This is a short but dense introduction to recent trends in scholarship on Plato’s political thought. It touches on many controversies with intelligence and sympathy. However, it substantially discusses only a few of these trends, and not always as substantially as others have done. To be fair, it does not claim to be comprehensive or definitive. I might recommend it, as one among other imperfect starting points, to a graduate student looking to develop their own perspective on the current state of the discipline.
The first, prefatory chapter, beyond outlining the book’s contents, sets out the book’s central theme: Plato’s attitude towards democracy. The author alludes to the great variety of political positions that have been ascribed to Plato, but chooses to emphasize, as is conventional, the tradition associated with Karl Popper that holds that Plato was an authoritarian opponent of democracy. The author rightly suggests that much recent scholarship has defined itself against this tradition.
The second chapter focuses on two longstanding sources of controversy in our knowledge of Plato’s biography: the authenticity of the Seventh Letter and the operations of Plato’s Academy. On the Academy, the author surveys the central points of contention—What was the curriculum? What was Plato’s ultimate teaching? Did the Academy aim to influence politics?—and concludes that the historical evidence currently seems insufficient to resolve these disputes. On the authenticity of the Seventh Letter, the author reviews the recent two-fold case against authenticity by Burnyeat and Frede.[1] The author raises some decent objections to Frede’s arguments that Plato could not have held the hopes for the education of Dion that the letter attributes to him. He finds more merit in Burnyeat’s reading of the letter as a literary “prose tragedy” and, along those lines, points out that sidelining the question of authenticity has and can further make space for interesting interpretations of the contents of the Platonic epistles.
The third chapter treats the question of the historical Socrates. The first part of the chapter endorses the increasingly common rejection of the Schleiermacher-Vlastos tradition of attaching more value to Plato’s Socrates than to Xenophon’s. On this the author closely follows Dorion. The next part of the chapter, more idiosyncratic, presents some the author’s own (previously published) work on Socrates, as an example of things we can say about Socrates other than what he might have actually thought and said. Here, Lombardini finds in the written sources evidence of an ongoing debate staged in Athens about the political import of Socratic humor.
The fourth chapter is about the Republic. It begins by reminding us of how the utopia proposed in the Republic is evidently undemocratic. It then explains Ober’s distinction between rejectionist and immanent kinds of social criticism (one criticizes for the sake of an alternative society, the other for the sake of improving the existing society) and Ober’s application of them to Plato. The author then recounts how, while Ober characterizes Plato’s criticisms of Athenian democracy as rejectionist, Monoson and Allen bring out what in them is immanent. Another rapprochement between Plato and democracy comes to light in the scholarship that foregrounds the anti-authoritarian or “dialogic” literary form of Plato’s dialogues (L.’s discussion focuses on Euben’s classic work on this topic and the less familiar though more recent Poetic Justice by Jill Frank).
The final chapter takes up Plato’s Statesman and Laws. The author asks whether the Statesman’s inquiries into statecraft and the rule of law evince a more positive assessment of democracy than is found in the Republic, showcasing two works taking opposing sides on the question, and concludes with some considerations of the rule of law in the fourth-century democracy. For the Laws, he competently recounts the debate between Bobonich and Laks: does the city imagined in the Laws reflect a development in Plato’s views about the possibility of happiness for non-philosophers, or is the Laws rather devoted to describing a worldly approximation to the Republic’s ideal? Connecting this debate more clearly to the book’s running theme, the author emphasizes Morrow’s important 1960 study of the elements of Athenian history in the Laws (and in the book’s conclusion suggests that another major study of the Laws’ historical context ought to be written, though regrettably he does not elaborate on what might be missing from Morrow’s book, aside from youth).
I am sceptical about the author’s occasional suggestions (e.g., pp. 3, 101) that this book might serve as an introduction to Plato’s political thought per se. The summaries of primary sources which perhaps are included for this purpose are too cursory. An online encyclopedia article would work just as well. A thorough discussion of the primary texts, such as Malcolm Schofield’s Plato: Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015), would work better.
As an introduction to current research, the book is more successful, but not without defect. My major complaint is that the book does not convincingly demonstrate its main contention, namely, that current research, with its focus on democracy, challenges our received or “standard” (p. 3) understanding of Plato’s political thought. To be sure, democracy is the focus of much recent work on Plato. But, of course, interpreters are not only now realizing that Plato was as much a product of his time as he was a critic of it. What, then, if anything, makes today’s conversations different from past ones? To answer this question, the author would have had to have offered a clearer overall picture of both the present field and the past against which the present must be defined. I will provide two examples of how the author might have done so.
One very important thing that has changed is our sociology. While the likes of Grote and Popper spoke of liberty and authority, today’s classicists talk about ideology and discourses. For instance, Ober’s unique contribution to the field was not—contra what one might gather from reading pages 63-65 of this book—that he popularized the question whether Plato believed Athenian society could be improved or not (immanence vs. rejection). Rather, it was to argue that, despite his anti-democratic inclinations, Plato was intellectually constrained by the ideological hegemony of the democratic citizenry. In this way Ober attempted to align our understanding of Plato with the novel vision of Athenian political life that he argued for in his more significant, earlier book, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton University Press, 1989).
Another important factor—which the book alludes to in its opening gambit (pp. 1-3) but not beyond that—is the culture in which people write and read about Plato. Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies was a polemic against the project of applying metaphysics to social reality, written by a philosopher of science fleeing European fascism. Since then, Plato studies has become the business of American professors and other academic servants of the complacent pax Americana. Our aims are comparatively low-stake. We aim, for instance, to make incremental contributions to ever more specialized branches of knowledge, and we are incentivized to publish for reasons of professional advancement (when on p. 103 Lombardini wrote that the Laws is a “growth field in Platonic studies,” apparently borrowing a metaphor from finance, the idealist in me bristled). Or, when we do take a genuine philosophical interest in Platonic politics, it is not because of Platonic metaphysics, which, in anglophone spheres at any rate, is quite out of fashion. Rather, we now tend to read Plato’s dialogues because they help us work through our ambivalence about liberal democracy—the political system which we have been enjoying or, more precisely, to which we have resigned ourselves for supposed lack of a realistic alternative. No wonder we keep finding Plato to be a democrat in spite of himself. The pioneer of this kind of reading may have been (ironically, a contemporary of Popper and fellow European émigré) Leo Strauss, whose presence in particular discussions but not in general Lombardini occasionally features (pp. 5-6, 40-42).
Notes
[1] M. Burnyeat and M. Frede, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter. Edited by D. Scott. Oxford University Press, 2015.