Abstract
Contemporary democratic theories that draw on Socrates for inspiration have addressed his method of investigation too narrowly because there has been insufficient attention to the need for authority, which Socrates also identifies. Because his appeals to authority initially appear antidemocratic, we cannot overlook this aspect of his thought. I describe a virtue, civic competence, which is the excellence of citizens who critically engage with the norms of the community, but who also recognise that authority is politically necessary. Deliberation requires elenctic-like scrutiny, but also a willingness to accept some arguments as authoritative. My overarching claim is that failure to exhibit such character traits can appear in more than one form, a point neglected in recent literature, and that not all such forms are antidemocratic. Civic competence is susceptible to corruptions that may never result in citizenship that is simply undemocratic. I define two corruptions of civic competence: ‘disagonism’ and ‘eristicism’. The former treats disagreement as signalling either confusion or wickedness and deliberation as a process of clarifying and tidying discourse. The latter treats disagreement as ineliminable and deliberation as gaming with words in order to defeat an opponent in argument.
The dialogic and aporetic nature of Socrates's conversations complements a particular view of democratic politics and citizenship. The open curve of the Socratic search for answers, the critical attention to others’ opinions and the persistent incompleteness of the conversations themselves gesture towards – or perhaps reveal – a democratic politics based on free, equal and undogmatic discursive interaction between citizens (Euben, 1989, 1997; Villa, 2001). Lutz puts it succinctly: ‘Long a hero to liberals such as Hume, Mill and Dewey, Socrates is once again recognised as a paragon of citizenship’ (Lutz, 1998, p. 2). If, as some have said, contemporary democratic theory has taken a discursive turn, Socrates might exemplify the highest ideals of citizenship in a truly deliberative democracy. Indeed, he may exemplify the highest ideals of the democratic tradition itself. 1
If Socratic investigation is to define his democratic legacy, however, Socrates's defenders need to take note of an apparent problem. Even the Platonic dialogues thought to render most faithfully the historical Socrates show that a democratic domestication may be forced. For example, whatever democratic longings Socrates fulfils, he also appears to believe that authoritative moral knowledge is the only thing that can end disputes, that can lead us to choose well and that can ensure our moral well-being. The allegation that ‘the many’ fail (and must fail) to exhibit such knowledge is a regular feature of the dialogues. Because it is difficult to imagine a democratic theory that assumes the demos is not up to the job of self-government, Socrates appears to be a puzzling democrat. The openness, the discussion, the searching for an account – all that gives Socrates a democratic aura – must somehow trump whatever threatens to deflate the claims of his defenders. If not trump, then, at least, heavily compensate for whatever appears to be both Socratic and undemocratic. I understand Euben to take this approach (for example Euben, 1996). He acknowledges that, once we move beyond the Apology, Socrates the friend of democracy becomes harder to discern. Writing on the Gorgias, Euben notes that Socrates proposes an idea of expert knowledge, but that ‘no one (including Socrates) is presented as so superior that he should be entrusted with making the collective decisions about what to talk about or who is entitled to speak about what to whom’ (Euben, 1996, p. 334). Shortly later he says ‘… Socrates of the Gorgias, like Socrates of the Apology, remains a teacher of how to politically educate a democracy democratically, even if, as I would not deny, he remains sceptical of certain practices we regard as essentially democratic’ (Euben, 1996, p. 335, italics mine). To accept this picture of the sympathetic if critical friend of democracy (Euben, 1996, p. 333), though, we have to deny the devil that lurks in the caveat. Should we bracket or even forgive the appeal to expert knowledge in the Gorgias, as Euben appears to do, or should we be reminded that the very same appeal is made in the Apology? If the latter, then Socrates in the Apology is not an unproblematic democrat either. Furthermore, this seems to dispense with the Platonic/Socratic distinction, which many, including Euben, draw on to distinguish the historical Socrates from the undemocratic ‘Socrates’ in some of the dialogues, most famously the Republic. Vlastos (1991) makes one of the most vigorous arguments for such a distinction. It is commonly thought that Plato is the authoritarian ventriloquist who makes Socrates utter un-Socratic ideas in the middle and later dialogues. We should dispense at the start with this idea that the antidemocratic ‘Socrates’ is a later Platonic creation. As common as this developmental account is (or is it an account of betrayal?), seemingly undemocratic views, as we see in the Apology, make their debut in the earliest texts, reminding us that it is Plato who exercises complete authorial control over all speakers in the dialogues (Kahn, 1996; compare with Brickhouse and Smith, 2003).
This is more than to say Socrates and democracy have an arm's length friendship; it is to question how willingly theorists should return to Socrates for democratic inspiration (Barber, 1996). If this concerned (merely) our interpretation of Socrates, contemporary theorists would be perhaps less strenuous in their arguments. However, Socrates is being recruited into contemporary debates. Consider Dana Villa's remarks on Socrates's explanation at his trial for his non-participation in the Assembly. Villa takes Socrates to be commenting on the intolerance to which democratic majorities are susceptible (Villa, 2001, pp. 16–7). This susceptibility is true enough, but Socrates is not talking about a majority in the Assembly. He is describing ‘the many’, the demos. The sense for the Greeks would be one of class distinction, not a statement about numbers. What happens to democracy in a Socratic key in that case? The problem is hard to avoid, because it must affect how we understand the Socratic imperative to question and investigate.
In spite of the comments above, I argue here for a democratic reading of Socrates that can inform contemporary debates. I will claim that emphasis on the Socratic cross-examinations results in the underemphasis of the character disposition that gives moral shape and content to those investigations. This will help us clarify what is happening at the heart of Socrates's thought given other views that he appears to hold. My overarching claim is that Socrates challenges the democratic citizen to do more than strike a critical stance because such a position can be exhibited in more than one way and can arise from more than one dispositional motive. I am especially interested here in the relationship between Socratic investigation and political authority because, as my comments above illustrate, we should be concerned about Socrates's appeals to authoritative moral and political knowledge if we want to develop democratic arguments that rely on his thought and action. The typical picture of Socrates as the critic of convention tells us only half the story, because even Socrates knows that some beliefs and values must be agreed and, thus, taken as conventional in order to get critique off the ground. The challenge, then, is to combine the democratic imperative to practise the kind of critical investigation for which Socrates is rightly famous with the more general political need for some kind of authority. The difficulty of putting this into practice becomes apparent by examining the failure to do so and, thus, I examine here such failure as it occurs in several dialogues: the Crito, Protagoras and Apology. 2 Taking the aporia of Socrates's conversations seriously, I show that he tries to draw his interlocutors to an awareness of the practical problems that their beliefs generate. While interlocutors actually see themselves as successfully combining the two elements of criticality and acceptance of authority, in each case the acceptance of authority rests on a denial of criticality. Because Socrates does not reject authority, he needs to cast light on what is being taken as authoritative and how that authority is established. My argument is essentially negative: Socrates does not prescribe a technique for combining the imperative to scrutinise with the need for authority. Rather, he highlights the difficulty of defining the space in which one is both critical of and open to authority by confronting the failures of his interlocutors to occupy such a space.
So far, this will sound familiar to contemporary theorists who have drawn on Socrates's thought. It is common to treat Socrates as exemplifying how democratic citizenship ‘should be done’, especially so in the context of more participatory accounts of democracy (Euben, 1997, pp. xiii, 176–7). 3 By concentrating on the interlocutors, however, I show that Socratic exemplarity is not the only type present in the dialogues. The interlocutors I discuss below represent modes of citizenship that are unlike the democratic character Socrates exemplifies. Nevertheless, they are not antidemocratic and the tendency to focus on Socratic examination has created a binary divide: one is either Socratic or un-Socratic. My point is that being un-Socratic takes more than one form, some of which are not opposed to democracy. Some of the interlocutors are convinced that their democratic credentials are unassailable, so we need to reflect on these characters as representing types of corruption to which democratic citizenship is susceptible if we are to understand Socrates's own exemplarity.
The interlocutors I examine here illustrate two such types, one of which I characterise as an impulse to naturalise convictions such that searching questions of those convictions are treated as unreasonable. The other form of corruption is characterised by a desire to find any available means of refuting another's position. While the primary aim is to win the argument, the underlying motivation is to confound an opponent in order to demonstrate one's own superiority in what is perceived as a competitive arena. Civic competence, then, I describe as a disposition to seek out and occupy the space in which one is critical of and open to authority, a disposition that I suggest is usefully thought of as desiring the best authority for the best reasons. In practice, this means a desire to search for arguments that one can see no reasonable grounds to reject.
This sounds like an unremarkable description of citizens who are motivated to seek agreement, the key psychological impulse assumed in some accounts of deliberative democracy and public reason (Rawls, 1993, pp. 47–54; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, pp. 52–94; Bentley, 2004, pp. 115–34). However, neither of the forms of corruption I describe here is strictly incompatible with that motivation and, therefore, we need to consider, alongside the terms of deliberative engagement, the terms of disagreement – how the permissibility of disagreements is governed. There is a fundamental problem confronting any democratic theory that prizes deliberation. Even in the presence of some that desire to seek agreement, citizens may not be motivated to acknowledge the reasonableness of claims that challenge what they already take to be authoritative norms and conventions. This is more complicated than a failure to accept the burdens of judgement in Rawls's terms, because the way in which norms and conventions act authoritatively will condition how those burdens are interpreted (Rawls, 1993, pp. 54–7). Also, deliberators may be motivated to win arguments and, thus, see agreement as the point at which an opponent capitulates and is forced to accept the superiority of another. The winner's aim is precisely to make the opponent experience and publicly acknowledge a sense of defeat.
Plato, then, reminds us of the motivational complexity affecting the way deliberation occurs. Those searching cross-examinations that are quintessentially Socratic have a deeper moral psychological relevance to our understanding of democratic citizenship. We see not only the practical difficulty of accepting authority and viewing it critically, but also the psychological factors that complicate any picture of the democratic personality in action. The next two sections address related topics: one about the forms of and challenges to authority in the dialogues; the second about the virtue of democratic citizens in Socrates's thought.
In the second section, I examine the Crito, Protagoras and Apology and show that Socrates confronts different attitudes towards disagreement, which govern the way interlocutors perceive what is and is not a permissible argumentative challenge. His interlocutors start from one of two points: either common opinion authoritatively governs disputes, or an authoritative presumption of interpersonal rivalry makes disputes ungovernable. Regarding the former, the attitude towards disagreement can branch in two directions. In one direction disagreement signals confusion, and in the other direction disagreement signals criminality. Regarding the latter, the presumption promotes insincerity in argument and the desire to humiliate fellow deliberators.
In the third section, I develop from my readings of the dialogues an account of civic competence to show that Socrates's relevance to contemporary democratic theory concerns the capacities that underpin democratic citizenship. Civic competence is the democratic virtue that we find at the core of a genuine democratic politics and which Socrates tries to inspire in others. As a virtue, it is a state of character, a firmly established moral disposition. The third section thus complements the second by describing the desire for a particular kind of discursive engagement as the expression of a psychological disposition. When we draw Socrates into contemporary democratic theory, therefore, the character disposition of the democratic citizen needs to be seen as giving moral shape and content to critical investigation.
The Terms of Disagreement
In this section I show how Socrates's encounters with his interlocutors foreground the different states of character I describe above and the depth and persistence of disagreement in a political association. To paraphrase Waldron on the ‘circumstances of politics’, I am appealing to the idea that political disagreement goes all the way down to constitutional fundamentals (Waldron, 1999, pp. 153–4). This foregrounding is needed, as I show in my examination of several interlocutors, as disagreement with the dominant moral view of the community is variously treated in the dialogues as a sign of ignorance, confusion or wickedness. At the heart of these views is a promise (or hope) that disagreement is not, after all, deep, intractable and a condition of communal life itself. I interpret each dialogue separately and end this section with a discussion of the common themes that arise. These become the key ideas that inform my description of civic competence and its corruptions in the next section.
The Crito
In the Crito, Socrates gives his friend a lesson in how to construct an argument. Visiting Socrates in his cell, Crito breathlessly runs through a laundry list of reasons to justify a plan of escape. Socrates, though, picks out one particular aspect of Crito's reasoning, namely his appeal to what others will think if Socrates's friends do not come to his rescue (46c—d). Crito is worried about the opinion of ‘the many’, taking his cue about the right course of action from conventional opinion. Here Socrates introduces the craft analogy: as the athlete consults and listens only to the trainer about diet and exercise (47b), the right action in Socrates's case requires the guidance of a relevant expert. Not only do the many lack expert knowledge, they are also fickle. They would execute a man one day and bring him back to life the next.
Given the call for expert guidance, and the harsh comments about ‘the many’, Socrates's remarks sound dismissive of democracy itself. No sign here of Aristotle's wisdom of the multitude. 4 However, Socrates is not dismissing democracy; he is dismissing the way in which Crito has argued his case. The implication is that Crito has started his argument in the middle, at a point that is itself in need of justification, namely the assumption that the opinions of the many should be followed (or that they even have some bearing on the question). Socrates attempts to weaken Crito's confidence in that starting point, even though it might not appear odd to start there, since, as Socrates suggests, the many have the power to put a man to death (48a—b). However, this worry about common opinion has a surprising twist. If Crito had plainly declared that a majority of Athenians feel that it would be right for Socrates to accept a chance to escape, the worry about the many would suddenly appear odd. A majority vote at his trial convicted Socrates and declared it right to execute him and now a majority ‘vote’ is said to declare that he should take all measures to avoid his punishment. Socrates's potential opposition to the escape plan is effectively being outvoted by the views of the many. 5
Of course, this does not address the antidemocratic charge against Socrates. He does say that we should only consult the person who is wise. However, the craft analogy used to develop this claim tells us the class of person to consult, but cannot confirm the identity, or even the existence, of the person with the relevant wisdom. 6 Socrates does not even indicate how we might verify a claim to expertise. If the craft analogy is meant as an argument, it simply begs all the questions. In this case, Euben's remarks on the Gorgias fit perfectly: no one in the dialogue is presented as an expert, yet expertise is precisely what Socrates calls for. It is revealing, therefore, that when Socrates does seek consultation in the dialogue, he creates a fictional person whom he can consult – the personified Laws of Athens. The speech of the Laws, which declares escape to be an injury against those to whom one owes the highest duty, is typically examined as the Socratic account of political obligation. Interpretations of this dialogue diverge over how seriously, or in what way, Socrates presents the speech as a statement of his own views. More analytical treatments concentrate on what Socrates's account of obligation is, given what he says both in the speech and in the Apology (Kraut, 1984; Brickhouse and Smith, 1989). Other readings tend to take careful note of the dramatic detail to expand the scope of discussion with respect to Socrates's decision. 7 For the purposes of my argument, we should observe that in its literal terms the speech is astonishingly authoritarian – so astonishing that I suggest it draws our attention to the purpose behind the speech. Thus, we should do more than note the authoritarianism just to provide Socrates with an escape hatch, as Villa does in his reading of the dialogue. He says that there are ‘hazards’ in ‘assuming that the Socrates Plato presents in the Crito is as authentic a presentation of Socrates's voice as that which we find in the Apology’(Villa, 2001, p. 48). He goes on to say that even the ‘Socratic’ dialogues will have ‘gradations of relative faithfulness to Socrates's thought’. The supposed faithfulness of the Apology is convenient for this claim, but it cannot stand. We cannot simply assume which, if any, dialogues are more faithful to the historical figure, given what we know about both authorship generally and Socratic conversations as a genre in particular (Kahn, 1996; compare with Brickhouse and Smith, 2003). More importantly perhaps, by trying to explain away the remarkable tone of the Laws’ speech, we lose the opportunity to explore rhetorical purposes that lie behind its inclusion.
After all, having criticised Crito for the way he makes his appeal, is Socrates conducting the argument any better? On the surface, no. He says we need wise counsel, but looks for counsel that provides just one possible answer. This does not appear to be a superior approach to Crito's and we should, therefore, look closer and consider the prior conditions that must hold in the authoritarian world of the Laws’ speech. We immediately notice that Socrates's construction of the speech eliminates entirely any conflict of obligation. We see no ambiguity about where our obligations lie, no internal inconsistencies, no conflicting loyalties. These points may seem unsurprising: we do not desire laws to be inconsistent or vague. However, the speech we have in the dialogue is not the voice of legislative statute. Greek law, nomos (pl. nomoi), includes statute, customary practice, traditional beliefs and values – that is, positive law and social norms (Ostwald, 1969, 1986). Thus, when Socrates removes conflicts of obligation, he removes them from all aspects of Athenian social life. This would also imply the removal of moral conflict within the individual, if the influence of the Laws is as pervasive as Socrates lays out in the speech. It would be difficult to imagine individuals experiencing moral indecision in the imaginary world of these imaginary Laws. The speech is more extraordinary than it already appears, because we have seen that Athenian social norms are openly contradictory. In other words, the Laws’ conclusion that escape is impermissible would not be at all predictable if the Laws were the actual nomoi of Athens. As Crito's arguments demonstrate, it is not a question about whether the actual nomoi could ever countenance disobedience, because they seem both to require and forbid it. 8
We must reconsider the initial view that Socrates conducts his argument no better than his friend. Crito begins his entreaties in the dialogue with a sense that there are shared foundational moral convictions – not only between him and Socrates, but between all Athenians. If that were true, Socrates's elimination of conflict in the speech would reflect a true aspect of the actual Athenian nomoi. Athenians did believe that they had obligations to the city, but they did not necessarily believe that such obligations trumped those they had towards family and friends (Dover, 1994 [1974], p. 273). Crito certainly knows this; he places the duties of friendship above duties to the city in this case. Indeed, his argument is basically that all people would. Therein lies his failure. Crito is not saying that Socrates should accept what everyone else accepts as true. He is saying that Socrates is not seeing things clearly because there is no genuine disagreement between Socrates and the many. Thus, he believes that Socrates needs to be shown this fundamental agreement. Crito pitches his argument in terms of natural relationships – family and friends – that generate obligations for the individual. Failing to fulfil these obligations would be shocking or, worse, monstrous (compare with Euthyphro 4a—b). Socrates draws on precisely this sort of natural obligation in the speech of the Laws and radically expands these natural obligations in a way that exaggerates what is implicit in Crito's appeal: the absence of real and deep conflict.
Crito, then, wants us to believe that conflict vanishes when one gets down to the bare essentials, as it were. When one is faced with loss of life, the kinds of disagreement that may animate us at other times suddenly become irrelevant and our choices indisputably clear-cut. Beneath the superficial turbulence, there is a broad, authoritative moral consensus – the ‘truth’ that everyone knows – which signposts the right and the good. As surely as if we had consulted an expert, the principles that define this consensus give direction in a way that it seems groundless to challenge.
The Protagoras
Crito is no theorist of the subject, but the authoritative moral consensus to which he gestures unites him with someone who is in some sense a theorist, Protagoras. This dialogue is rich in dramatic detail and philosophical significance, so no brief discussion can avoid being selective in its approach. Most of my comments are about two significant moments of the dialogue. The first occurs early on when Socrates and Protagoras first meet. The second occurs towards the middle of the text when Socrates engages in some interpretation of poetry. The second discussion complements the first by illustrating and extending an important principle that I introduce. I end the discussion of this dialogue with some brief comments about Socrates's supposed defence of hedonism in this dialogue and his proposal for a ‘hedonic calculus’.
In the Protagoras, disagreement is treated as more genuine than it appears to be in the Crito. Nevertheless, the Sophist Protagoras indicates that disagreement, although real, is no more than conceptual untidiness in our moral discourse. Protagoras presents himself as a kind of expert, but takes up a curious position with respect to expertise. He claims to do a little better what everyone else can do (328b—c). He says that he teaches young men the art of politics (319a, following pages), which surprises Socrates. He, like all Athenians, he says, does not believe that the political art can be taught and that there are no teachers (Socrates may be ironic in appealing to common belief. However, it is more likely that he sees conventional opinion as something that must be responded to and not something to be dismissed out of hand. Common belief is one possible answer, but not an answer immune to scrutiny). His evidence is straightforward. During political discussions, the Athenians only recognise strict technical skills (for example shipbuilding) as legitimate areas of expertise. Anyone claiming to have a special political knowledge is ridiculed, because no one is believed to have such a skill. Furthermore, Socrates adds, if excellence could be taught, no one would fail to pass the knowledge on to their young. Observation shows, however, that men with the highest reputations for excellence often have sons of low merit.
Protagoras responds to both of these challenges, but it is his response to the second point I want to address here. Socrates has basically said that if excellence could be taught, we would be able to identify the teachers. Part of Protagoras's response includes an analogy. If, he says, we went out looking for someone who teaches Greek, we would not be able to find such an expert because everyone in the community is a ‘teacher’ of the language (328a). The same is true for excellence, he says. We do not see that the entire community teaches excellence by telling the young that certain things are wrong and others are right, punishing improper behaviour and rewarding the opposite (324d, following pages). Nevertheless, even though everyone seems to do what Protagoras accepts to do only for pay, he says that his services are worth the price, because he does it a little better.
An important issue raised by his analogy between teaching virtue and language concerns the idea of moral conflict. Protagoras is surely correct that a community inculcates in all its members some kind of moral sense. But consider for a moment the full effect of the analogy. All members of a language community teach the language to those who are still acquiring language skills. For Protagoras's analogy to hold, along with his claim to do better what others do reasonably well, it must be possible for there to be some person who does this language teaching better than others. Call that person the Grammarian. The Grammarian's role is to ensure that language users actually use it correctly, that is, in accordance with its rules. In other words, beneath the colloquialisms, the informal usages, the idioms, the various accented pronunciations, there is a rule-governed, pure form of the language. The Grammarian is expert in that and makes students into better language users by tidying things up, eliminating sloppiness, promoting adherence to the rules. The point is that the language is actually one thing, even if no one actually uses it in its pure form.
It is surely no abuse of the idea to say that a community uses the same language, even though we observe differences in, say, dialect. The problem is suggesting that moral education is a very similar process of tidying up and standardising differences that lie at the margins. The analogy indicates that there are shared core moral principles and that when there are moral and political disagreements, our deliberations should lead us to choose alternatives that accord best with those core principles. To make the correct choice, we need careful articulation of what those core principles are and, once we have that, deliberation becomes demonstrating which courses of action most accurately express the community's central moral convictions (Wallach, 1988, pp. 402–3). This is the substance of Protagoras's claim and clarifies what he believes he does just a bit better than everyone else.
To appreciate the significance of Protagoras's analogy, we can look to the second aspect of the dialogue that I said I would discuss. While it receives considerably less attention from commentators, the discussion between Socrates and Protagoras about a poem by Simonides, beginning at 338e, is about both the language analogy and, more importantly, disagreement. I first describe this section of the dialogue and then draw out its significance for my argument.
Having begun to chafe under Socrates's demand that he provide concise answers to questions, the two accept to reverse roles and have Protagoras ask his own questions. Not surprisingly, he chooses a subject about which he feels especially knowledgeable, poetry. He probes Socrates's understanding of a particular poem because, he says, the poet Simonides contradicts himself at one point. In this exchange over the poem, Socrates will subtly turn Protagoras's language analogy back on him and show that there is no grammarian-arbitrator to sort out our language disputes. Similarly, the expert who can sort out our moral and political disagreements is equally elusive.
The supposed contradiction Protagoras identifies concerns two somewhat separated lines in the poem. In one line, Simonides says that it is hard to become good and in a later line he says that he disagrees with another poet (Pittacus) who has said that it is hard to be noble (that is good). Now, the obvious way to refute the claim that the lines contradict one another is to observe that Simonides refers to the difficulty of becoming good and later the supposed ease of being good. In other words, one line is about a process of achieving some end and the later line is about the achievement of that end state. Socrates makes this argument indirectly, which he describes as a delaying tactic. Having heard Protagoras's explain the supposed contradiction, he says that he suddenly felt dazed, as if he had been struck by a good boxer (compare with Menexenus 234c–235c and Apology 17a). Needing time to gather his thoughts, he turns to Prodicus, another Sophist in the assembled group. Prodicus was famous for distinguishing the precise meanings of words and Socrates asks him whether being and becoming are the same thing. Prodicus confirms that they are different and Socrates cites a couple of lines from Hesiod as further support. Protagoras says that this solution creates a greater problem than the one it was meant to resolve. He says that the poet made a worse blunder by saying that it is easy to hold on to goodness, because everyone agrees that that is the hardest thing of all.
Protagoras has changed the terms of his argument at this point and given up on the supposed contradiction, having lured Socrates into this supposedly bigger problem. Protagoras wins whether or not Socrates can disprove the contradiction claim, so long as he follows the most obvious route of distinguishing being from becoming. But Socrates makes further use of Prodicus. It happens that both Prodicus and Simonides are from Ceos, so Socrates suggests that in their dialect ‘hard’ means ‘bad’. Prodicus, willing to have a joke at Protagoras's expense, confirms Socrates's plainly facetious remark. Thus, if ‘hard’ means ‘bad’, Simonides disagrees with the other poet because he takes him to be saying it is bad to be good. Prodicus even adds that Simonides is censuring the other poet for failing to distinguish the meanings of words correctly, because Pittacus (the poet Simonides criticises) came from Lesbos and was raised speaking yet another dialect. Socrates has clearly set Prodicus up as a model of the Grammarian who can tidy up our discourse.
Protagoras might be exasperated at having to take this comical line of argument seriously and when Socrates asks him to comment on Prodicus's points he responds directly to his professional rival that Simonides certainly means what everyone else means by ‘hard’. Socrates confesses it was all in jest. He also admits that Prodicus wanted to see how Protagoras would defend himself. As we saw, Protagoras's defence is simply that everyone agrees that ‘hard’ and ‘bad’ are not synonyms, which is not the sort of expert literary criticism we would expect from someone who earlier declared that knowledge of poetry is the most important part of a man's education. Socrates proceeds, then, to give a more thorough explanation of why his facetious comments could not be correct. Indeed, he offers a lengthy account of the poem, which may or may not have merit as a comment on the work, but does offer more insight into the problem of disagreement.
The central point of Socrates's account is that Simonides is attacking Pittacus's saying that it is hard to be good in order to make himself appear wiser than the renowned Pittacus. Socrates says that Simonides was trying to gain a reputation for wisdom and that refuting this well known saying by someone already reputed to be wise would advance Simonides's own standing. We can compare this to Prodicus. His reported desire to see how Protagoras would withstand cross-examination foreshadows the motivation that Socrates attributes to Simonides, because Protagoras is the older and more established Sophist.
The discussion of poetry is an unusual section of the dialogue and it is tempting to see it as no more than ironic or as elaborate ridicule of sophistic style. However, this is too quick and, as with the attempt to explain away the Laws’ speech in the Crito, it denies us opportunities to explore the purposes behind any discussion of poetry in the dialogue. Several points emerge from Socrates's interpretation. First, the ‘dispute’ between the two poets is about a fundamental moral question, at least for the Greeks. Second, this ‘dispute’ is not taking place between the common sort of people, but between the educators of the Greeks, the poets. Protagoras does not think knowledge of poetry merely gives one a cultivated air. It is the basis of a proper moral education. Thus, if the culture's moral guides can be shown to disagree with one another, how can we trust the guidance they offer? How can we judge between the disputing parties? Third, the disagreement between Simonides and Pittacus is not inspired by a conceptual disagreement. Simonides has not attacked Pittacus with anything like analytical rigour. He was moved to do so, Socrates says, by a desire to show himself more wise. Therefore, we have little reason to assume that Simonides would be swayed by an argument showing his own position to be flawed. His desire to outdo Pittacus would more likely motivate him to try a different tack – much as Protagoras does when he introduces the subject of poetry.
The cumulative effect of these points is to greatly complicate deliberation itself. Socrates's commentary on the poem retrieves both the complexity and ineliminability of moral and political disagreement from Protagoras's hope that we can smooth rough edges in our discourse to eliminate conflict. Where Protagoras identifies a moral disagreement at all (whether or not it actually is hard to be good), he handily resolves it by consulting common belief. As with Crito, convention is the arbiter. While Protagoras, presents himself as that man who does a little better what all others do, he takes common opinion as the final court of appeal. As if to underscore the point about disagreement in the dialogue, Hippias, another Sophist present, applauds Socrates's interpretation and offers to deliver one of his own. There is nothing to tie disagreement down, no way to draw a line that ends the possibility of reinterpretation.
While it has been critically evaluated many times in the context of Socrates's views on hedonism, the hedonic calculus has relevance here, as well (351b, following pages). Socrates introduces the calculus to describe a science of practical judgement that would allow us to choose those things which would deliver the greatest pleasure. In the scholarly literature, discussions range across the kind of hedonism Socrates appeals to and the idea of practical judgement he seems to endorse. The hedonic calculus is cited as evidence that Socrates tries to do what I just described: definitively end the possibility of conflicting interpretations (Bentley, 2003). However, the hedonic calculus exaggerates in order to mock the attitude towards disagreement that I have shown Protagoras holds. In order for the hedonic calculus to work at all, every practical judgement must be a judgement about degree. The problem that the calculus is introduced to resolve is the supposed fact that errors of judgement arise from misperceptions of relative value. If we could calculate the pleasure value of our options each time we need to choose, we would always choose well. Perceptions are fickle, unreliable, prone to error and dispute. We need the calculus so that we do not have to rely only on perception when making choices. 9 As I said, Socrates exaggerates his interlocutor's position. Protagoras wants to present disagreement as arising from conceptual imprecision – the analogue to misperception – and imprecision can be corrected by accurately articulating core concepts – the analogue to calculating relative values. Moral disagreement will never be more than a temporary inconvenience, because claims, arguments and interpretations can be tested against our principles. Socrates may be the author of the hedonic calculus, and he drags Protagoras towards it very much against the Sophist's will, but the ideas behind it are Protagoras's own.
Until they burned his works (as tradition has it), the Athenians seemed content to have Protagoras as a guest. It might not be difficult to understand why: he does not challenge the sense they have of their own wisdom. He does not exactly flatter the Athenians. He simply treats moral disagreement as a disturbance at the fringes of an otherwise broad moral consensus. When everyone agrees on some moral issue, that issue ceases to be the subject of reasonable disagreement. Expertise, for Protagoras, lies in articulating the terms of moral and political disagreements so that a resolution can be achieved that accords with what everyone already accepts as true. Thus, he formalises what is already done informally and, thereby, permits a kind of calculation that sweeps up those disagreements that will appear around the margins. Whatever cannot be swept up – cannot be accommodated within the moral consensus – is simply unreasonable.
The Apology
This is a milder version of what we witness at Socrates's trial. In the Apology, Socrates's accusers criminalise disagreement. For my purposes I concentrate on the charge that Socrates corrupts the youth and to defend my claims I include some comments on another dialogue, the Meno. During his trial Socrates cross-examines Meletus, one of his three accusers, to discover who improves the young. Socrates rejects Meletus's first answer that the laws do, because he wants to know which man or men are capable of improving the young (24b, following pages). Meletus then declares that every Athenian citizen, bar Socrates, improves the youth. With this declaration, Meletus is committed to a position we encountered in discussions above. His point is that a broad moral consensus exists in Athens and that it definitively establishes the meaning of the right and the good. Meletus's name is a stroke of luck for a philosophical dramatist like Plato. As Saxonhouse notes, ‘Meletus's name means “care”, “concern” or “attention to”’. She connects this to his supposed concern for Athens’ youths and to what she sees as his attempt to impose a unified vision of the city that is usually associated with Socrates in the Republic. As I will argue below, Meletus refuses to acknowledge that there is not already a unified city that would make sense of his comments to Socrates. He would have to imagine disunity in order to impose unity, but he lacks the imagination. It is only his failure to acknowledge division in the city that permits him to denounce Socrates as a corrupter (Saxonhouse, 1992, pp. 102–3).
However, one might object to this reading on two grounds. First, we have to remember that Meletus's aim is to convict Socrates and he may not himself be committed to the wider implications of his statements. Second, any other answer Meletus might give to Socrates's question would amount to an accusation, which begs the question of why the indictment singles out Socrates. On what grounds, then, can we say that Socrates's accuser is committed to the position I just described? The Meno helps us see more clearly what Meletus likely believes, because we meet one of his fellow accusers, Anytus, in that dialogue. In the Meno, Socrates asks Anytus to help him and Meno find those who can teach virtue (Meno 89e, following pages). Socrates suggests it might be the Sophists, at which Anytus exclaims that he hopes no friend or relation of his would allow himself to be ruined by that sort of person. He says that one can learn excellence from any Athenian gentleman, while the Sophists can only corrupt. This is the idea Meletus expresses in the Apology. To be excellent is to be in accordance with conventional opinion. 10
Anytus and Meletus are not only hostile to anything that smacks of a questioning attitude; they criminalise disagreement. Anytus becomes annoyed when Socrates seems to doubt the reputed wisdom of Athens’ most famous statesmen. Meletus suggests darkly that Socrates can make the weaker argument appear stronger. The kind of calculation I mentioned with respect to Protagoras is considerably more crude in the case of these two men. Dissenting from what is widely agreed is a wilful and wicked act. This is, to say the least, not an approach that values enquiry and we can see that with Anytus himself. His palpable disgust at the thought of associating with Sophists is based on no experience whatsoever with an actual Sophist. He takes it as read that Sophists are pernicious.
Yet, Anytus and Meletus want us to trust the wisdom of Athenian gentlemen, who, it seems, are in agreement on the most important questions about excellence and moral education. We know, though, that Sophists could not have engaged in their activities in Athens without the support of Athenian gentlemen as sponsors and customers (both of whom could either have been gentlemen in the sense of class or merely wealthy enough to pay Sophists’ fees). Pericles, for example, famously kept a close association with Protagoras. Athenian gentlemen are not an undifferentiated mass of individuals, but individuals who, despite their shared designation as gentlemen, or simply as Athenians, can and do deeply disagree over important matters. For Anytus and Meletus, this is a serious problem because they treat moral disagreement as signalling criminal intent and as something to be denied by prosecuting its manifestation. The views of the many, to which Crito appeals, have had their despotic power fully realised in Socrates's accusers.
Disagreement and Denial
In this section I have been describing the theoretical significance of some of Socrates's interlocutors. At the start of this paper I said that the interlocutors, while seeing themselves as successfully combining critical thought and the political need to accept authority, actually deny criticality. Looking at the interpretations I have offered, we can now develop this point more fully and see connections to contemporary democratic theory.
The interlocutors I have discussed are committed to the view that moral and political disagreements are not actually deep or persistent. To be sure, disagreements occur, but it is a relatively easy to clear them up. In denying the depth and persistence of disagreement, the interlocutors must be intolerant of anyone who seeks to prolong or complicate disputes. However, this intolerance is deceptive, because the interlocutors accept that people disagree (at least from time to time) and, therefore, willingly present and defend claims in the face of opposition. But they do so within certain terms of disagreement that authoritatively establish what counts as a reasonable dispute. Now, some terms of disagreement have to hold for deliberation to occur and Socrates is not challenging the need to demarcate the reasonable from the unreasonable. He is challenging what is taken to authoritatively define the reasonable and how it is itself made authoritative. As I have argued with respect to each of the dialogues, conventional opinion is ultimately foundational for the interlocutors. What distinguishes the works from one another is the extent to which the interlocutors see disagreement as arising from either error or intent. The Apology quite clearly exemplifies the latter: Socrates sets out to commit the illegal act of teaching the young not to believe what everyone else believes. He intentionally subverts the very foundations that make sound judgement possible. In various ways, the Crito and Protagoras describe disagreement as error. In the Crito, Socrates is told that his real duty is to friends and family, not to various things he committed himself to in the past. Socrates is failing to notice the new light that his present circumstances cast on questions of obligation. Crito's appeal implies that when Socrates understands precisely what is at stake, he will see that escape is the only reasonable conclusion. In the Protagoras, the problem is more imprecision than error. What we learn from him is that a more precise articulation of the already existing moral consensus will help us pierce the fog of disagreement. Socrates, I claim, mocks precisely this view with the hedonic calculus.
The dialogues direct us to an elusive, possibly fugitive space in which the need for political decision is accepted without this leading to the abandonment of critical thought. The problem, however, is not so much about describing that space as it is about describing the disposition of character that, first, motivates a desire to occupy it and, second, encourage one to bear the inevitable tensions that occupying it entails. We see that the investigative, account-seeking aspect of Socrates's activity, which is often taken as Socrates's legacy to democratic theory, might fail to fully capture what Socrates teaches. Indeed, the more emphasis is placed on that aspect, the more Socrates could be perceived to have a technique for citizenship. I want to argue instead that there are no ‘technical specifications’ for good democratic citizenship that we can draw from Socrates, nor do phrases like ‘critical distance’ fully do justice to the psychological dimension of such citizenship. In the next section I describe, first, the corruptions of that psychological dimension and, second, I use those negative accounts to develop a positive account of civic competence.
Civic Competence and Democracy
As I said at the start, I am calling the corruptions of civic competence ‘disagonism’ and ‘eristicism’. Each neologism is meant to capture something that is distinctive about the corruptions. Eristicism is derived from the Greek eristic, which refers to the type of contentious disputation normally associated with the Sophists. Eristic is classically portrayed as an argumentative style used for no purpose other than winning an argument (Kerferd, 1981, pp. 59–67). Disagonism has perhaps a more familiar origin in the Greek word agon, struggle or contest. In contemporary democratic theory, ‘agonism’ is associated with contesting boundaries of the political and universalist Enlightenment ideas that work to mask or suppress difference. An agonistic theory can be thought of as one that challenges the terms of political argument and foundational claims, especially in the context of describing patterns of domination. For my purposes, the key idea of disagonism is precisely the erection of barriers to certain forms of argumentative challenge. Because I treat eristicism and disagonism as corruptions, it is important to recognise that civic competence as a state of character can shade off towards either the corrupt forms, without necessarily becoming a fully non-democratic type of citizenship (Mara, 1997, pp. 54–6).
Disagonism, in a sense, is an uncritical acceptance of claims to wisdom, so long as those claims are based on customary norms and practices. The caveat is crucial; an uncritical acceptance of claims to wisdom, unconditionally, signals a lack of agency. Because the disagonist is certainly an agent, we need to understand this corruption specifically within the context of moral agency. Thus, we start from the assumption that the disagonist does assess knowledge claims, but the assessment is shallow or low-grade. It is made on the basis of familiarity or accordance with some already settled conviction. In other words, the disagonist is quite sceptical and wary of anything innovative and, therefore, new knowledge claims tend to be rejected unless they ‘fit’ a current constellation of convictions. Such a person may be described as bound by tradition, but is actually bound by a particular image of that constellation. The disagonist sees no conflict in his moral universe and he holds that all his beliefs are both true and compatible. Conflicts are ultimately superficial and a bit of refinement will never fail to restore compatibility. Thus, the disagonist is not opposed to change, as such. Indeed, in Athens, the Sophists signify a remarkable change in the city's way of life, but patrons of the many visiting Sophists would certainly not have described themselves as anything other than supportive of the Athenian nomoi.
The interlocutors I examine in this paper, of course, provide suitable models, but we can cite at least one other illustration from the Republic. As Socrates begins his construction of the ideal city, he tries to describe the sort of character that should lead it – a character type that is fierce towards the city's enemies and gentle towards those whom it is entrusted to lead and protect (Republic 375a, following pages). Socrates declares that a well-trained watchdog is the model for his guardians (later to become Auxiliaries). These watchdog-men are suited to their initial role as leaders because the city, as constructed to that point, needs no more than protectors who preserve what has been established. The familiar needs to be preserved and the scent of something new signals danger. The analogy with disagonism is apt and, moreover, accurately sums up some of the characters we see in the dialogues examined here. Meletus and Anytus, in particular, exhibit this sort of watchdog temperament. As character types, they are protective towards the city's established ways and beliefs – even if they also exhibit a sort of mercenary ambition that motivates their prosecution of Socrates (an ambition that is certainly not alien to the city's ways). When we understand the disagonism of his accusers, we can better understand their accusations. Socrates corrupts by degrading confidence in settled convictions. He lends customary norms and practices, those foundations of sound judgement, a certain conditionality, and this kind of conditionality is what the disagonist calls a vice. The tendency of disagonism is to naturalise convention. Socrates denaturalises it and, thus, destabilises judgement. Once denaturalised, the possibility of deep moral and political disagreement becomes manifest and the disagonist's assumption of widespread moral consensus can no longer be sustained.
The naturalisation of convention is a gradual process occurring through social interaction and deliberation and, at its point of perfection, it is expressed as intolerance towards anything challenging the assumed widespread consensus. Obviously, there will be degrees of this. Crito, for example, must have taken pleasure from, and saw no harm in, his philosophical discussions with Socrates in happier times. He alludes to the way those discussions challenged what he now describes as principles everyone knows and accepts. But he will not permit the challenge to be taken up. To challenge, ultimately, is to be mistaken. Meletus and Anytus, on the other hand, are considerably less tolerant. They are both rigidly defiant that challenge could have merit, even as a recreational pastime. To engage in it must signal malicious intent. Although the disagonist need not be antidemocratic, he must be an attenuated democrat because the recognised need for authority confines critical thought. The disagonist is intolerant of there being a tension between authority and criticality. Authority wins and criticality is a prisoner within the terms authority sets for it. Thus, a more democratic politics calls for a different kind of deliberation than that practised by the disagonist. This is the insight that inspires the other corruption, eristicism.
The eristic revels in disagreement and welcomes the opportunity to dispute an issue. It is not, though, an excess of criticism, as such, but an attitude towards deliberation that marks it out. The eristic mistakes refutation for testing or proving and makes confounding an opponent the aim of deliberation. Thus, eristicism is not simply the desire to win – that desire is not unique to it – but a desire to trumpet one's superior skills in argument, which entails winning. We can imagine cases where one loses an argument, but scores a ‘moral’ victory. However, this is a category of victory that an eristic cannot perceive. A moral victory implies a principled commitment that motivates one's argument, something the eristic lacks. While eristicism incorporates an element of examination, it is not concerned to defend any particular position, only to defeat the opponent. Indeed, the topic under consideration and the eristic's actual convictions are irrelevant, because the eristic sees argument as a zero-sum game. Eristics do not actually care whether authoritatively correct answers to moral questions exist, because argument is a competitive arena to demonstrate one's superiority.
Because I call this eristicism, it is natural to assume that the Sophists or teachers of rhetoric are the primary culprits. There are, of course, numerous examples in the dialogues of Sophists who fit the description. However, Socrates cites other perpetrators during his trial. He warns the Athenians that condemning him will unleash young men who have been delighted by his cross-examinations of others (Euben, 1989, pp. 214–5). These young men imitate what they understand Socrates to be doing, but do not possess the traits of character that make the elenchus more than a technique. As a result, they will not be content to investigate and will relish refutation for its own sake. For the young, the temptation to refute is particularly great, because this rising generation of Athenian citizens is eager to advance in the city (see Euthyphro 2b—c, where Socrates describes Meletus in similar terms). They must, therefore, show their superiority over those who already command respect.
In my discussion of the dialogues above, we can see eristicism at work in the Protagoras. It is indicated clearly at several points. Socrates virtually showcases it by attributing to Simonides the desire to outdo another poet. Socrates also implicitly attributes it to Prodicus, who enjoys seeing his professional rival struggle under cross-examination. Perhaps most significantly for the insight it gives us into the psychology of eristicism, Protagoras bristles under Socrates's questioning because he senses he is being outdone and his failure is on public show.
If disagonism naturalises convention, eristicism can be said to naturalise the desire to defeat an opponent. Furthermore, this entails naturalising the oppositional relationship such that the idea of a joint enquiry into an issue is barely comprehensible. Proposing a joint investigation is no more than a clever rhetorical tactic for disarming an opponent. Also, because one's opponent must be seen as necessarily trying to win at all costs, the presumption of insincerity in argument is inbuilt. Protagoras's jaw-clenched replies to Socrates at certain points express a sense of entrapment and, when given the chance, he tries to spring a trap of his own. In explaining the supposed contradiction in Simonides poem, Protagoras sets out a problem that has an obvious solution. When the obvious solution is proposed, a new and bigger problem is revealed and the trap slams shut.
Civic competence clearly means avoiding either of these forms of corruption and with a clearer sense of each we can better describe the virtue itself. As I said, civic competence can shade off towards either the corrupt forms. Thus, it is important to see the virtue as something more complicated than steering a course between two equally undesirable extremes because civic competence shares some family resemblances with each. Eristicism includes an understanding of contestation. It goes wrong in misconstruing the aims of deliberation. The eristic believes every argument, whatever its apparent subject, is actually about who is the better arguer. Disagonism includes an understanding that settled convictions have some authority. It goes wrong in not entertaining the possibility that settled convictions can come into conflict.
The Socratic elenchus returns with its role clarified and its connection to democratic citizenship better secured through an understanding of the psychology behind it. The competent citizen recognises that certain convictions are currently held, but that there can be disagreement precisely over these convictions. Villa has tried to set out an account of citizenship that describes a Socratic citizen as standing at some remove from the norms of his community. Is this sufficient? Villa seems to take the aporia seriously, because a sceptical stance encourages us to see that definitive answers, immune to further challenge, are never possible. But the Socratic aporia is not simply inconclusiveness; it is a contradiction from which no escape is apparent. In the aporetic dialogues, the interlocutor is shown to hold sincere but contradictory opinions, neither of which can be easily abandoned, and both of which accord with the norms of the community. This, then, is the aporia: the norms of the community lead to disagreement and cannot finally end disagreement. Standing at some remove cannot address conflicting demands that emerge from our own moral discourse. No matter how lightly we wear our community's norms, the aporia will be real.
Moreover, if politics is a practical activity, we can expect practical events to spur questioning. The practical nature of politics concerns judging claims and making decisions that will be binding on the community as a whole. The need for an authoritative decision and the need for critical engagement will create a tension and the character of the deliberators will govern the way in which that tension is experienced and publicly expressed. The competent citizen understands that it is politically perilous to dissolve the tension because doing so affects how disagreement is viewed, how dissent is accommodated and how citizens view their relation to one another. The disagonist dissolves the tension by naturalising convention and, thus, classifies citizens who challenge convention as enemies of the political community. The eristic dissolves the tension by naturalising an adversarial impulse, and makes legitimate authority impossible. Therefore, the citizens’ disposition towards disagreement and deliberation will govern the character of community itself.
Anyone who wants to draw Socrates into contemporary democratic theory has to accept that he has a historical situation and a political experience that are very much not ours. As a figure in the dialogues, Socrates is attempting to transform the debates of his own polity. As Euben comments in describing Socrates's implicit identification with Achilles in the Apology, ‘… Socrates invokes Achilles as a way of identifying himself with a cultural narrative he is also transforming’ (Euben, 1989, p. 220). The transformative direction, I would suggest, is away from negative accounts of democracy – not tyranny, not oligarchy – towards a positive account of what a democrat does that is distinctly democratic. While Socrates has his own circumstances, this is the point at which he joins our debates. The question I have tried to answer in this paper is, what characterisation of the democratic citizen does Socrates bequeath to us? Villa provides one answer: the Socratic democrat avoids injustice. To make the case, he uses a notion of ‘clearly recognisable forms of injustice’, examples of which he says Socrates identifies at his trial (Villa, 2001, pp. 26–7). These examples are Socrates's refusal to obey an order given by the Thirty Tyrants and his opposition to the assembly's decision to try collectively the generals of the Athenian naval defeat at Arginusae (Apology 32a, following pages). However, these examples fail to make the point and, indeed, make a different point about Socrates's democratic legacy. In both of the examples Socrates uses at his trial, he is describing situations in which the will of some political body is declared to be the expression of what is just. Socrates is not describing the avoidance of injustice, but the problem of opposing the will of rulers when those rulers denounce opposition as treason. The injustice Socrates avoids arises from the exercise of arbitrary power that permits no challenge.
This description of Socrates's conduct, I believe, brings us nearer to an understanding of his proper role in democratic theory. Nonetheless, it might still be the case that the ancient experience of citizenship in the democratic city is so far removed from our own political lives that applying Socrates to our practical activity as citizens can hardly be imagined. While we cannot assume Athenian political institutions with their extraordinary degree of citizen interaction, we can recognise that a modern democratic society is not simply a large citizen collective acting through a monolithic political instrument called ‘the state’. Informal networks of public deliberation, ‘subaltern counterpublics’ (Fraser, 1992) or deliberative ‘enclaves’ (Mansbridge, 1996) are important sites of citizen interaction. Habermas writes:
Informal public opinion-formation generates ‘influence’; influence is translated into ‘communicative power’ through the channels of political elections; and communicative power is again transformed into ‘administrative power’ through legislation. … The normative implications are obvious: the integrative force of ‘solidarity’, which can no longer be drawn solely from sources of communicative action, should develop through widely expanded and differentiated public spheres as well as through legally institutionalised procedures of democratic deliberation and decision-making (Habermas, 1996, p. 28).
The associations that de Tocqueville saw as necessary because of democratic equality 11 are a modern democracy's answer to the ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions that Socrates could easily answer about his own city's regime. ‘The citizens in the Assembly’ has been supplemented by ‘self-selecting subsets of individuals in informal and quasi-institutionalised groupings that interact and have overlapping memberships’. Civic competence, the virtue I have located at the heart of Socrates's democratic thought, is also the virtue of non- and quasi-institutionalised deliberative bodies that play a role in contemporary democracy. The ‘circumstances of politics’ – the ineliminable presence of disagreement that goes to the fundamentals of a political association – have their counterpart within those informal networks, subaltern counterpublics and political enclaves. As a recognition of the circumstances of politics, this is taking democracy all the way down by attending to the moral psychology of the democratic citizen in whatever forum citizens gather.
Footnotes
Previous versions of this paper were presented to audiences at Southampton University and University College Cork. I am grateful to all those who participated in discussions for prompting me to think harder about certain aspects of my argument. For their detailed readings of various drafts and for their written comments, I am especially indebted to Vittorio Bufacchi, Andy Mason, Peter Nicholson, David Owen and the anonymous referees for this journal.
2
While many of the dialogues would help me develop the points I make in this paper, I consider the Crito and the Apology specifically because they are well known as two of Plato's more ‘political’ dialogues. I consider the Protagoras because it expressly introduces a theme of political excellence alongside a theme of skill in argumentation.
3
Villa seems to distance himself from specifically deliberative democratic arguments (Villa, 2001).
4
Politics Book III, ch. 11.
5
Crito's appeals show that he assumes Socrates will oppose the plan. Indeed, his argument that Socrates need not adhere to all the statements he made at his trial actually anticipates Socrates's determination to be consistent with all he has said and done in the past (so long as it still withstands scrutiny) (Crito 46b—c).
6
Consider also Socrates's personal quest – and subsequent failure – to find a man wiser than himself (Apology 21c–23b).
7
Congleton, 1974; Euben, 1978; Orwin, 1988; Bentley, 1996.
8
The aporetic character of the dialogue becomes clearer when read in this light.
9
Of course, we have to rely on perception somewhat, because it is perception that first informs us that there are differences in degree.
10
The widespread consensus to which Anytus appeals is between Athenian gentlemen, that is, educated opinion. Meletus, no doubt for strategic reasons in the context of a trial, makes a more encompassing appeal.
11
Democracy in America Vol. II, Part Two, Chapter 5.