PLATO AND THE CITY:
A NEW INTRODUCTION TO PLATO'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

Jean-François Pradeau

Foreword by Christopher Gill

This book is a translation of a revised and extended version of Jean-François Pradeau’s Platon et la cité, first published in France in 1997.¹ What does the book have to offer English-speaking readers?

In the first instance, as the title indicates, this is both a study of a specific theme in Plato—the ‘city’ or political community—and an introduction to Plato’s political thought as a whole. It is lucid and non-technical; it includes summaries of the main dialogues relevant to this theme and translations of key extracts; all Greek terms are translated throughout. It thus provides an accessible survey of a major topic in Greek philosophy and political theory for a wide range of students, scholars and general readers.

But this book also has an original and distinctive approach to its subject. Jean-François Pradeau, who teaches at the University of Paris-X Nanterre, is widely recognised by specialists as one of the most gifted and original of younger Plato scholars. He is the author of a major study of the Atlantis story as well as of editions (translations with introductions and notes) of two Platonic dialogues. This book offers a valuable point of access to the unified and systematic reading of Plato that is characteristic of much contemporary French scholarship.

It may be helpful to spell out more fully how Pradeau’s approach differs from the characteristic standpoint of much Plato scholarship in English. Since the Second World War there have been two overriding preoccupations in English-language Plato scholarship. One is the question of Plato’s attitude to democracy. The other is the question of how Plato’s thought developed, especially in his later works, after the Republic.

Karl Popper, reacting against the rise of Fascism and of totalitarianism in the inter-war years, famously described Plato as an ‘enemy of the Open Society’. The debate about whether Plato was or was not an opponent of democracy had a pervasive influence on much post-war scholarship on Plato, particularly on the Republic.² A reaction of a different kind to the rise of Fascism in the 1930s underlies the work of Leo Strauss, a German émigré whose writings have had a huge, though controversial, influence, especially in the USA. Strauss maintained that Plato’s message in the Republic was that philosophers could have no effective influence on political life and should concern themselves purely with the search for truth. This message (Strauss claimed) is conveyed in an oblique, self-concealing style that only skilfully trained academic readers can decode. Right-wing American intellectuals have taken the Straussian reading of Plato as supporting their rejection of political programmes of social improvement in the USA.³

A second preoccupation of English-language Plato scholarship in the last 50 years has been with a supposed development in Plato’s later thought. The Republic has been seen as the classic text of Platonic Utopian idealism. The political structure outlined there (centred on the idea of philosophers as rulers) has been taken as a constitutional blue-print that Plato would like to see realized in real life. In his later works, the Statesman, Timaeus-Critias, Laws, Plato is thought to have become gradually convinced that this blue-print could never be realised. He turned towards a more constitutional model (the law-bound state), though he adopted this only as a ‘second best’  to the ideal state of the Republic.

Pradeau’s book forms a welcome contrast to both these scholarly tendencies. A key theme in his book, which has a bearing on both tendencies, is that Plato’s political philosophy is not primarily centred on constitutional thought (including thought about democracy) at all. What Plato is trying to define are certain core ideas, which apply to political life in all types of constitution, and which are significant for non-political life as well. The chief of these is the idea that politics is—or should be—an art or craft, a form of knowledge, grounded in objective principles. A central role of this art is that of creating a community that is genuinely unified; and, without this art, no community can achieve real unity.

As Pradeau brings out, this means that Plato is neither anti- or pro-democratic, any more than he is (as he has often been thought to be) pro-Spartan, pro-aristocratic or pro-monarchical. This is not to deny that  Plato’s dialogues imply certain views or responses to Athenian democracy. Pradeau shows, revealingly, how Plato’s Menexenus, a pastiche funeral oration to Athenians who have died in war, gives a picture of Athens’ deterioration in the fifth century, which implies a critique of Athenian democratic political culture. Also, in the Laws, Plato imagines a form of politico-economic life in which the Athenian democratic ideal of equality was realized, though in a radically different constitutional pattern. But, in both cases, Plato’s response to (Athenian-style) democracy is dictated by his larger conceptual approach, which is not fundamentally linked with constitutional forms at all.

Pradeau’s book also forms a marked contrast to most developmental readings of Plato’s thought. He sees a single line of thought, centred on the role of knowledge as an art which unifies the city, running throughout Plato’s works, from the early, supposedly ‘Socratic’, dialogues to the Laws, Plato’s last work. The variations between the dialogues do not indicate change in these core ideas. Rather, different dialogues have different conceptual projects which examine various aspects of these ideas. Pradeau shows how, in a series of dialogues, including the Euthydemus as well as the Republic, Plato works out the idea of knowledge of the good as both a determinate kind of expertise and one that can guide the management of other functions. In the Republic, the central theme for exploration is that such knowledge can operate both at the psychological and socio-political level and that this is  the only force that can bring real unity to the functions of both personality and state. Without the direction of such knowledge, all political constitutions and psychological conditions are more or less incoherent.   

Although the Republic is widely thought of as Plato’s central political work, in fact it explicitly cuts across the boundaries of the psychological and the political, and does not, as Pradeau underlines, define a specifically political art at all. It is the Statesman that focuses on the distinctive form of political art, characterised by the combination of objective knowledge of the good and the ability to unify the different elements in the community by a process of ‘weaving’ through education. It is also the Statesman that explores such centrally political questions as the relationship between government and law and between government through executive action and through constitutional forms.

The Statesman is sometimes seen as marking the start of a process in which Plato renounces the hope of realizing the ideal that philosophers could become rulers and settles for a ‘second best’, government by constitutional laws. Pradeau argues that this is not how we should understand the thought of Plato’s later dialogues. Plato retains his conviction that knowledge of the good should govern the direction of politics; but in the dialogues after the Republic he explores the idea that such knowledge can be embodied in constitutional structures and codes of law as well as direct executive government. Rather than seeing these later dialogues as marking a philosophical retreat, Pradeau sees them as conceptually adventurous, as Plato presses in different directions the idea of knowledge-based political frameworks.

 In the Timaeus-Critias, Plato links the study of political expertise and order with that of the physical universe. The Atlantis story serves as a vehicle for exploring the physical aspects of political life and for depicting the contrast between the rationally based, unified state and its opposite in terms of the use of land and of material culture. In the Laws, Plato’s last and longest work, Plato works out in the fullest and most systematic way the thought that political art or knowledge could pervade and unify the life of an entire community. Political art in this case is seen as expressed by a combination of direct government, constitutional forms, laws accompanied by public explanation, education and custom, and is conceived as operative in the entire material, social and cultural life of a community.  

The Laws has often been seen as Plato’s dullest and least philosophically coherent work. Pradeau presents it as Plato’s political masterpiece, the culmination of his vision of a community unified by political art.

Although Pradeau’s book marks a contrast with much earlier English-language scholarship, his ideas have parallels in some recent scholarship. Certain British and American scholars are also questioning the standard picture of development in Plato’s political philosophy and in Plato’s thought more generally.⁴ This gives an added interest to Pradeau’s compelling statement of the unified reading of Plato’s political thought. His book is both a striking and suggestive academic study in its own right and a valuable introduction to a perennially fascinating aspect of Plato’s philosophy.