politically knowledgeable and virtuous proletariat.32

In the Republic, the challenges of Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus prevent Plato’s Socrates from worrying about the immediate practicality or popularity of his arguments and paradeigmata. But he does worry about the cultivation of virtue in kallipolis. So, to build a polis in logos, he: censors Homer and recasts Greek religion; eliminates all institutional barriers to equality between the sexes; opposes rulers’ primary attachments to their immediate families; predisposes citizens not to harbour prejudices against their nearby neighbours or neighbouring poleis so as to avoid civil discord (stasis), and seeks to overcome antagonism to dialectical education and philosophy. Such phi-losophy sets guidelines for a virtuous and well-informed exercise of political power. It overcomes practical resistance to its authority that stems from power as domination (kratos). In the Republic such philosophy can theoretically per-suade a demos that initially is portrayed as susceptible to the wiles of sophistry and antagonistic to philosophy (492b, 494a ) to welcome its political advice and philosophical education (499d-500a). The demos can turn away from the dark world of manipulated illusions to philosophical self-understanding (518b-e) – though Plato’s Socrates believes that few are likely to do so.

For the past three decades, one has often heard hackles about ‘enlighten-ment’ (or the Enlightenment) or praise for the virtues of otherness, difference, and opposition – as if they automatically exhibited political virtue (thus sim-ply inverting the modal objects of their criticism) or as if virtue was inherently a political vice. Such criticisms surely have broadened our understanding of cramped and self-serving renditions of both the meaning of humanity and where potential for human virtue can be found. But they have not offered a practical politics for an extant demos. For Plato, there is just and virtuous power, which works, and unjust power, which doesn’t – at least in the medium to long run. His belief that the latter doesn’t work stems not only from philosophy

32 One can imagine proposals today for political reform by a hypothetical Courageous Democracy Party, but no candidate for Congress or the Presidency would receive 5% of the vote for measures that would directly benefit 95% of the population. For examples of a hypothetical platform for this hypothetical party, contact the author.

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but also from historical experience. Yet he hasn’t experienced the rule of phi-losophy or a genuine philosopher educated by the regimen delineated for him or her in the Republic. After all, neither Socrates nor Plato himself meets the latter’s standards. Yet Plato’s readers readily presume that they know what they actually would consist of and how they would be actually practiced – viz., badly. More often than not, this sort of fear of philosophy has misplaced tar-gets: ‘mob rule’, ‘tyranny of the majority’ (since no ‘mob’ or demotic majority has ever ruled in a political order for a significant length of time), or a ruling elite that more nearly resembles The Thirty than Plato’s philosopher-guardians. Besides, even Athenian majorities were minorities, insofar as their constitution excluded women and slaves. Today’s readers of Plato refrain from thinking radically about politics. They regard a Platonically philosophical diet for politi-cal rule with as much scepticism as Athenian politicians then or American politicians now who enjoy the benefits of the status quo. Plato, too, was fearful of elitist rule. But he was fearless when it came to using philosophy for diag-nosing stasis and devising means for overcoming injustice.

There is, of course, the familiar canard that Plato was essentially anti-dem-ocratic. But as much as any of his ‘realist’ critics, he thought principally about the condition of just politics (unless one just reads Plato’s discourse as garden-variety ideology). Moreover, there is no evidence that not thinking about jus-tice as an aim of good politics (pace Machiavelli, et al.) enhances one’s practical views of the general welfare. Plato’s literary portrayal of a descending cre-scendo of unjust, ideal-typical political regimes – is usually used as evidence for his antagonism to ‘democracy’, since democracy appears after timocracy and oligarchy, only ‘ahead’ of tyranny.33 But Plato is not offering a philosophi-cal judgment of that political form in the actual world – any more than he has written a historical-ethical thesis about the rise and decline of timocracy, oli-garchy or tyranny. Rather, Plato’s Socrates has described ‘forms’ of injustice, removed from their historical contexts. No actual society that has flattered itself by naming itself a ‘democracy’ has ever existed without cultural beliefs, social conventions, reverence for the law, dedication to the value of politics, and acceptance of some hierarchies of power that leaven and supplement the open-ended practices and values associated with the democratic principles of liberty and equality.34 That is because democracy is only partially a self-legitimating political order. It is partially legitimated by the participation of the citizenry in ruling themselves; that must be an unqualified good for any demo-crat. But those democratic citizens need certain dispositions to make their

33 See, for example, Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‘Democracy, Equality, and Eide: A Radical View of Book 8 of Plato’s Republic’, American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), pp. 273-83.

34 See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.



practices just. Insofar as Plato’s Socrates finds fault with ‘democracy’ in Book VIII of the Republic, its troubles stem from the inability of its ‘natural’ values of liberty and equality to sufficiently generate political or personal virtue.

We have returned to the problem Socrates faced in addressing his accusers. He loved addressing anyone he met about the meaning of virtue, his accusers not-withstanding. Similarly, problems arose in addressing the question of how whatever presumptive virtue they claimed to possess could be transformed into powerful political practice, when issues of strategy had to be confronted and compromises accepted.35 Plato’s democracy in Book VIII was not the imagined democracy of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Thucydides’ History, where those who did not participate in politics were ‘useless’ (achreion, II.40.2). In the typified democracy of Book VIII of the Republic, interest in politics was occa-sional, not widespread (557e-558a; 561c-d) – just the opposite of the descrip-tion of the Athenian democracy’s political habits offered in Thucydides’ (also typified) account of Pericles’ Funeral Oration or Plato’s generically Protagorean account of the commonly shared, virtuous sense of justice and reverence (aidō te kai dike) shared among ordinary Athenian citizens (Protagoras, 322d-323a). Plato’s unjust democracy had power (dunamis and kratos) by having over-thrown oligarchy – the political form that assured the institutionalization of stasis by dividing the polis into rich and poor – but it did not naturally know how to practice its power virtuously. Its citizens are so enamoured by equal freedom that they disregard law, seeding soil for tyranny to take root (563d).

Virtue or excellence is supposed to guide the political practice of citizens and leaders as they forge their future, yet democracy’s core principles of liberty and equality per se are insufficient agents of political virtue.36 Ultimately for Plato, the problem is formulating the means for practically exercising political power in any form. Such power is inherently necessary and inherently prone to corruption at a collective and individual level. ‘Tyranny’ follows upon ‘democ-racy’ in Socrates’s story of unjust political forms in Book VIII as a condensed result of the injustice that marked the degenerations from aristocracy to timoc-racy, namely not adhering to philosophically sanctioned virtue. (547a) Plato does not flee from political realism or loathe the demos; he simply but radically seeks the sufficient conditions of political virtue.

35 Alasdair MacIntyre dubbed a version of this problem in a sceptical, if not entirely accu-rate, vein when he said that Marxists who gain power become Weberians. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 243.

36 We associate political virtue with liberty and equality only because of underlying reli-gious beliefs or preference for procedural guarantees of the practices of political liberty and equality over and against any predetermined substantive conception of political vir-tue – dubious as we are about how that would be practically defined.

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The above account of Plato’s view of political power differentiates his belief in the potential of the ordinary citizen and his despair at what results when they act collectively. One might think he resembles modern-day liberal indi-vidualist. But that hardly is the case. For Plato (like every other ancient Greek) does not value individuals per se apart from the contingent combination of their natures and the habits they socially develop, and certainly does not sanc-tion any set of those as ‘rights’. He also offers a most fragile account of indi-vidual integrity, declaring that it only exists when the three components of one’s soul (psyche) manifest the right relationships among one another. (586e-589c) In turn, Plato does not believe that ‘power corrupts’, a mantra of anti-governmental liberals, because power as dunamis constitutes social life. In Plato’s dialogues, power as dunamis nonetheless cannot be understood without accounting for its use, and it is the improper use of power (broadly understood as kratos) that fosters corruption. This allows Plato to modulate his conception of the political art (politike) and laws (nomoi) in the post-Republic political dialogues (Statesman [Politikos] and Laws [Nomoi)] that deal with non-ideal conditions under the aegis of his theory of justice adumbrated in the Republic’s unlikely but possible kallipolis.

I mention the later dialogues only in relation to Plato’s conception of power. The Laws depends on an array of assumptions about ancient Greek political life that need not concern us; it is the Statesman’s discussion of how to achieve justice via politike that harbours the most material for understanding Plato’s conception of power. It regards force as an intrinsic part of political power. The connection between power and force stems from Plato’s Eleatic Stranger’s account of human nature as incorrigible, making conflict inevitable, so that a statesman must use force to achieve justice.37 But here, as in the Republic, the decision about when one no longer can rely on philosophical persuasion to achieve justice but must use force (in the Statesman, bia or ischus) is left to the judgment of the statesman trying to find the right connection between his conception of justice and the necessarily limited possibilities for its actualiza-tion (304d).38 This is a matter of judgment – just as the reader of the Republic

37 See Melissa Lane, Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and C. J. Rowe’s Plato: Statesman, with trans. & comm. by C. J. Rowe (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1995).

38 Whether or not Plato regards such use of force as ‘tragic’ or simply ‘necessary’ is a matter of interpretive contention. The majority of scholars take the latter view. The former view is notably put forth by J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). For a Platonic view of ‘good’ rhetoric that will be rightly persua-sive, see Plato, Phaedrus, 277b-c.



must judge how to interpret the ideal coincidence of philosophy and political power for his psyche and in his life (592a-b). But Plato does not theorize the activity of judgment, not because he disregards its significance but because judging the link between logos and ergon in any particular instance transcends the limits of what he can or wants to provide in a text (cf. Phaedrus, 274b-277a).

V Is Platonic Power a Political Virtue?

For secular-oriented (as well as religiously inspired), pivotal authors in the his-tory of Western political thought – e.g., Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Weber, and Rawls – Plato offered no basis for a worthy political party, program, or outlook. Nor has Plato’s political thought lent itself to programmatic politics (unless one follows the outrageous interpretations of Popper & Co.). His texts offer no political recipes and require interpretation and judgment on the part of his reader – even though this doesn’t reduce the meaning of his texts to the judgments of readers. But the dominant tradition of history of Western philosophy and political thought from Aristotle to the end of the twentieth century (despite a smaller tradition of sceptical readers) has mistakenly categorized Plato as a metaphysician who dictates political prac-tice from a philosophical plane and instrumentalized his view of power.

The Platonic conception of power, nonetheless, is inadequate. Its dimen-sions are not sufficiently detailed to provide much direction for shaping indi-viduals and societies (although considerably more detailed in relation to a conception of justice than anything the historical Socrates ever provided). In addition, the detail it has only appears in an improbable, ideal world with agents whose immunity to vice is fragile at best and presupposes the necessity of a hierarchical, tripartite order within the state and soul. It is easy to under-stand, therefore, that readers of Plato in the relatively depoliticized eras that followed Plato’s found Plato’s work politically wrong and irrelevant or most open to elaboration in philosophically or religiously doctrinal directions. I think Plato would have been disappointed but not surprised; he recognized that his ideas were unlikely to gain power unless a group of friends could be found to promote political change – an improbability (Seventh Letter, 325c-d.). What, then, about the meaning of Platonic power now? What kind of political power did he think his ideas possessed?

Plato forged his conception of power in a society where the conventional defects of political power were most graphically demonstrated in a democratic constitution (politeia) of a small-scale, pre-capitalist, polytheistic, male- dominated, slave-sustained, society. Nowadays, democracy in its radical sense

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is nowhere continuously effective. At best, the power of the demos appears episodically as a force that challenges conventional structures from outside them.39 In ‘liberal’ or ‘deliberative’ democracy, inequalities of civil society that jeopardize political liberty and equality are given marginal consideration. What are called liberal democracies seek to severely limit the supposedly cor-rosive effects of collective and demotic action that worried Plato – but in so doing, empower elites.

In the twenty-first century, if ‘democracy’ can perform a critical function on behalf of justice, its ‘power’ will need to be understood differently than it was by Plato. A different world faces us, one marked by massive institutional struc-tures that minimize and deflect the political agency of citizens. But that does not make Plato’s conception inherently unrealistic or anti-political, and think-ing that it has these features artificially limits our political and democratic horizons – by either restricting our sense of what is potentially political or foreclosing our sense of make might generate justice of and by all. (See Appendix.) Because of having marginalized Plato for political critique and understanding, critics of Plato and political power fail to appreciate fully the realism of his political radicalism, what he reveals about political possibilities beyond political conventions. The difficulty for us in reading Plato today is to read beyond (not between) the lines, to appreciate the radical and unconven-tional character of Plato’s thinking about power and justice, to adapt Plato’s thought to the present – not entirely unlike the activity in which readers of the history of political thought always must engage. For Plato was preoccupied with the epistemological, ethical, and political deficiencies of collective thought and action. For him, political thought too often amounted to a kind of group-think; political action was too often thoughtless. The situation vitiated the paradigmatic and dynamic relationship between logos and ergon eulogized by Pericles (in Thucydides’ account of his Funeral Oration, II. 40. 2). His posi-tion as a radical anti-conventionalist meant that his conception of power was reconstructed out of the present but positioned beyond it. Given the promi-nence of democracy in the Athenian society in which he lived (for which he

39 See Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) and Democracy Incorporated: Managerial Democracy in the Age of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a more heated, shorter, but comparable argument, see John R. Wallach, ‘No One is a Democrat Now’, Theory and Event, 13 (2011). The consternations of those who feel disenfranchised by electoral pro-cesses have appeared recently and notably in the various Occupy movements, the opposi-tion in southern Europe to EU austerity measures, and the major demonstrations against elite power and corruption in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Ukraine.



also fought and in which he established the Academy) it is unlikely that he thought he could appreciate the value of politics as decision-making by the demos, whether as a group of individuals or a collectivity, without also endors-ing other unjust features of its constitution. But this makes it anachronistic to view his political thought as essentially anti-democratic, anti-political, unreal-istic or impractical. After all, he did not face the behemoth of the modern state or the goliath of global capitalism; he was not in a position to see democracy as a counter-conventional kind of power that could move political thought and action in more just directions. If Plato were revived, he could well regard the promotion of democracy as the best counter to the unjust power of tyrannical elites, one which could foster the best practical conditions for the widespread achievement and expression of political virtue.

To some extent, Plato recognized this. Among the unjust regimes typified in Republic VIII, democracy is the most hospitable to political philosophy and most free from the institutionalized power of injustice authorized by the cor-rupted virtue of other regimes. (557b-d, and previous sections of Bk. VIII). In the Statesman, democracy is the best of regimes for non-ideal circumstances in which laws do not accord with justice (303a). But Plato’s chief preoccupa-tion was not to bolster the image of democracy but that of critical philosophy as a precondition of just political leadership, to reconstruct the educational roots for knowledge and virtue of the political art, an art that from his experi-ence was probably accessible to only a few but was conceivably accessible to anyone – similar to the premise of Socrates’ vocation but now spelled out in philosophically, ethically, and politically dialectical writing. Those who reject Plato out of hand today as an authoritarian philosopher, whether liberals or self-styled radicals seem to deny their own efforts to establish intellectual prominence for their own work or its political effects were it to gain traction as a discourse of persuasion and power. ‘Difference’ and ‘agonism’ usefully dis-turb the complacency and discrimination of the ruling classes, but they pre-suppose rather than justify conditions for the appreciation of what counts as difference and how agonism can be constructive; that is, how to ameliorate conflict on behalf of justice, how to persuade those who, as members of a demos, have not found reason to contest the rewards that have gone to the Wall Streeters that have made others suffer because of their actions that brought us the Great Recession of 2008 and its dismal aftermath for most.

The critical issue for understanding the significance of Plato’s view of the use of political power in either his critical and aporetic voices or the more con-structive voices expressed in the Republic, Statesman, or Laws, is whether or not one reads his textual statements as deeds that command the reader to act – which amount to denying Plato’s emphasis on the superiority of speech

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to writing, of dialogue and dialectic, of active interpretation over doctrinal obedience.40 By contrast, if one reads his dialogues as exemplary philosophical explorations of how logos and ergon correlate in philosophy and politics, par-ticularly insofar as they would express and promote virtue (arete), Plato’s polit-ical aims of fostering knowledge and virtue in the conduct of political life can reclaim their intellectually invigorating and politically radical character. That is, if one reads Plato dialectically, then his perspective on political power and its relationship to justice still warrants our attention, despite the far different cul-tural and practical contexts that inevitably shape our appreciation of what he has to offer.

To be sure, if one sees unconventional, radically critical aims (or human nature) as inherently corrupt, rather than just corruptible, then Plato’s politi-cal thought poses serious political dangers. For in that case, most obstacles to political betterment are insuperable, and efforts to overcome them ought to be minimized because of ‘the limits of politics’ (pace Strauss). Yet Plato’s radical, political criticism does not accept this view, a view that effectively endorses traditional inequalities. As such, it does not deny the power and force of real-ity; it rather recognizes how one’s own priorities and political contributions constitute the realities of the discourse of justice that legitimates every politi-cal order. Moreover, even ‘realists’ have to justify their recommendations as not only accurate but also beneficial; they just take more of what is given as an acceptable point of intellectual and political departure for understanding the political good. Platonic power affirms that one always has the responsibility of deciding how to accommodate the differences and conflicts that beset our lives in a non-doctrinaire fashion, critically evaluating the inherently authori-tarian and arguably unjust character of so much of social life beyond the politi-cal system – including early child-raising, gender roles, inequalities of rank and status, of various types, not to mention economic activity – because of their political elements.

If we accept, as we should, current scholarship on Plato’s Academy as a highly unauthoritarian institution that he created and nurtured for most of his adult life; if we also regard the claims in the Seventh Letter (whether or not they came from Plato’s hand) that affirm his dedication to the rule of law in extant political orders and antipathy toward tyrannical political behavior as accurate,

40 See Phaedrus, 274b-277a, 277e-278b. For an interpretive inversion of this claim, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1968]), pp. 61-171. For identification of this debate as a long-stand-ing one in the history of philosophy, see Myles Burnyeat, ‘Master-Mind Lecture: Plato’ (13 April 2000), Proceedings of the British Academy, 111 (2001), pp. 1-22.



and if view the Sophists and Athenian democracy known to Plato as lacking the best method for acquiring political knowledge (let alone actually having it) or exhibiting all the practices that offered the best guarantees for achieving political virtue, joining power and justice, then the Platonic conception of power as dunamis that may be allied to kratos and arete by an educated demos may be a fine place to start thinking theoretically and realistically about how to promote justice today as a kind of political and ethical power.41

Appendix

Here are three examples: one from the American liberal democratic political theory of Michael Walzer; one from the French political and democratic theory of Jacques Ranciere, who reads the history of Western political philosophy as anti-political, and one from an Anglo-American anarchist, David Graeber, who accepts a definition of anarchy as democracy without government.42 Walzer’s critique stems from his view that radical (i.e., Platonic) philosophical criticism invariably eviscerates democracy for two reasons. First, it operates as unchecked power that ethically disdains the demos, and, secondly, it is ‘exter-nal’ rather than ‘internal’ criticism and has merely ethereal connections to the intuitions and beliefs of the citizens whose lives it would improve. Walzer would rather live, work, and criticize ‘in the cave’. But this rhetorical flourish depends on Walzer’s belief in the sufficient foundation of liberal principles of liberty, equality, and moral pluralism (in political isolation from each other), supplemented by the intuitions of citizens along with internal criticism focused mostly on discursive and political leaders who do not respect these

41 This view is substantiated in the most respected, relatively recent account of Plato’s Academy. See John P. Lynch, Aristotle’s School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) as well as Christopher J. Rowe’s interpretation of Plato as a philosophical writer, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

42 For illustrations of these perspectives, see: Michael Walzer, ‘Philosophy and Democracy’, Political Theory, 9. 3 (1981), pp. 379-99 and ‘Liberalism and the Art of Separation’, Political Theory, 12.3 (1984), pp. 315-30, along with Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jacques Ranciere, trans. J. Rose, Disagreement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [1995]) and Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), and David Graeber (an intel-lectual hero of the Occupy movement): Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007); Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012); The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013).

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principles. But Walzer ignores Plato’s deep involvement with the practices and beliefs in Athenian society, and he reads his philosophical discourse as founda-tional rather than critical. Moreover, in tying his political theory to intuitions, Walzer’s criticisms flow along the surface of democratic politics; they do not have the wherewithal (as Platonic critical evaluation of power does) to take issue with the structures of power and ethics that predispose the intuitions of conventionally positioned contemporary democratic citizens to accept struc-tures of injustice and vote (or not) against their practical interests. It accepts the conservative aspect of democracy, which relies on the judgment of actual citizens, and delimits the radical potential of democracy, in which the demos has dunamis and aspires to virtue.

Ranciere has no particular allegiance to the intuitions of citizens but rather to the primacy of his interpretive conception of ‘politics’. This is not an Arendtian conception of politics that demarcates it from other from other kinds of human activity (especially technai) and eulogizes its capacity to link words and deeds.43 Instead, Ranciere eulogizes ‘politics’ insofar as it maintains distance from conventional political practice and condemns the ‘archipolitics’ of Plato (and its variants in the history of political philosophy) – which, he claims, gravitate towards ‘policing’.44 But apart from the limits of his argument by stipulation, Ranciere offers one-dimensional readings of Plato, in which the status accorded to philosopher-guardians is simply anti-democratic, mostly designed to supplant the kratos of the demos.45 He ignores the question of the good or virtue in politics – that is, what makes some politics usefully demo-cratic or ghastly (when it promotes ‘policing’) – as well as the difference between dunamis and kratos in relation to the power of the demos. Ranciere’s problems with interpreting Plato stem from two flaws: the familiar one of col-lapsing Plato’s critical epistemology, ethics, and politics into a critique of the demos, and the failure to recognize that Plato’s conception of justice responded to Thrasymachean political realism by viewing it in relation to human tenden-cies toward arrogance and hubris, not merely the problem of disagreement. (Republic 373a-374e) After all, Platonic justice does not deny the inevitability of disagreement; it engages it to understand how to foster its contribution to human and political well-being.

43 See Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Ranciere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 40-48.

44 See Ranciere, Disagreement, pp. 61-72. This is how Ranciere both distances (by highlight-ing ‘politics’) and connects (by emphasizing ‘policing’) his work to Foucault’s work.

45 See Ranciere, Dissensus, pp. 49-50; Chambers, The Lessons of Ranciere, pp. 115, 135, etc.



Graeber’s anarcho-democratic project has struck a deep chord among the politically disenfranchised across the globe, whom Hannah Arendt saw in the United States of 1970 as forced to practice ‘civil disobedience’ in order to be political because of their systematic exclusion from the tables at which basic decisions about social power were being made. Graeber theoretically and prac-tically shuns arche, which he understands as institutionalized leadership or authority as well as the beginning of a course of political action. As such, Graeber not surprisingly does not like Plato, referring to his thought as ‘totali-tarian musings’, adopting the Popperian view and ignoring Plato’s recasting of political power via a critique of convention.46 But Graeber is too quick to find fault in Plato’s focus on the conditions of philosophical knowledge and politi-cal leadership, the constituents of virtuous arche. To recall, Plato personally endorsed no actual political process in Athens by which a few ideas or indi-viduals would be systematically elevated above the demos (even though Plato’s views associated the actual power of the Athenian demos, rightly and wrongly, with the Athenians’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the legal condemna-tion and execution of Socrates). Plato believed that there should be no coerced, non-consensual, institutional elevation of the few over the many – even as he sought to elevate dialogical, philosophical knowledge as the pivot of political leadership in a just society. To be sure, if one believes that ‘democracy’ needs no more to be said for it than (in Graeber’s words) ‘ordinary people collectively managing their own affairs’, then Plato and Rousseau are useless. Plato is, because of his preoccupation with the art of politics as an art of virtue and his belief in the natural character of arche, including the arche of democracy under non-ideal conditions (which he had the Athenian Stranger in Laws say was favoured by the gods and blessed by fortune when exercised by the casting of lots).47 Rousseau is, because, despite his endorsement of an ideal social con-tract society under the aegis of popular sovereignty, he believed that if democ-racy involves both the authorization of political power and its management it is suitable for ‘gods, not men’.48 While both theorists are criticized for writing theories that overly depend on consensus, one might say the same about the Occupy movement, the difference being that Plato and Rousseau generated their political theories as engaged, thoughtful responses to what both believed to be the inevitability of civil strife (stasis). But while the Occupy movements

46 Graeber, Possibilities, p. 365. 47 Plato, Laws, III. 689e-690d. The Athenian Stranger subsequently stated that injustice was

most likely to stem from the actions of kings than from the demos (690e), a sentiment presaged by arguments in Republic, VIII.

48 Rousseau, The Social Contract, III.4.

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have been hopeful signs of democratic protest over the last three years and have been central in drawing public attention to economic inequalities supported by political systems, one of the obstacles to the enlargement of these move-ments has been their difficulty in determining criteria of authority and leadership.

Platonic Power and Political Realism

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