Corrupting Youth

We cannot assume today that men must in the last resort be governed by their own consent. Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power—and that we hope it does have limits—does not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason, of the conscience of the obedient.

The question of who corrupts the young obscured what is perhaps a prior question, one that frames the Apology even though it is not explicitly raised in it: how can one know what effect one has on others? There are so many contingencies even in the relationship between two people, say a teacher and student or a parent and child, that the idea of knowing how to educate one’s fellow citizens politically seems daunting to say the least. We know that reading the “right” books does not always form the “right” action, that taking courses in moral philosophy or professional ethics does not necessarily translate into ethical behavior, and that one of the most cultured peoples in the West committed perhaps the worst atrocities in the West. So the question remains, How do “we” “make” someone better, “make” them into good citizens? An issue in totalitarian regimes where the intentions of all but a few are subject to constant “reeducation,” it is even more of one in a democracy where the “we” must be inclusive (or at least the burden falls on any exclusion), and the idea of “making” someone anything seems inherently antidemocratic. What the Apology implicitly raises the Gorgias explicitly does when Socrates criticizes Gorgias and Pericles for having “made” people worse rather than better and suggests that he, having the political art, would not.

From chapter two on I have emphasized the ways in which Socrates’ vocation can be seen as an elaboration of Athenian democratic practices even when he is explicitly critical of democracy. But even if I am right about the Apology providing evidence for such continuities, my claim is counterintuitive (to say the least) in regard to virtually every other dialogue in the Platonic corpus, none more so than in regard to the Gorgias. If Socrates’ criticisms of democracy in this and other dialogues are of such a nature that he can plausibly be seen as antidemocratic, then my case for his being a democratic political educator and my distinction between a political and a politicized education that depends on it seems farfetched. True, his criticism of democracy may be useful for democrats to take seriously, but that, while significant, is something different and leaves the opposition between philosophy and democracy I am challenging intact. One of the burdens of this chapter is to show the ways in which Socrates is democratic and how thinking of him in that way illuminates aspects of dialogue that are often elided.

In chapter three I offered a general argument that Athenian politics made political theory possible and necessary. In the following chapter on accountability I looked at two specific practices that Socrates could have, or more strongly did, build upon when he demanded that his interlocutors render an account of their lives. While the chapter on Salamis talked about a cultural dialectic, the chapter on accountability was concerned with specific institutional practices. In this chapter I want to make an argument that complements that of chapter four while further illustrating that of chapter three. I will do this by exploring how elements of Athenian democratic culture and politics shape both the substance and form of the Gorgias. Whereas my response to Walzer (as well as Bloom and Barber) in chapter four rested on moving from practice to philosophy, my response here moves from philosophy to practice.

With the help of Thucydides and Hobbes, chapter six on Antigone defined the issue of political corruption in terms of the corruption of speech and language. That formulation reappears in the Gorgias as a debate over the purposes of rhetoric. More specifically, I ended chapter six by asking how much the corrupt world of mythical Thebes was a mirror of or an object lesson for the audience in the theater. Given the world on stage, any hope for a Habermasian project seemed partial in both senses. But insofar as the world on stage was another place in Zeitlin’s sense, the experience of watching the play may have contributed to the possibility of such a project in the sense of contributing to the Athenians’ ability to deliberate about politics. Though they surely never lost sight of the necessarily strategic dimensions of language as Ober has repeatedly emphasized, the contrast between persuasion and violence implicitly recognized the need for speech to be something more than strategic. It was some such distinction that lay behind Thucydides’ characterization of how language became “defamed” during the civil war at Corcyra. This chapter reposes the question raised in the concluding sections of the Antigone chapter by exploring the tension between Socrates’ (or Plato’s) proposal that philosophical dialogue can be seen as paradigmatic for political deliberation and the degree to which philosophy itself is politicized.

As in the Clouds, the issue of political corruption is posed largely in generational terms. It is posed specifically in the relationship between Gorgias and his young student Polus, in Socrates’ relationship to Alcibades, and in Socrates’ charge that Pericles has made the Athenians worse. (Except for his comments on Aristides Socrates is no more respectful of the older generation of leaders.) More generally it appears in Socrates’ pointed question of what will become of the Athenians when they can no longer glory in the empire, power, and wealth they now celebrate as their noblest achievements.

The Gorgias is not a very promising dialogue if one wants to make a case for a democratic Socrates. The dialogue presents him as contemptuous of the multitude and the idea that it could have its own will and voice, as rejecting jury pay and majority rule, as indifferent to the question of who enjoys the political rights and prerogatives of citizens, as endorsing expert political knowledge, as regarding leadership as a form of “psychic engineering,” and as perversely disparaging the revered democratic leaders of Athens,² all as part of a misbegotten project of substituting philosophical truth for the contingencies and uncertainties that mark all politics but democratic politics most of all.

While I have no desire to explain away these antidemocratic sentiments or dismiss the conventional readings of the Gorgias, I will read the dialogue against the grain³ to complicate the picture of Socrates as antidemocratic. At a minimum I will argue that Socrates is more of a democrat than he seems and that much of what he says about democracy in the Gorgias is directed at the way democracy is being construed by the interlocutors in the dialogue and those in Athens who agree with or honor them. If such putative friends are in fact enemies of democracy, then Socrates’ critique of them raises the question of who are democracy’s true friends and whether the real friend may be the seeming enemy. This question has special urgency in a society which, as Ian Morris has emphasized,⁴ citizens thought of themselves as tied together, restrained, and made equal by philia. If, like Polemarchus in the Republic, one is confused about who one’s true friends and enemies are, then such ties and any politics based upon them become deeply problematic. And unless one is clear on this, it will be difficult to distinguish between critics of democracy attempting to recall or inspire their fellow citizens to the highest possibilities of their culture⁵—whether it be by argument, example or provocation—from those who are antidemocrats.⁶ Let me take Socrates’ criticism of Athens’s political leaders as an example of why the distinction is not as obvious as it seems. Later I will argue that this criticism involves a contest over how Pericles—and so Athenian democracy—was to be understood.

There is no question that Socrates’ criticisms of the Athenian leaders are ungenerous at best, simple-minded and moralistic at worst. In assuming that leaders are in complete control of events, he ignores the contingencies that accompany all collective endeavors, and the inevitable discrepancy between intentions and results. But let us suppose Socrates (or Plato) knows that such revisionist representations, though they might find favor in a few militantly conservative circles, would be taken as provocative. Suppose the point is to stimulate argument and debate, to have Athenians become more thoughtful about what they had done and could do in the future. In this regard consider Sheldon Wolin’s argument⁷ that during the Peloponnesian War the connection between power and place was attenuated as Athens became a naval base from which power was projected rather than embodied in internal deliberations, policy decisions, and decrees. Should we regard sharp criticism of such developments and the leaders responsible for them as being antidemocratic? Perhaps, if the critiques go far enough. But how far? Though I am not sure of the answer, I am sure that the Gorgias poses the question with unique force and subtlety and that a case can be made that part of Socrates’ critique is directed against the unforeseen consequences of Athenian imperialism.

Those consequences are foregrounded when Socrates pointedly asks Callicles what will happen to him, to Athens, and by implication to his assessment of Athenian leaders when the city loses its empire, as of course it had by the time the dialogue was written. The tension between the dramatic and historical dates of the Gorgias presents Socrates as more politically prescient than the more “realistic” and pragmatic Callicles.⁸

There is another way of getting at the complications involved in making a sharp distinction between sympathetic critics of democracy and antidemocrats. Socrates dismisses majority rule as an absurd way of deciding on the best way or life or even the best policy. Since such rule is seen as essential to if not distinctive to democracy, such rejection seems strong evidence of Socrates’ hostility to the equality and antifoundational epistemology democracy presupposes. But majority rule is not distinctive to democracy and so Socrates’ criticism is not directed just at democracy but at any regime—including oligarchy—in which some group of citizens, no matter how exclusive, decide things by majority vote. What is distinctive to democracy is who is part of the majority when it does vote. More than that, even democracy’s friends have often worried about what majority rule can mean in the face of elite manipulation, as Mills does in the epigraph for this chapter.⁹ For all the dangerous notions that claims about manufactured consent can lead to (such as false consciousness and democratic centralism), for all the reconceptualization of power due to Foucault, and for all the attempts by writers on popular culture to find local resistance where Mills finds manipulation, his concerns remain salient and echo Socrates’ concerns about rhetorical manipulation¹⁰ and manufacturing of consent.¹¹

I offer one final way of complicating the distinction between being a sympathetic if critical friend of democracy and being antidemocratic as it applies to Socrates in the Gorgias. Although there are obvious and significant dissimilarities between modes of communication employed in the relatively face-toface society of classical Athens and our own electronic mass media, Socrates’ concern with democracy’s susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation anticipates contemporary concerns about the debasement of public discourse, the disappearance of public spaces, and the danger of the “system world” cannibalizing the “life world.” ¹² In its indifference to truth, our political discourse has become, in Neil Postman’s view, “dangerous nonsense.” “By favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom and by demanding a certain kind of content,” television has created “new forms of truth-telling.” ¹³ When he goes on to insist that television fosters “misplaced irrelevant fragmented superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something which in fact leads one away from knowing,” we can hear Socrates’ response to Gorgias’s claims about the power of rhetoric overwhelming truth about medicine or politics.

For Socrates, rhetoric as practiced by Gorgias is committed to manipulation and misinformation since his power (and that of the kind of rhetoric he practices) depends on the ignorance of the people.¹⁴ In this sense Gorgias is antidemocratic while Socrates is someone who reveals that fact and who, moreover, suggests in contrast that a participatory egalitarian politics requires that people be able to judge the character of the speaker and the general veracity of what is said, as well as distinguish between speech that is narrowly strategic¹⁵ from speech that is not. Such a view is hardly antidemocratic, even if it is asking too much.

The political deficiencies and dangers of rhetoric do not lead Socrates into a wholesale rejection of it for at least two reasons. One is the fact that philosophy too is rhetorical, even manipulative, a fact Socrates implicitly and the dialogue explicitly acknowledges (as I shall argue). The other is the need each has for the other, as when Socrates ends the dialogue with a rhetorical display—the telling of a myth—intended, among other things, to convince the dialectically unpersuaded Callicles of the benefits of philosophy.¹⁶ Nor do the deficiencies drive him into an epistemologically rather than a politically grounded notion of knowledge and wisdom. Rather he explores, both by what he does and what he says, the possibilities of a philosophically informed, politically grounded rhetoric that could help constitute a political education for a democratic citizenry. At least in this dialogue Socrates does not transform politics into a theoretical object requiring elaborate education as a prerequisite for the sharing of power as he is said to do in the Republic. He does not separate democracy from theory and intellect. What Socrates (or Plato) does do is what I suggested Salamis accomplished (in chapter three)—detach aristocratic values of the sort Callicles embraces from social class and reattach them to intelligence and philosophy while holding out the possibility that knowledge like power might be widely distributed. It is this vision of an aristocratic democracy as discussed in chapter three that Socrates explores persistently though inconclusively in the Gorgias.

As this implies Socrates assumes democracy as a context for his argument, and his criticisms of politics would be beside the point and unintelligible if the demos was not a significant political actor. The assumption is manifest in the Gorgias’s thematic preoccupations with freedom, power, and empire, in its stress on the need for open frank speech, accountability, and responsibility, and in its insistence on assessing what someone says by the merits of advice rather than on his birth, status, or wealth. It is also present in the dialogue’s intellectualism (by which I mean a concern for the precondition for what it is doing)¹⁷ and in the way these thematic preoccupations become the stated preconditions for successfully engaging in philosophical dialogue. And it is evident in the dialogue’s commitment to and dependence upon the idea of what Robert Dahl calls a strong principle of equality, where all members of a community are regarded as sufficiently well qualified to participate in making binding collective decisions on all issues that significantly affect their good or interest. (Though Socrates proposes the idea of expert political knowledge, the dialogue he has with his interlocutors in the Gorgias neither illustrates nor claims it.) 18 As I read the dialogue, no one (including Socrates) is presented as so superior that he or she should be entrusted with making the collective decisions about what to talk about or who is entitled to speak about what, to whom, how.

Socrates not only assumes democracy as a context for his critique of politics; he elaborates democratic practices discussed in previous chapters into a philosophical-political vocation. As I have argued, both the form and content of his criticism of Athenian democracy could build on a tradition of democratic selfcritique found in drama and in the demand for accountability represented by the dokimasia and euthunai. If, as Benjamin Barber argues, reflexivity conditioned by civic education turns out to be democracy’s greatest virtue, if democracy is debate about what democracy is, then what better example can we have than the Gorgias and of Socrates who embodies, or at least helps constitute, a democratic culture of this kind? It is for these as well as other reasons (set out in chapter two) that I believe that Socrates of the Gorgias, like Socrates of the Apology, remains a teacher for how to politically educate a democracy democratically, even if, as I would not deny, he remains skeptical of certain practices we regard as essentially democratic.

Finally, I want to offer a way of reading the Gorgias that opens up its democratic possibilities against the confluence noted in chapter one between conservative canonists who find congenial political pronouncements in classical texts and multicultural critics who accept their readings and condemn Socrates because of it. I argued there that such agreement relies on a deflationary reading of the dialogues. Here I want to offer an example of an alternative reading as a way of substantiating my criticism that such readings ignore the riddles posed by the way Socrates’ knowledge is, to repeat Gregory Vlastos’s words, “full of gaps, unanswered questions,” “invaded by unresolved perplexity in a way that makes Socrates strange” (atopos is what Callicles calls him), as well as the need to keep faith with Socrates assertion of ignorance and his implicit denial of it.¹⁹ I will argue that such interpretations tend to miss how the tensions, contrasts or even contradictions between text(s) and context(s), argument and drama, form and movement, and characters (such as Socrates and Callicles) create generative spaces from within which the issues and conclusions of the dialogue are continually reframed. This is not so much a contrast between surface and depth or low and high (as in the Republic), as between shifting points of reference and view on the surface. And this means that questions of consistency and inconsistency are fluid and multiple for the same reason that a moment such as the Funeral Oration in Thucydides’ History reads differently depending on which other speeches it is compared with, which other Athenian leaders he is compared with, and which incidents (Melos, the plague, the Mytilenean debate) are juxtaposed to it. If, as I will argue, these multiple points of view remain unresolved by any “normalizing” narrative, then the dialogue contains a superabundance of energy and transformative impulses ancient critics and modern defenders associate with Athenian democracy.²⁰

I have already referred to Carol Dougherty’s argument that the Athenians did not try to resolve the multiplicity of narratives by which they represented themselves as Athenians but allowed competing narratives about the origins of democracy, about Athenian identity, and even contradictory views of specific historical events to remain unrationalized. She goes on to suggest that the competition over origins was part of a contemporary controversy over the construction of citizenship and civic identity. As she puts it, “foundation tales of all kinds tend to respond to needs of the present as much if not more than they adequately record the past.”²¹ Her point applies to the Gorgias and helps us make sense of the debate over Periclean leadership, which is not only about whether he was a good leader but about how “Pericles” is to be represented and what sort of politics various representations legitimate. Her point also helps us make sense of how and why the contest over “Plato” and “the” Western tradition he comes to stand for is involved in contemporary debates over democratic citizenship and American civic identity.

Socrates’ antidemocratic sentiments in the Gorgias seem clearest in his disparagement of the revered democratic leaders of Athens and in his conception of leadership as “psychic engineering.” His most vehement criticism is aimed at the most democratic leader, Pericles, who is accused of making his fellow citizens worse by indulging their desires rather than educating their souls. How can someone who made those in his charge lazy covetous chatterboxes, who had a worse reputation among those he led at the end of his tenure of office than in the beginning, and who complained about his unjust treatment at the hands of the people he purportedly led be considered a good political leader? If he was a horse trainer who trained his horses to be even more unruly than they were before, or a doctor whose prescriptions made his patients worse, would we praise their art and accomplishments? Why not use the same standards for Pericles?

As an alternative Socrates offers the true political art (alēthōs politikē technē) and himself as the one living practitioner of it. This political art aims at improving the souls of citizens, transforming their ill-formed aspirations and illinformed unselfconscious commitments. In its assumption of a radical inequality between the competent authority of the true statesman and the actual lives of people, in the discrepancy it posits between the judgment of the people and the knowledge necessary for moral self-knowledge, which is itself a necessary condition for participation, it is a view of leadership incompatible with even a tepidly liberal view of democracy. The case against Socrates as democratic seems both powerful and closed. But, as is by now obvious, I do not think it is either.

It isn’t because, for one thing, it depends on a kind of reading the dialogue itself warns against. The Gorgias is concerned with deception and self-deception and shows Socrates using tactics he explicitly excoriates and failing to achieve what he repeatedly says he must in order to answer the central question of the dialogue (“Which is the best life?”). Moreover it incessantly calls attention to what is absent or problematic in the argument and drama such that the preconditions for dialogue become the dialogues’ subject. And finally it leaves the great dialectician talking to himself.

For another thing there is the question I posed earlier of when being a critic of democracy makes one antidemocratic rather than a prophet recalling his or her people to what is best in their past and most promising in their future. This is a particularly pressing question if, as the juxtaposition of the dramatic and historical contexts of the dialogue suggests, that democracy has become so corrupt²² that critique must be systemic and a particularly difficult one if we read the Gorgias against the background of Euripidean or Aristophanic drama, whose criticisms of Athenian democracy can make Socrates’ criticisms of his native city seem relatively tame.

The dialogue, like the Antigone, presents the general corruption as one of language, a corruption of particular significance in an oral culture and in a democracy which relied on speech as a mode of political education, common deliberation, and judgment. It is in this regard that Socrates appears more committed to democratic culture than the popularly acclaimed Gorgias and the putative democrat Callicles. For the Gorgias of this dialogue²³ language is a form of manipulation and the necessary as well as sufficient condition for power, freedom, and happiness. The rhetorician’s mastery of language enables his students to master anyone, any time, any place and for any ends.²⁴ It is the consequences of this which Socrates brings Gorgias to see and which brings the rhetorician to take Socrates’ side later on.

Where speech becomes mere words, when, as with Callicles (and some contemporary political leaders), protestations of affection and respect for the demos disguise contempt for them,²⁵ democratic citizens may well become cynical, passive, act impulsively or in ignorance, all of which then justifies elite claims to superiority. When masters of speech like Gorgias are disconnected from a living community of fellow citizens so that their sons will not have to fight in a war their words may have helped begin, the separation of words and things becomes the separation of power and responsibility.²⁶ If political judgment rests on the anticipated communications with others with whom I share a world and with whom I have to come to some agreement, then “distorted communication” of which Gorgias boasts and perpetuates is a threat to it. That he is uninterested in listening to what others say (he claims he has already heard every question that could possibly be asked him) and that he is a foreigner make him less aware of the highly contextualized discriminations and attention to particular ties of place and time that remind a people of their shared past and future. But he also dissolves the enlarged mentality political judgment requires, a mentality that enables citizens to think in place of others, to consider their perspectives. To quote Arendt yet again, “The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue and the better I can imagine how I would think and feel if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion.”²⁷ This does not entail any erasure of self, interest, or will (or reifying them either). Nor is it a matter of altruism, following the dictates of an ontology or adhering to a stable vision of community. What it does entail is political and moral imagination, the ability to at least momentarily take the part of others, to see as they see and so see more of the world one shares with them. Like an actress one has to play more than one role to avoid “type-casting.” Like a member of an audience one is able to see how the parts make up the whole. This is not a claim for objectivity or universality but for impartiality, in which we think as fellow actors, in representative ways.

The example Gorgias sets, the view of politics as domination he assumes or espouses, and the sort of citizens likely to emerge from that example and view (i.e., Polus and Callicles) endanger the always fragile negotiations that characterize democratic deliberations. But this is not a matter of undistorted communication since the Gorgias presses the ubiquity of power upon us even in philosophical discussions where it seems least present and most inappropriate. Nor, given the contest over the representations of Athenian democratic leaders and Socrates own manipulations, does it permit a sure line between fact and fiction.

One could say that the dialogue presents two principles in tension if not at war with each other: one’s a Habermasian ideal of a communicative reason in which dialogue and deliberation are governed by ideas of frankness, mutuality, consensus, and rational argument derived from the formal structure of communication itself. The other is the Foucauldian suspicion that such discursive practice is a particularly insidious way of concealing power’s regime of truth with its normalizing productions and perpetuation of exclusions and hierarchies, both of which problematize any ideal of manipulation and coercion-free “conversation.” For the former dialogue provides a paradigm for an emancipatory political theory and politics. For the latter it is another instance of hiding power amid the rhetoric of rationally motivated agreement.²⁸

Thus the Gorgias holds out the hope and vision of dialogue as an exchange which excludes extraneous concerns beyond the desire to understand, clarify, reflect, and achieve agreement on the animating questions of individual and collective life. Here is a need for frankness and precision, friendship and consistency. But the dialogue challenges that vision by politicizing philosophy through its own semantic complexity. Here is Mikhail Bakhtin.

The words, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers.²⁹

There is a third complication about Socrates being antidemocratic, this one involving his criticism of Pericles.

By the time we get to Socrates’ critique, Pericles has been assimilated to tyrants. For Gorgias the connection is implicit, emerging from his definition of politics as deceit and domination for selfish ends. In these terms no political leader, including Pericles, could have shared responsibility with relative free and equal citizens since all leaders aim to be powerful, free, and happy and above the law, doing what they want, when they want, to whomever they want. What is implicit with Gorgias is made explicit by Polus who identifies the democratic leaders with the tyrant Archelaus. It is left to Callicles to provide a metaphysical justification for it and to praise Xerxes and Darius as having acted according to the nature of what is just (483e2)—in their attacks on Greece! So when we get to Socrates’ critique of Pericles, the latter’s democratic sympathies are portrayed as a particularly ingenious cosmetic ploy to insinuate himself with the demos in order to better dominate it. But if Socrates is criticizing this Pericles then it is not so clear that his criticisms of the Athenian pantheon is a criticism of “democracy” rather than of the way democracy and leadership have come to be construed by men like Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles (and the society that has called them forth). If I am right, then the contest over “Pericles” is a contest over how to represent the Athenian past as a way of legitimating a contemporary political agenda.³⁰

In addition, despite the claim that he alone possesses the true art of politics which should presumably insure that his students are just in the way Gorgias’s are not, Socrates was tried for corrupting the young and blamed then as he is now (by I. F. Stone) for having taught students who were responsible for a violent antidemocratic coup. Thus the accusations he levels at Gorgias were brought against him and the question becomes why he was as inept at “educating” his students as he accuses Gorgias and Pericles of being.³¹ What makes things even more peculiar is that Socrates prominently invokes Alcibiades who was both one of those people he was accused of corrupting and a ward of Pericles. Thus Socrates and Pericles share responsibility for their students’ excesses. And that creates a certain kinship between Socrates and the man he accuses of being the worst political leader of all and against whom he offers himself as corrective. To top it off there is Socrates’ own inability to “control” Callicles. In the end he is left talking to himself, which is, Callicles implies, what he has been doing all along.

But what about the charge of “psychic engineering,” the claim that Socrates endorses the idea of a political technē and rule by experts whose special unshared knowledge entitles them to tell others how to live or, at a minimum, establishes a relationship of teacher and student Arendt insists is inappropriate for the citizens of a democratic polis?

There is no question that such an idea is present in the Gorgias. If politics is a technē as shoemaking, horse training, or medicine is and those who possess the political art can “make” people better, prescribing for their souls as a physician does for their bodies in accordance with some agreed upon procedures and ends, then political issues can be dealt with rationally by professionals indifferent to the blandishments of men such as Gorgias. If there is such an art, no accidents of character or situation can thwart its success, since it is the absence of such an art that leaves someone like Gorgias unable to control the consequences of his teaching as they appear in the form of unjust actions by his students.

As with Socrates’ criticisms of Pericles we confront complications which leave us less certain of Socrates’ endorsement of any such political technē. Of course any such uncertainty affects the degree to which Socrates’ arguments for a technē can be grounds for his being considered antidemocratic.

To begin with, it is worth noting that Socrates presents his claim as a counter to Gorgias’s assertions about the power of rhetoric to give one absolute domination over everyone and every situation. The old rhetoric promises mastery over others as a means to achieve the satiation of desires. It persuades by flattery rather than on the basis of facts or common deliberation since its success depends on manipulation. And it magnifies the divisions within the soul and city. But the new philosophic rhetoric, the true political technē Socrates claims to practice, promises mastery for shared ends, treats others as ends, convinces these others on the basis of knowledge and dialogue and lessens the divisions within the soul and city. Making a man a friend to himself is, for Socrates, the precondition for making him a friend to others, and so a good citizen.

However strategic Socrates claims for a political technē may be, he does make them. Of the three analogies Socrates introduces by way of justifying his art/ artisanship—shoemaking, horse training, and medicine—the latter is the most plausible and most invoked. A political educator or leader is like a doctor of the soul who prevents or cures political and psychic illness as the doctor does physical ones. Unlike inert materials (leather or wood) that artisans work on or the irrational beasts that concern trainers, in medicine the “material” participates in its own physical regeneration. The question is, How? It had been one of Gorgias’s boasts that the rhetorician is more powerful than the doctor even on medical matters since if a patient refuses to heed a diagnosis or take a prescription all the doctor’s skill goes for naught, whereas a rhetorician can convince someone to do what makes him worse because of his skill with words. This is the ground upon which he claims rhetoric to be the master art. But for Socrates a good doctor-patient relationship entails the doctor persuading his patient to accept treatment by explaining the cause of his symptoms and the reasons why he is making the prescriptions he is. More significantly a healthy man would do whatever he wants and so the political authority of the expert would be at most temporary.³²

But this is still a technē. What evidence is there for the stronger claim that, despite all appearances, Socrates does not endorse even this kind of a technē for politics?

If there is any ultimate authority in the dialogue, it is not a technē as Socrates has defined it but dialectic or dialogue itself. But this is a peculiar form of authority. For one thing it is neither personal, contained in a body of knowledge, nor derivable from transcendent norms but is, like politics, constituted and reinterpreted by the participation of human agents in ways that do not happen even in a doctor-patient relationship. For another thing, even dialectic or dialogue is contested and politicized, either by Callicles who challenges it directly, or indirectly by Socrates who pointedly departs from it, again unlike medicine.³³ Finally, Socrates’ criticisms of Callicles’ elitism suggest the possibility that dialectic, unlike technai (including medicine), could be taught and practiced by anyone. If that is indeed his belief, if he is hoping to create a citizenry capable of thinking for itself and thus immune to rhetorical manipulation, a citizenry moreover that is willing or even anxious to accept the responsibilities of power democracy requires, then the criticism of “Pericles” may constitute a general warning against democrats relying too much on any leader. Then the point of Socrates’ philosophical rhetoric would not be to educate a few great leaders but to educate every Athenian to be a leader, at least to the degree that he will not have his judgment deformed by a Gorgias or a Callicles.³⁴ In these circumstances philosophical education becomes political education and Socrates’ concern is with us as choosers rather than with any particular choice.

Consider the parallels between this view of a democratic political “leader” and Socrates’ own role as a “teacher” and dialectician.³⁵ Socrates does not want us to think what he thinks or as he does unless we persuade ourselves by thinking for ourselves. There can be no passive acceptance of doctrinal instruction, whether the source be philosophers or political leaders. Thus the Gorgias finds Socrates questioning the authority of tradition, the many, self-styled political experts, pretenders to moral superiority, and self-proclaimed aristocrats, all the while insisting that he has “no more knowledge than you do when I ask and speak but rather join in a common search with you” (506a) and that he does “not know how it is that these things (the subject of the dialogue) are so” (509a).³⁶ Rhetoricians and sophists tell people what they want to hear as a way of gaining power over them. Socrates calls even the most obvious things and accepted views (about Pericles, wisdom, power, happiness) into question as a way of sharing power with them, whether in the dialogue or city.

Or consider the way philosophical conversation as a common search for a shared good that enhances an individual’s and dialogical community’s good stands as an ideal of political deliberation as well. In these terms Socrates’ insistence that “if my opponent has any substance in what he says I will be the first to acknowledge it” (506a) provides a standard for a political debate over the best policy. Moreover, as participants in the dialogue should take responsibility for what they say and are in this respect educators of each other, so should citizens. To be a good citizen requires that one be a friend to oneself, which is a precondition and end of dialogue. When Socrates argues that truth is larger than particular interests of those engaged in its pursuit or claims he cares for the argument that is their shared enterprise rather than being victorious, he is proposing a political as well as philosophical ideal. In these terms “philosophical” choices have direct consequences for how one acts politically, indeed for how one thinks about politics and action. Finally, the process of talk in both philosophical discussion and political deliberation changes how one talks. In both instances there is a move from what is private, selfish, or merely taken as given to a situation where reasons in terms of common purposes must be offered and defended. That participation in dialogue or deliberation changes those who participate in them is one reason why Benjamin Barber can describe what he calls “the civic bond” as “dialectical.”

Individuals become involved in government by participating in the common institutions of self-government and become involved with one another by virtue of their common engagement in politics. They are united by the ties of the common activity and common consciousness—ties that are willed rather than given by blood or heritage or prior consensus of beliefs and that thus depend for their preservation and growth on constant commitment and ongoing political activity.³⁷

With appropriate substitutions (e.g., of dialogue for government) this is true of philosophical argument as well.

Now this suggests that the question of whether and how Socrates is a democrat is not only a matter of what is said but of how it is said, not only a question of explicit argumentation but of dialectical “method” and of the dramatic movement of the dialogue. Thus, it would be possible for the way criticisms of democracy are made—provocatively, frankly, inconsistently, ironically, dialectically, polyphonically—to be “democratic,” even as the particular argument was not.

I want to elaborate this claim by articulating three voices in the Gorgias. Each voice is also a way of considering the relationship between philosophy and politics. I then want to recast these voices and these relationships as they are played out in the drama between Callicles and Socrates, which will lead to the question of Plato as a democrat and the third part of this essay.

The first, which I have called “Habermasian,” is the possibility of philosophical dialogue as an idealized analog for democratic deliberation. The idea that political debate should emulate dialectic as Socrates celebrates it stands as a rebuke to Callicles’ view of politics as a war of all against all, against the idealization of tyranny, and against the equation of power with domination. Here “communicative rationality” would be free from deceptions and self-deception, strategic manipulations and domination. The second is what I called “Foucauldian,” which politicizes philosophy, making it clear that establishing a dialogic community no less than a political one involves fiercely contested negotiations of power. Politicized philosophy confronts power as much as reason, and its search for truthfulness, in the sense of a mutually established ground for speech against rhetorical debasement, is disrupted by the play of interest and advantage within the dialogue, which echoes a similar play outside it. In this voice dialogue, like the democratic polis, rests on consent that is continually reworked and perpetually liable to politicization. If the first is the will to truth, the second confronts truth with the will to power, in the sense of both a suppressed instinct and generative possibilities.

There is a third voice that problematizes any analogy between philosophy and politics—a voice that reminds us of Socrates’ death and anticipates the animus between philosophy and politics. Occasionally foregrounded, as when Callicles pointedly warns Socrates that his preoccupation with philosophy will leave him politically helpless and susceptible to false accusations that may well lead to his death, it mostly exists on the margins as frame, or at the center as subtext.

Fifty years ago Werner Jaeger wondered whether “we have not given enough thought to the possibility that in his own character Plato had so much of that unruly will to power as to find, and fight, part of himself in Callicles.” Though such a will to power lies “deeply buried” in Plato’s other writings, its presence in the Gorgias may explain why Socrates was so powerful an influence on him. For if Plato “had by nature been only a second Socrates, the real Socrates would hardly have had such an overwhelming effect on him as he had.”³⁸ Though I would quarrel with parts of this formulation, Jaeger is right to emphasize the singular energy and passion of Callicles’ challenge to Socrates and philosophy, and the deep ambivalence toward politics this challenge portends.

Callicles is bewildered by his reaction to Socrates. “I do not know how it is that your speech attracts me Socrates. Yet I share the common feeling [pollōn pathos] of being unconvinced” (513c). On the one hand he admires Socrates’ courage and tenacity, his independence and largeness of sensibility in adhering to something beyond petty pleasures and mundane preoccupations. If not convinced, Callicles seems at least worried by Socrates’ argument that tyrants and those who would advise or support them are the least powerful, free, and happy because they must necessarily exhibit a slavelike hypersensitivity to what others think and might do. One could say that it is Socrates not Callicles who demonstrates a natural superiority the latter so admires.

Yet for Callicles what makes Socrates powerful also makes him vulnerable to unjust accusations and prey for any ambitious politicians. While Callicles respects philosophy as an essential ingredient in the education of a good man, to be a philosopher in the sense of making philosophical considerations paramount is a kind of insanity. It trivializes one’s talents, marginalizes one’s significance in life,³⁹ is ultimately self-defeating, and leaves one with a severe case of vertigo. At the very outset of their conversation Callicles recognizes that if Socrates was serious in his arguments with Gorgias and Polus human life “will have to be completely turned upside-down [anatetrammenos]” and “everything we do seems the exact opposite of what we should do” (481c).

“One chooses dialectic,” Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect; the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be selfdefense for those who no longer have other weapons.”⁴⁰ Perhaps Plato shared some of Nietzsche’s sentiments and so Callicles might have had the same effect on him that Socrates had on Callicles. Perhaps Jaeger is right in assuming that the Gorgias is a dialogue between two parts of Plato’s soul (which would give yet another dimension to the Republic). What we would need to know to answer these questions is Plato. But in the most obvious ways we don’t.

I begin with a simple but sometimes unappreciated fact: nowhere in any dialogue does Plato speak in his “own” name. This makes the charge that Plato is an authoritarian, antipolitical, or antidemocratic, indeed the attribution of any doctrine to him, deeply problematic, unless one believes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece or that there is a straightforward way of distinguishing the democratic Socrates from the authoritarian Plato. Let me suggest why I do not think Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece, why, even if he is, it will not advance the argument for the latter’s authoritarianism, and why, even if we could establish such a separation, it is not very consequential for the question of a democratic Socrates or Plato.

In a recent essay Michael Frede distinguishes various forms of Platonic dialectic.⁴¹ One form is didactic, where the respondent, ignorant of certain truths as shown by his false statements, confronts a questioner who already knows the answer and asks questions that will induce him to give the right one so they can proceed to the next step of the argument. In these exchanges the respondent has no influence on the course of the argument since the questioner will not go on until she has received the right answer. This view of dialectic assumes that Socrates is “advancing an argument he already has and espouses, because it is an argument Plato has and endorses and which Plato just puts into Socrates’ mouth; an argument” in which the participant has no real power or influence “except that, for dramatic purposes, he can be represented as stubborn or misguided and thus as making it more or less difficult for Socrates to get to the conclusion of his argument” (209). This is how most undergraduates understand the Platonic “dialogues” on first reading, and how some of their teachers understand them after many.

But this form is never present in the early dialogues and absent in the Gorgias. All are aporetic, representing Socrates as engaging in “elenctic, rather than didactic, dialectic” (210). An aporia is a situation in which one no longer knows what to say or do about an issue or question.⁴² Like Callicles, one is befuddled, tom between the conclusions one has reached and what seems to be the case, at a loss as to how to get out of the difficulty presented by the contradiction between one’s original claim and the conclusion of the ensuing argument. If it was a situation where Socrates provided a proof for the contradictory claim, then Callicles would be embarrassed as were Gorgias and Polus. But being at a loss as to what to say and do is a different matter.⁴³

How does elenctic dialectic do this? Take Callicles as an example. Callicles presents himself as an expert on politics and human nature. Socrates proceeds to test the knowledge upon which this claim to expertise rests. If Callicles (or Thrasymachus or Protagoras) contradicts himself on the very subject on which he claims expertise then his authority is in question. Socrates is less concerned to refute directly any particular answer or claim than he is in refuting Callicles himself. Indeed we might go further and argue, as I have in respect to leadership, that no claim to authority seems to withstand Socratic critique, that expertise itself is suspect. (The situation is analogous to the one in which we find equally reputable experts testifying on the opposite sides of an issue in a lawcourt. It is not so much their individual expertise that gets called into question but the very idea of expertise itself.)

If Frede is right about elenctic dialectic and I am right in applying it to the Gorgias, then Callicles contributes significantly to the movement and substance of the dialogue. It is true that Socrates poses the equations and in that sense shapes the argument. But since he does so to clarify the views and life of his interlocutor, “it does not matter in the least what the questioner himself knows or believes to be the facts about the subject in question” (212). Thus even if Plato were to identify with Socrates, he is committing himself only to the elenctic dialectic itself, not to any particular argument, which means that if we are to make any inference about the position of the character Socrates or Plato, it has to be highly indirect. Even in what are regarded as nonaporetic dialogues as different as the Phaedo, Timaeus, and the second part of the Parmenides, the commitment of the questioner is often qualified, and even where it is not “nothing follows about the commitment of the author.” So even in his most dogmatic dialogues “Plato” maintains “a radical distance from the views and arguments of the characters of the dialogue,” which is a work of fiction anyway.

But why does Plato take such pains to avoid being committed to particular arguments of the dialogue and how and why do dialogues achieve this purpose? Surely one thing is to impress upon us how hard, even impossible, it is to legitimately speak with authority, how few of us are justified in our confidence about the meaning of our actions and speech, how easy failure of understanding is especially in those matters which effect and affect us most deeply. Human knowledge seems unable to master any subject, let alone subjects such as virtue, reality, justice, power, happiness, and freedom. These are not issues that are easily bounded by disciplines for they help to determine our whole life as citizens and individuals.⁴⁴

Perhaps this is the kind of ignorance that led Socrates to characterize himself as someone who cannot pronounce on the questions he is inquiring about and who denies that he is a teacher in the sense of being an expert or an authority. But what about Plato? Did he have the knowledge Socrates claimed not to have? Certainly nothing prevented him from presenting his arguments as treatises, which would have amounted to a claim to speak as the author and from authority.⁴⁵ But he doesn’t. At a minimum, dialogue seems to have afforded Plato the opportunity to present his views without endorsing them more strongly than he thought justified. But it affords something more. The dialogues, Frede points out, go “to great lengths to specify a fictitious context out of which the argument arises: it is individuals with a certain character, general outlook, a certain social position, certain interests, ambitions and concerns, individuals in a certain situation, who enter the debates, and this background noticeably colors their views” (p. 216). What we see in the Gorgias (or Protagoras or Republic) is that to know about power, justice, friendship, happiness, freedom, or courage entails knowing about one’s character, outlook, social position, interests, ambitions, and concerns; that beliefs and experiences are deeply yet unobviously connected; that arguments emerge out of and remain more or less embedded in one’s way of life; and that philosophy is tied to interest. What we see is, again, the politicization of philosophy in counterpoint to the Apology’s vision of philosophical politics.

Frede concludes by indicating how the relationship between respondent and questioner in the dialogue anticipates and is paradigmatic for the relationship between reader and author outside it. If Plato’s concern is for our becoming clear about our ideas, commitments, and lives, then he must thwart our temptations to adopt his views for the wrong reasons; for instance that an idea comes from a great mind like Plato’s. Instead Plato pushes us to sort out our own views in order to come to what Frede calls “the correct view” (p. 217). If there is any lesson teaching or moral in the Platonic corpus this is it: “nothing but our own thought gains us knowledge.”⁴⁶

Yet most of us do not think for ourselves, at least not in the way Socrates commends we must. Socrates is no more successful with us than he is with Callicles in the dialogue or Critias, Alcibiades, and Charmides outside it. Nietzsche is right when he dismisses dialectic as the last refuge of resentful impotence. Most of us most of the time agree with him and Callicles that philosophy “emasculates” those of exceptional abilities by seducing them away from public life where there are real stakes to “live out their lives skulking in some comer, whispering with three or four boys, never saying anything worthy of a free powerful and notable man” (485d). It is not only that philosophers are useless in terms of their own moral or moralistic principles—as Vlastos asked, Where was Socrates when the Athenian assembly debated the fate of the Mytileneans?—but that in the end we simply walk away from them. At best we are like Crito, who acquiesces to arguments he has no doubt heard many times before and which manage to silence rather than convince him. Or we are like Protagoras, who (as we shall see in chapter nine) praises Socrates as an excuse to get away from him (all other stratagems having failed). Or like Euthyphro, whose last words, “for right now, I am in a hurry to get somewhere, and it is time for me to leave” (15e), are astonishing given that he initiated the discussion and is continuing with an action whose morality and motives have been shown to be profoundly suspect. In these terms Socrates’ concluding myth in the Gorgias is a monologue whose impact is emblematic for us who read the Platonic dialogues. Even when we do not accept all of Socrates’ arguments we almost always accept the superiority of his position to those of vanquished interlocutors like Crito, Protagoras, Euthyphro, or Callicles. Yet it makes little or no difference in our lives. Having taken Socrates’ side we close the book and, like the interlocutors, proceed to go about our business, perhaps amused by Socrates’ cleverness, or feeling edified in an abstract way that allows us to be self-righteous and amoral at the same time. What we do not do is doing what agreement with Socrates should entail: living the examined life by devoting ourselves, as he did, to the search for the good life.

No doubt what Socrates and Plato ask is extremely difficult. But if we agree that the search for goodness, justice, and truth is the right thing to do and not to do it, if we know that it constitutes a better life than the one we lead yet continuing to live as we do, we are, as Plato’s readers and Socrates’ admirers, in what Alexander Nehamas calls “a very peculiar situation indeed.” For “to believe that Socrates’ effect, either on his own interlocutors or on the readers of the dialogues is generally beneficial is to be taken in by Platonic irony and to show ourselves to be missing the point in our very claim to see it. It is nothing other than displaying our ignorance of our ignorance” (p. 298).

But perhaps Plato could succeed where Socrates failed even if that success entailed abandoning Socrates in his name, a not unfamiliar theme from anyone familiar with Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Perhaps he could take Socrates’ paradoxical ignorance and systematically articulate the view that the life of knowledge and philosophy is the best life for humans to live. Perhaps he could take Socrates’ goodness, his motivation, character, and activity, and make it more than a matter of luck or “divine accident”⁴⁷—make it the product of a technē. If there were a way to ensure that there would always be a few Socrateses around who would be honored for what they are, then one would likely turn to systematic education to “produce good people and the ability in those who are not good to recognize them” (p. 304). One would produce the Republic as a response to Socrates’ failure with Callicles, Protagoras, Euthyphro, as well as Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides.

On Nehamas’s account Platonic philosophy entails the separation of knowing from doing and the adoption of a method that makes the kind of political technē Socrates of the Gorgias sometimes endorses, but which elenctic dialectic ultimately undercuts, a real possibility. Plato wants to show us what the good life is while separating the ability actually to live that life from the lesser, but still admirable ability, to recognize the superiority of that life and of those who live it. Not only could he define what the good life was, he became “rapt” with “a method of learning which itself does not depend on luck and good will, but only on ability and persistence—a method which offers no choice, but imposes the obligation to accept its conclusions once you begin to follow it.” It was on this basis that he devised a system for the direct education of every person’s soul. The method, Plato’s method, is “in its higher reaches mathematical” (305). We can have a political technē that produces the right kinds of students and citizens. Here is the missing ground for Socrates’ criticisms of Gorgias’s inability to control his students, and Pericles inability to control the citizens he leads. It is also the way a future Socrates can control a future Callicles or Alcibiades, thus exonerating philosophy from the charges of failure and complicity leveled at Socrates.

But all this is, Nehamas suggests, premised on a belief that philosophy constitutes the best way of life. Where this sense is lost, as it now is, the “idea that philosophers are particularly qualified to understand the nature of the good life and show it to others must lose much of its hold” (pp. 305-6).

But I am not wholly convinced by the undemocratic Plato that emerges from Frede’s and Nehamas’s readings. I am not sure “Plato” wanted us to come to “the correct view,” which sounds more didactic than elenctic. Nor am I sure that he regarded dialectic as instrumentally as Frede seems to when he sees it as a way of arriving at truth rather than a way of representing it. If the choice of writing dialogues (and arguing dialectically) “expresses a sense of life and of value, of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations and communications,”⁴⁸ if life is never simply presented by a text but always represented as something, then dialogue becomes exemplary and intrinsically valuable. A dialogue like the Gorgias then is a way of expressing the surprising variety, complexity, and impenetrability of the world, its flawed beauty and furtive orders, which, however revered or longed for, yield to fissures and contingency. It suggests that even the most ingenious schemes of political and linguistic containment cannot erase division and conflict and that any mode of philosophical prose less allusive and attentive to particularity than dialogue is would flatten the political and intellectual landscape. The rhythm of dialogues like the Gorgias and Protagoras, with their inversions and subversions, their movements of attraction and repulsion, of friendship and enmity, trust and suspicions, embodies a surplus that exceeds any single position or interpretation.

This does not preclude Socrates from holding particular views that Plato may have shared, at least in the aporetic dialogues: views about the good life, about it being better to suffer injustice than commit it, about virtue being knowledge and sufficient for happiness. That he holds these views matters to the success of dialectic, whether it is the dialectic within the dialogue or between the dialogue and its readers. But what also matters is how he came to those views, the sense in which he “holds” them, and whether he risks them in a dialogic encounter. Unlike Frede and Nehamas, I think he does.

In part this has to do with the fact that a position’s survival through every examination in the past does not guarantee it in the future; it may have been proved false in the very next one after that.⁴⁹ But in part it has to do with something that emerges from Socrates’ discussion with Callicles about whether it is better to suffer or commit injustice, something which bears both on Socrates’ criticism of Pericles and the issue of political expertise.⁵⁰ Doing and suffering injustice are ineradicable features of human life because the consequences of any action—whether done by Pericles or Socrates himself—escapes prediction and containment. Since none of us can live in a completely controlled environment and are thus likely both to (inadvertently) cause suffering and to experience it, the issue is how to live, politically and philosophically, in a world where our best efforts must partially fail.⁵¹ In these terms Callicles’ defense of the tyrannical life is also a Nietzschean insistence that only by cultivating the widest range of passions most intensely can one live life to the fullest. This endorsement of the sublime over the ordered life, this impiety toward conventions that impose unnatural limits on the forces of desire, this celebration of the sheer joy of imposing one’s own order on that which is other are what Callicles admires both in Socrates and in Pericles.

As this implies, it is not only particular views that are at stake in Socrates’ dialectic counters. Something far more is at risk even for Socrates, more likely for Plato—the status of dialectic itself. As I have argued, the Gorgias dramatizes the contest of power present in the constitution of discourse, how winners erase what they have triumphed over even as they deny there has been a war. Whatever Socrates’ protestations about dialectic operating above the fray, he and it are portrayed as very much part of it. This is true not only of the Gorgias but as we shall see in the next chapter of the Protagoras, where the sophist argues that Socrates’ insistence on dialectical argument is his way of forcing an opponent to fight on unfavorable ground. In these dialogues, as elsewhere, Socrates departs from his own dialectical strictures, using the antidialectical tactics of his opponents.⁵² This is usually seen as Socrates showing that he can play his opponent’s game better than he can so that his choice of dialectic is really not aimed at vanquishing his opponent since he can do that without dialectic. I think something more than that is at stake: the status of dialectic and of Socrates. Dialectic demands that one is willing to open oneself up to a refutation of one’s life and character as well as to the arguments that manifest it. Few are willing to do so— certainly Callicles isn’t, though he recognizes that not doing so is a kind of cowardice—because one could discover that one is not who one thinks one is and is not doing what one thinks one is doing. The courage required to face the risk of discovering commitments acquired inadvertently and wrongs done unintentionally is not only something Socrates displays in regard to his exchanges with the interlocutors in the dialogue, but something Plato is also undertaking in regard to Socrates. This means that in the Gorgias (as in other dialogues such as the Protagoras and Republic) Plato may be discovering the commitments he has more or less inadvertently made to Socrates as well as the injustice he has suffered or is perpetuating as Socrates’ student and rival.

Nor am I convinced that Plato “provides the sort of Final Answer and Full Disclosure that can resolve doubt by submitting all problems to the regime of a mathematical world model.”⁵³ Even in the Republic these arguments are embedded in a dramatic context that persistently challenges its readers to reexamine not only its particular theses but the frame within which they become claims to be true or false. What we make of any such claim depends on what we make of the fact that Socrates interrupts the discussion to warn the interlocutors that they have been hasty in their agreement, gullible in their confidence, and impatient in argument and failed to recognize the significance of what they ask and fail to ask. It depends too upon what we make of the dialogue criticizing what it is (poetry and drama) and extolling virtues it ignores (that one should play a single role in life or as Socrates ventriloquizes the voices in the dialogue), and posits analogies between soul and state it gives ample evidence to reject.⁵⁴ Sometimes Socrates is explicit about these interruptions, but not always. Insofar as Socrates is a character in a drama written by Plato, there is a set of signals Plato provides readers which seem unavailable to any of the interlocutors including Socrates. Interpretations that fail to materialize within the imaginary encounters of what Harry Berger calls “the field of dramatic play” are conspicuously featured in the “field of textual play.” Thus the Gorgias, Protagoras, or Republic like other dialogues (Berger’s example is the Ion) can be read as a dialogue or agon between its speakers and its text. “For the text tells us something about itself in adumbrating the limits of a form of discourse—Socratic logos, constrained by its oral conditions—which only textual representation can recuperate, or supplement, or transcend.”⁵⁵

If the Platonic dialogues abound in so many contradictions and inconsistencies then trying to elicit the “presence of the master, the coherence of his meaning and the disclosure of his mind”⁵⁶ seems a daunting if not impossible task. Impossible unless one is as confident as Terence Irwin is that on the basis of textual evidence one can readily distinguish the views of Socrates from those of Plato, document the successes and failures of Plato’s defense, rejection, and revision of Socratic ethics, and recognize that many of those views are “false, confused, vague, inconclusive and badly defended.”⁵⁷ Or, by contrast though similarly, if one believes that rigorous attention to the dramatic context of an argument is a “key to Plato’s intentions.” Then an “attentive reader” can reveal Plato’s intentions and provide us with Plato’s teaching.⁵⁸

If I am right about the Gorgias and Plato, then I was wrong to begin by saying Plato does not appear in his dialogues. He is all over them. “Perhaps,” Aryeh Kosman writes, “we should not be discussing Plato’s silence but his ventriloquy; the displacement of speech, its projection into a created other, a dummy, a mute substitute who is truly a silent partner in the act despite the fact that it is he who ‘speaks.’”⁵⁹ These voices remain unstilled, provoking, and inspiring, repellent yet seductive even for Callicles and Nietzsche “in spite of themselves” (in both senses of the phrase).⁶⁰ This is an astonishing fact given the general rejection of Socratic intellectualism as defined by a trust in reason, a belief that ignorance is the ultimate evil, an identification of virtue with knowledge and happiness, and an indifference to the affective side of human life and the need for habituation. Surely Socrates has his feet planted firmly in the Clouds. And yet he moves us even as he fails to convince us, perhaps because Plato’s dramatization(s) of Socrates’ life transmutes his teacher’s intellectualism into something more arresting and affecting.

Nehamas and Nietzsche are right when they claim Socrates was unsuccessful in persuading friends and enemies alike of the truth of the statement that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. But when he staked his life on that truth by refusing to escape the death sentence,⁶¹ that became, in Plato’s hands, a story of passion and pathos and Socrates became a man of Achillean courage who died for the life he led. This myth of a man who was at once a courageous citizen of a democracy, and an independent thinker in part because of it, frames the arguments of the Gorgias and continues to agitate those who think of themselves as educators in a democratic polity. Mostly these are philosophers and political theorists whose professional responsibilities include teaching classical authors. But sometimes the question of whether Socrates (or Plato) was a democrat matters to them more than usual and to more people than usual. I think that is true now because of the ongoing debate between multiculturalism and canonists over the meaning(s) of America, a conflict that, not coincidentally, mirrors that between Socrates and his interlocutors in the Gorgias over the meaning of Periclean leadership and Athenian democracy. The peculiarities of this debate discussed in chapters one and two suggest a need to recast the terms of my argument.

Suppose we ask not about Socrates or Plato being a democrat but about the resources for democratic readings and culture contained in dialogues like the Apology, Crito, Gorgias, Protagoras, and Republic. Such a shift would, to begin with, turn our attention away from the historical Socrates and authoritarian Plato to the interplay between an evolving text and the generation of sometimes divided interpretative communities who care about and for them. Then analysis of “the” text would include some study of how these interpretive communities are constituted and sustained, their place in the larger culture, how they “use” the text while learning from it. When, as in the nineteenth-century debate over the reform laws in Britain or now in the controversy over Great Books and core curriculum in the United States, these communities are wider than the academy, the issue of the relationships between democratic readings and democratic citizenship has more salience than it otherwise might.

Historicizing a text does not absolve us from making arguments for our interpretations of them; closely reading passages, contesting translations, detailing the interplay of what used to be called form and content, text and context. It means that, as Socrates suggests in the Apology, mortality inflects any understanding of events and texts and eternal verities are always worked out in local circumstances.

Attending to the democratic potentialities and democratic readings of works like the Gorgias affords the chance to return to some themes of chapter one. I suggested there that some of Plato’s most implacable critics are in fact his allies, while some of his most strident defenders turn out to be the wolves in sheep’s clothing. If what makes texts like the Gorgias (or Republic or Protagoras) “great” is their capacity to generate the kinds of moral and political controversies canonist defenders such as Bennett and Cheney would silence or circumscribe, then feminist, postmodernist, and Marxist critics of “Plato” may be giving his texts the life and energy his friends exhaust (providing, of course, that the critics do not themselves come to form a new orthodoxy). Clearly conflicting views of human nature and goodness in dialogues like the Gorgias are inscribed in the very plots, themes, arguments, and dramatic settings of canonical texts in ways that undercut their “usefulness” in any politicized education.⁶²

Thus the Gorgias is polymorphous—exactly what Plato objects to about democracy in the Republic when he describes it as a bazaar of constitutions. If so, then the hearers most likely to respond to Jaeger’s tensions and Bakhtin’s semantic complexity are likely to be “democratic” readers. Readers committed to a single interpretative methodology, political standpoint, or philosophical approach and who aggressively insist that each character and term are fixed are deaf to the kind of irreducible paradoxes the Gorgias sustains and which are so often the substance of Greek tragedy. They play over the polyphony of shifting meanings (including those of democracy, politics and philosophy) and miss the degree to which the interlocutors push each other (or us) to continual reassessment of our political and philosophical commitments, and how the dialogue pushes democratic citizens to be alternatively if not simultaneously political educators of each other. Such readers are like those individuals who embrace what Stuart Hampshire calls “a morality without perpetual regret, because it is without any sense of the possibilities lost, unnoticed.”⁶³

If I am right, then Callicles is not just a villain. Nor is he erased by what can be construed as Socrates’ victory over him. He lives on as an agitating presence and thematic counterpoint waiting for restitution or revenge, for Nietzsche or Grote, for Foucault or Lyotard to take up his cause. Indeed the very difficulty of the effort to defeat him makes him a live cultural option and constitutes part of the power and provocation of the Gorgias.

But Callicles is no friend of democracy despite Socrates ironic (or spiteful) punning of his love for a man named Demos. That he is not is a useful reminder to those who romanticize the quasi-Nietzschean arguments he makes. We would not want him to rule either within a dialogue or in the world outside it. Yet for all this his voice disrupts the comfort of conversation in a way that creates an interpretative space, incites us to participate in the construction of the dialogues’ meaning(s), and pushes us to reinvent Socrates and Plato as contemporary interlocutors.

The presence of Callicles does one more thing; it makes theorizing an activity and resists its becoming an artifact. Twenty-five years ago Frederic Jameson argued that every “theory about the world, in its very moment for formation, tends to become an object for the mind and to be in itself invested with all the prestige and permanency of a real thing in its own right, thus effacing the dialectical process from which it emerged.”⁶⁴ I am suggesting that the Gorgias keeps the dialectic process conspicuous.

The contest over who Socrates and Plato were, like the contest in the Gorgias over who Pericles was, is partly a contest over the identity of democracy, including the role of philosophy for a democratic citizenry. Some philosophers are contemptuous of democracy, despising it for its ordinariness and grossness, its lack of grace and virtue. But I do not think that describes Socrates in the Gorgias, for as I have argued there is evidence that he is critiquing those he cares for so that they will not rest content in an unreconstructed understanding of who they are, but will take the risk and find out what they could become.⁶⁵

I have quoted the Corinthians in Thucydides that the Athenians were “born into the world to take no rest themselves and give none to others” several times already. The daring innovation and constant transformation they attribute to this most democratic of cities are imitated by the generative power of Platonic dialogues, whose resilience lies less in the prescriptions they offer or the harmony they commend than in the way their irreconcilable tensions keep open the question of what it means to be human. It is the responsibility of those citizens in a democracy charged with the care and teaching of such works to insist that this openness to struggle is one of the most valuable parts of a legacy we need to pass on to our citizen students.⁶⁶ Doing so we can help recover the cultural heterogeneity of the West in ways that can ease the rigid polarities that mark the contemporary cultural wars and enhance the political education of our compatriots.

¹ C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 40-41.

² See Neal Wood and Ellen Wood, “Socrates and Democracy: A Reply to Gregory Vlastos,” Political Theory 14, no. 1 (February 1986): 68, and Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 2.

³ I have done such a reading in much more detail in “Democracy and Political Theory: A Reading of the Gorgias,” in J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober, eds., Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 198-226.

⁴ Ian Morris, “The Strong Principle of Equality and the Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy,” in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, eds., Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracy, Ancient and Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

⁵ It is perhaps worth remembering that radical democratic movements were often generated by attacks on the dominant culture for failing to adhere to their own declared principles or to extend them to all. (That is one lesson of E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class [New York: Vintage, 1963] as well as C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins [New York: Vintage, 1963].)

⁶ For reasons elaborated by Josiah Ober in Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), such a polarity misdescribes the complicated ideological negotiations between elites and nonelites.

⁷ Sheldon S. Wolin, “Transgression, Equality, and Voice” in Ober and Hedrick, Demokratia, pp. 63-90.

⁸ E. A. Havelock, in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), argues that Plato lacked any understanding of the practical world with which the rhetoricians dealt. It is this political stupidity masked by high-flown pronouncements that Havelock suggests alternately annoy and enrage Callicles. I am suggesting the dialogue offers an implicit response to such charges (though they are only implicit and not conclusive).

⁹ See Steven Lukes’s discussion of “the third dimension of power” in his Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974) and John Gaventa’s elaboration of it (and of manufactured consent) in his Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

¹⁰ John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).

¹¹ In All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Stuart Ewan talks about the “engineering of consent” where public relations experts “conflate ideological management techniques with the idiom of social and political liberty” and goes on to quote Edward Bernay to the effect that “the engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.” The various freedoms in the Bill of Rights—speech, press, petition, and assembly, “the freedoms which make the engineering of consent possible”—are among the most cherished guarantees of the Constitution of the United States (p. 267).

¹² There is the added similarity of each dealing with the promises and danger of “enlightenment.” The phrases “life world” and “system world” are Habermas’s. He first introduced them in Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975) but develops them at great length in The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981).

¹³ See his provocative but overstated Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 108. A similar argument is made by Roderick P. Hart in Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Ewen argues that advertising, public relations, and other “industries of image and hype” are creating “a jerry-built material world with provocative, tenuous meanings suggesting fathomable value, but occupying no clear time or space” (p. 159).

¹⁴ Michael Berube argues that the persuasiveness of critics like Kimball and D’Souza depend upon the ignorance of its audience. See his “Public Image Limited: Political Correctness and the Media’s Big Lie,” in Paul Berman, ed., Debating PC (New York: Dell, 1992), pp. 124-49.

¹⁵ I say narrowly and primarily because I do not think one can, practically speaking, establish a hard line between strategic and nonstrategic, manipulative and nonmanipulative.

¹⁶ James L. Kastely argues that rhetoric and philosophy are partners because the former can help us distance ourselves from what we are most attached to and therefore assist the dialectic examination of our lives. See his “In Defense of Plato’s Gorgias,” PMLA 106, no. 1 (January 1991): 96-109.

¹⁷ See Martin Ostwald’s discussion of the evolution of nomos in his Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). One can see the same selfconsciousness in Pericles’ preamble to his Funeral Oration (in Thucydides) when he reflects on why the institution he is about to embrace came to be and whether it should continue to exist.

¹⁸ See Paul Woodruff, “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge,” in Stephen Everson, ed., Epistemology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 60-84. Notice that Socrates drops the discussion of technikou almost as soon as it is raised at 500a.

¹⁹ Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 3.

²⁰ See Sheldon S. Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in Euben et al., Athenian Political Thought, pp. 29-58.

²¹ “Democratic Contradictions and the Synoptic Illusion of Euripides’ Ion,” in Ober and Hedrick, Demokratia.

²² Though I think this is Plato’s (or Socrates’) argument, I am not endorsing it.

²³ If we regard Gorgias as a prismatic focus then the danger to democracy lies less within him than with the cultural forces that have made him popular and powerful. We make similar analyses of our political leaders when we see them against larger cultural frames.

²⁴ There is a wonderful example of this in the “gene industry” as analyzed by Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald’s Exploding the Gene Myth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

²⁵ In his second speech in favor of natural superiority, Callicles hardly disguises his contempt for the demos and later calls it a “mob of slaves” and a “rabble of worthless men” (489c).

²⁶ Rhetorical ability is a necessity for a democratic political leader but it must be linked, Thucydides’ Pericles tells us, with the ability to discern the appropriate policy, patriotism, and integrity (2.60.5). If one “despises rational argument and wishes, like Gorgias, to win fame and fortune by some other means, what more convenient doctrine to espouse in the process than Gorgiasic view that there is no truth anyway and it’s all a matter of manipulation, more or less like drugging? Then one’s failures to exhibit the traditional relational virtues will look daring rather than like sloppiness” (Martha Nussbaum, “Sophistry about Connections,” in Love’s Knowledge [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], p. 221).

²⁷ Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Culture,” and “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp. 219-24, 227-64. She draws her notions of judgment from Kant and Aristotle. On the ambiguities of her argument, see Susan Bickford, Listening, Conflict and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), chap. 3.

²⁸ See Habermas’s “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 421-61.

²⁹ The Dialogical Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 276.

³⁰ None of this is meant to deny that there is a real contest between Socrates and Pericles over who (if either) possesses the true political art. On this see the discussion by Stephen Salkever in “Socrates’ Aspasian Oration: The Play of Philosophy and Politics in Plato’s Menexenus,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 1 (March 1993): 133-43.

³¹ Thomas Pangle sees the depth of the irony when he notes that “Socrates thus predicts his doom at the hands of the citizenry soon after having laid it down as the criterion of an effective statesman that in the course of his rule he make those he rules more tame and submissive to his rule than they were before he undertook to rule them!” (“Plato’s Gorgias As a Vindication of Socratic Education,” Polis 10, nos. 1-2 [1991]: 6).

³² As Terence Irwin notes in his translation of Plato’s Gorgias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 216.

³³ Medical relations too are “politicized.” See, for instance, Barbara Ehrenrich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1979), and Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York: Norton, 1978).

³⁴ “Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage,” wrote Eugene Debs. “He has not come; he will never come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again.” This is quoted by Mark E. Kann in “Challenging Lockean Liberalism in America: The Case of Debs and Hillquit,” Political Theory 8, no. 2 (1980): p. 214. At the end of the dialogue (527a-b) Socrates both insists that only one logos is left standing and that his conclusions are as temporary as the next contest.

³⁵ Socrates denied he was a teacher. The fact that he became one of the great moral teachers in the West is an irony subtlety discussed by Alexander Nehamas in “What Did Socrates Teach and to Whom Did He Teach It,” Review of Metaphysics 46 (December 1992): 279-306. (Hereafter, page references will be given in text.) Most commentators consider Socrates’ role as demurrer ironic. I think he was opposing himself to the sophists who claimed to have a doctrine they could give to their students. Socrates did not “have” a doctrine in the sense they claimed to have it, was very much aware of the disjunction between intentions and consequences, and thought teachers were supposed to have students who thought for themselves. (See the discussion of these issues in chapter two.)

³⁶ As Vlastos points out (Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher), he often says this after what seems unambiguous victories and compelling arguments.

³⁷ Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 223.

³⁸ Paideia, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 138.

³⁹ See the discussion in Nehamas, “What Did Socrates Teach,” p. 279.

⁴⁰ Nietzsche, “The Twilight of the Idols,” in Walter Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 476.

⁴¹ “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form,” in James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, supplementary volume in Julia Annas, ser. ed., Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 201-19.

⁴² Frede (ibid.) is too parsimonious in his description of aporia. According to Liddell and Scott, aporia, aporeō and aporos can mean being left without resources, being in difficult straits, having trouble passing through some place, or difficulty in dealing with someone, embarrassment and hesitation, scarce or hard-to-get, and can refer to people who are intractable or in need.

⁴³ This is one reason why I think Richard McKim may overstate his case in his otherwise insightful essay “Shame and Truth in Plato’s Gorgias,” in Charles L. Griswold Jr., ed., Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (New York: Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1988), pp. 34-48.

⁴⁴ Frede, “Plato’s Arguments,” p. 215. See Martha Nussbaum’s parallel discussion of the way the choice of technē reconstitutes what it means to be human in her chapter on the Protagoras in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 4.

⁴⁵ Charles L. Griswold Jr. argues that “if reflection on the ‘beginnings’ of philosophy is unavoidable, if the fundamental question of metaphilosophy concerns the ‘quarrel’ between the proponents of philosophy and its various critics, if philosophy cannot be attacked or defended directly, and finally if the defense of philosophy requires a conversation with the critics of philosophy (and not just with abstract formulations of their ‘positions’), then it makes sense for a philosopher who agrees to all this (which Griswold thinks Plato does) to write dialogues” (“Plato’s Metaphilosophy: Why Plato Wrote Dialogues,” in his Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings, p. 157).

⁴⁶ Frede, “Plato’s Arguments,” p. 219. Frede argues that because dialectical debate has a “public character,” it assures an amount of rationality “which is not guaranteed when the soul is left to discourse with itself. Left to itself, the soul is not only hampered by its idiosyncratic views, it is also too easily derailed in its reasoning” (p. 218).

⁴⁷ Republic 492a.

⁴⁸ See Martha Nussbaum, “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” in her Love’s Knowledge, pp. 3-53.

⁴⁹ Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, p. 114, and Gorgias 527a-b.

⁵⁰ Gorgias 509c-510a, which elaborates 469a-c.

⁵¹ Kastely, “In Defense of Plato’s Georgias,” pp. 100-101.

⁵² Perhaps most bizarrely is Socrates long, contrived interpretation of Simonides’ poem in the Protagoras, as we shall see in the following chapter.

⁵³ The language is Harry Berger Jr.’s in “Levels of Discourse in Plato’s Dialogues,” in Anthony J. Cascardi, ed., Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 78.

⁵⁴ See Diskin Clay, “Reading the Republic,” in Griswold, Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings pp. 19-33, and my chapter “Justice in the Republic,” in The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990), pp. 235-280.

⁵⁵ In “Levels of Discourse,” p. 83. Like Berger I think Plato is aware of the kinds of criticisms Derrida makes of him.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Terence Irwin, Plato's Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), chap. 1, p. 3. For reasons why the rigorous attention to dramatic context of an argument by an “attentive reader” will not provide a “key to Plato’s intentions” and reveal Plato’s teaching either, see Berger’s discussion in “Levels of Discourse.” I think Kosman overstates his case insofar as he excludes the possibility that Socrates (but not only him) also creates the “author” or text that creates him.

⁵⁸ See Berger’s critique of Stanley Rosen in “Levels of Discourse,” pp. 87-89.

⁵⁹ “Silence and Imitation in the Platonic Dialogues,” in Klagge and Smith, Methods. In Harry Berger Jr., “Facing Sophists: Socrates’ Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras," representations 5 (Winter 1984): 66-89.

⁶⁰ As Nehamas suggests, Nietzsche’s “repugnance for Socrates” was “indissolubly mixed with admiration” (“What Did Socrates Teach,” p. 279).

⁶¹ See Arendt’s “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, pp. 247-48, where she argues that this teaching by example is the only form of persuasion that philosophical truth is capable of “without perversion or distortion.” She goes on to suggest that it is the only way such truth can become practical and inspire action “without violating the rules of the political realm.”

⁶² See Kenneth R. Johnston in “The NEH and the Battle of the Books,” Raritan 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 118-132.

⁶³ Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 241, and Barber’s discussion in Strong Democracy, pp. 258-59.

⁶⁴ Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 57-58.

⁶⁵ Kastely, “In Defense of Plato’s Georgias,” p. 107.

⁶⁶ Johnston, “NEH,” p. 132.