Plato: Political Philosophy (Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought)
Malcolm Schofield
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0199249466
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Plato is the best known and most widely studied of all the ancient Greek philosophers. Malcolm Schofield, a leading scholar of ancient philosophy, offers a lucid and accessible guide to Plato's political thought, enormously influential and much discussed in the modern world as well as the ancient. Schofield discusses Plato's ideas on education, democracy and its shortcomings, the role of knowledge in government, utopia and the idea of community, money and its grip on the psyche, and ideological uses of religion.
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they don’t know it already (459C–460A). With most scholars, but against Cooper (1999: 33–51), I take it that the reader 92 ATHENS, DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. is meant to suppose that Polus is quite right in insisting that this is a misrepresentation of Gorgias’ position (461B–C). In making 500A a turning point I follow Dodds 1959: 318, although my division of the discussion is based on a different contrast. For discussion, see e.g.
contemporary thoughts. The Republic, not the Statesman, is the main source of inspiration, and the differences that result from engaging less selectively than did Mill with the Republic’s approach to government are immediately apparent. Here is an extract from Jowett’s initial characterization of the true statesman:22 He is not a mere theorist, nor yet a dealer in expedients; the whole and the parts grow together in his mind; while the head is conceiving, the hand is executing. Although obliged
fact the notion that an architectonic form of political expertise might be what would bring people happiness fares no better here than in the Charmides. In dialogue with Crito, Socrates subjects it to a typically Socratic cross-examination, starting with the observation that if it is the expertise they are looking for, it must be something beneficial. Now he and Cleinias had concluded at the end of the first Socratic episode that wisdom or knowledge is the only good.50 So if the knowledge that
Statesman Plato treats the Eleatic Visitor as first and foremost an exponent of abstract, systematic, expository method.71 Systematic exposition is an essentially monological activity. The problem of accommodating monological discourse within the dialogue form is deftly dealt with (as again in the Parmenides) by adroit choice of discussant.72 The main speaker is supplied—at his explicit request—with a young and docile interlocutor, although Theaetetus in the Sophist and the younger Socrates73 in
lesson in method and in politics. But (as elsewhere in Plato)112 there are some false moves we are left to spot for ourselves—that is part of the lesson.113 Above all (but Plato’s message, rather than the Visitor’s), the dialogue does not reflect as widely as it might have done on the framework of politics and the role political knowledge might play within it. In particular, it is entirely silent on the question of how the statesman it describes could ever be produced and then installed in a city,