Comments on: The Athenians Wanted Democracy, And They Got It Good And Hard

By: Peltast

Peltast — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 12:51:51 +0000

Also during this period there was big presence of foreigners in Athens, especially Phoenicians (a Levantine Semitic people) who exercised great influence in international trading and banking.

By: David Grant

David Grant — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 20:46:29 +0000

I think the key is that Socrates wasn’t teaching his students so much as training them. From their teacher Socrates’ students mainly learned rhetoric, including Socrates’ unique style of deconstructive dialectic, and he also provided moral instruction. But if Socrates was training young men, what was he training them for? Well, like any good Sophist, he was training them to be effective politicians. These students’ politics were determined by their class, family, and friends more than by their or their teacher’s philosophy, though Socrates may have encouraged his students to become more systematic in their thinking.
The threat that Socrates’ circle posed arose more from their background than their philosophy. Until the fall of the Thirty, the democracy was effectively divided between oligarchic and democratic factions. With the fall of the Thirty, the democrats held supreme and undisputed power. Socrates’ students would have breathed new life into the oligarchic faction, and that was something the democrats would not tolerate.

By: Gordian

Gordian — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 18:21:37 +0000

Then I must not have understood the point of the article. Socrates’s threat to democracy Athens was not in his teachings but the misapplication of his teachings by aristocratic students, especially the kind of dim-witted literalist interpretations we see in Karl Popper?

I can certainly understand that taking any of the political dialogues literally (with the possible exception of The Laws, which seems to be more straightforward) would be a recipe for endless bloodshed, as attempting to literally interpret The Republic, for example, follows from the same mindset of any number of lunatic utopian ideologues, namely imposing self-will on reality in a vain attempt to change Being to fit doxa. The relationship between Ontos and doxa, of course, forms the center of all Socratic teachings, and makes the anti-political interpretation the only reasonable understanding of any of the dialogues of Plato or Xenophon. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people like Strauss and Arendt from attempting to re-politicize Greek philosophy, but that’s another topic.

By: David Grant

David Grant — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 17:56:24 +0000

I would attribute the ideas in the Republic to Plato rather than to Socrates, especially the radical rejection of politics. In practice, however, both Plato and his students at least kept a finger on the pulse of politics. I suspect that Plato himself was of two minds: raised and educated with the expectation of political involvement but deeply affected by his teacher’s death.
That being said, there is precisely zero evidence to suggest that Socrates had anything like a practical program or even an active interest in politics. All indications are that Socrates’ focus was entirely on education. Aside from Aristophanes, however, the relevant authors were Socrates’ students, who would have been at pains to avoid any such implications. My reading of the sources and history is that Socrates himself didn’t need to have any practical plans in order to have an impact: his students, when they came of age, would naturally enter politics. That being the case, I have difficulty imagining that Socrates was unaware of the political significance of his activities.

By: Gordian

Gordian — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 04:53:34 +0000

I have a question about the premise that Socrates and his students (Plato in particular) can be understood as advocating for any kind of practical political solution to Athenian democracy. In Book 7 of the Republic, just as Socrates has finished constructing the City in Speech, Socrates adds two last prerequisites to the City. First, the Philosopher-King must choose to rule and live the vita activa. However, the Philosopher knows the vita activa is inferior to the vita contemplativa. By choosing the vita activa, the Philosopher-King is deliberately choosing the inferior to the superior, and thereby surrenders the title of Philosopher, becoming a mere King. Secondly, Socrates argues that the first set of citizens must be children no older than ten without parents, because parents would have taught culture and values incompatible with the city in speech and the citizens must not have any influences from outside the City. One is led to believe that either the Philosopher is snatching infants from their cradles at night, or else these first citizens sprout out of the very soil itself (perhaps a reference to the Theban foundation myth).

In short, the foundation of the City in Speech requires two impossible acts: a Philosopher-King who is not a Philosopher and a crop of citizens born out of thin air. Socrates himself makes these demands, so it is absurd to claim (as some have tried) that he didn’t catch these two flaws in his reasoning. The flaws are intentional, meaning that Socrates knows full well that the City in Speech is an impossibility, and therefore the entire act of City-Building must have a meaning other than practical politics.

My question is this: If you wish to support your claim that Socrates was a reactionary politician interested in practical ends, why does he argue in Book 7 of the Republic that city-building is futile? One answer would be that The Republic represents mature Plato’s thought rather than Socrates, but The Republic, unlike The Laws, predates Plato’s travels in Sicily, and so he had yet to fully replace Socrates’s teachings with his own. The “middle period” of Plato is generally considered to be a mixture of Socratic and Platonic teachings. If we accept that The Republic represents Socratic thinking in any significant way, rejection of the vita activa for the vita contemplativa is a central tenet of Socratic thought from the beginning.

By: jay

jay — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 03:11:33 +0000

I have a question for all the readers and Authors of this site. If democracy failed so badly at Athens why is it so functional in the pure democracy of Switzerland?

Or is that a mistaken assumption on my part?

By: David Grant

David Grant — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:48:03 +0000

Thanks, Jeff!
Plato’s three dialogues Apology, Crito, and Phaedo are the main sources for the historical Socrates, but Plato seems to take some liberties with his subject matter. Xenophon’s Apology largely agrees with Plato’s account but differs on a number of details; his Symposium and Memorabilia are also about Socrates, but they were written many decades after the fact and deal primarily with events where Xenophon was not present. Aristophanes’ play Clouds presents a very different, more slippery version of Socrates from the portrait painted by his students.
For history, Xenophon’s Hellenica is the authoritative source for 410 B.C. to 362 B.C. and his Anabasis covers the march of the Ten Thousand. Things get fuzzy thereafter, except for Alexander’s rein, but Plutarch’s Lives of Agesilaus, Phocion, Demosthenes, and Alexander give decent coverage; Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History books 16-18 cover most of the 4th century, but he is a notoriously unreliable source.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:15:12 +0000

I really enjoyed this article. Can you provide a recommended reading list of books and such on these topics?

You are now on my daily reading list.

By: PolarWashington

PolarWashington — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 20:59:00 +0000

Politics is a dead end. Metapolitics? Maybe not.

By: vxxc2014

vxxc2014 — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 20:48:31 +0000

Wonderful article. Going to link for it for the History, I didn’t know Socrates was planning a coup of aristocrats. Strange our New Deal schools seem to leave that part out…I wonder why. [I don’t].

We don’t live in any sort of Athenian democracy and never did, as for Oligarchical tyranny we have that now in America, our Democracy was overthrown by the New Deal, which is Administrative Government. No election decides this governments fate, nor even impacts on it. We elect 537 of a government of 4.3 million – and you blame democracy? Our vote is irrelevant except to politicians and their cronies.

We don’t have Democracy and none of us have ever seen one. We did have a Republic that broadly extended the Franchise but few living ever saw that either.

You are denouncing a Tomb.

What is the impact of an election on any Department of Government or the Federal Reserve? Nothing. The figurehead boss changes.

As for Politics: There are in Leaders or Rulers both The Will to Power and The Call of Duty. In our current Rulers there is only The Will to Power, they consider Duty a four letter word – the only one not in their vocabulary or ken.

In neoreactionaries I discern also the same Will to Power, and frustration that they’d have to strive and suffer for it…I discern little or no call to duty. Too bad, it would keep you warm on the cold nights and keep you going when it’s hard.

There is no mind in History to compete with Napoleon’s, but he didn’t just succeed because of Supreme self-confidence and the Will to Power. He understood also his Duties – look at the Code Napoleon, his restoration and reform of marriage, the Church, education and the exiles. That’s Duty, not pure lust for power.

Until you have some sense of Duty you should indeed forgo Politics and striving after Power. Duty to something higher than yourselves. Reactionaries of course understood that and sadly only that…and not The Will to Power.

Perhaps if you find Duty you could marry it with ambition, and advance matters.

[I want isn’t Duty…I want..I want].