J. Peter Euben

I. Philosophy and Politics in Plato's Crito

plary : here was a man caught between conflicting commitments, a citizen who valued personal integrity and truth; an intellectual validating his thought and life by the courage of his death. On trial for his life, Socrates rejects in advance any offer of acquittal or probation on condition that he cease doing philosophy, that is, going among his fellow citizens to see whether they know what they think they know or truly understand the bases of their life and actions. To such an offer he would have to say, as he does in the Apology: &dquo;Men of Athens, I hold you in the highest regard and affection, but I will be persuaded by [obey] the god rather than you. As long as I have breath and strength I will not give up philosophy or stop exhorting you and pointing out the truth to everyone of you whom I meet.&dquo;2 But as critics of civil disobedience were quick to emphasize, another Platonic dialogue, the Crito, closely linked by time, theme, and reference to the Apology, apparently speaks in a different voice and with different import. In the Apology Socrates is contentious and rebellious. But in the Crito, he is reverent and submissive, referring to himself as a child and slave (doulos) of the laws, willing to suffer injustice if unable to persuade them of their errors of judgment and decision (50de, 51 bc). One might argue that Socrates’ acceptance of the unjust decision and his punishment is consistent with or even entailed by civil disobedience. But

Justice and the Oresteia

The essay is concerned with justice in the Oresteia and the way the Oresteia contributes to the justice it celebrates. It begins by examining the place of tragedy in Athenian politics as a preface to an analysis of the trilogys understanding of justice. That understanding is explored using two examples of fundamentally conflicting forces which are reconciled in the play to create a whole larger and more just than either force alone. The essay goes on to argue that the form of tragedy recapitulates and reinforces the substantive teachings on justice previously analyzed. Here four elements are considered: the balances between intelligence and passion, action and boundaries, political discourse and poetry, and the Euminides and Agamemnon .

Books in Review: Cunning, Don Herzog. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 208 pp.

adequate political vocabulary, to exploit the movement that it traces from the specific toward the general, and to use its systematicity—symptomatically, diagnostically—to help disclose political possibilities that might seem “unrealistic,” in the pejorative sense, if broached in the context of a relatively narrow dispute about a single political issue. Put differently, the Weberian choice that Geuss demands of us, between nontheoretical moral evaluation and theoretical understanding, may be too stark for Geuss himself, if he wishes to join realism to radicalism.

19.95 (paper)

For those on the democratic left, the standard interpretations of classical political theory as well as the theory itself offer small comfort. Most interpreters are either so preoccupied with textual exegesis and narrow philosophical analysis that the political assumptions of even the political texts are ignored, or, if they are not, then the critics largely accept the antidemocratic sentiments of the authors they study. If thisis so, then our view of democratic Athens and thus democracy itself owes much to thinkers unsympathetic with democratic practices. It also means that the founding vision of our theoretical vocation is shaped by conservative political predilections. Concern for these circumstances has inspired this book by Ellen and Neal Wood. Their fundamental premise is that the “classics of political theory” are “fundamentally ideological” and that to understand and appreciate them, one must begin by systematically relating them to their “social context” (p. IX). More specifically, they argue that the common ideology that “inspires, forms, and shapes” (p. I ) the political thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle seeks to revitalize the values of a declining landed aristocracy against an ascendant democracy. The authors insist that, far from disparaging Greek political theory, their approach actually makes it relevant and intelligible. For by studying theory in terms of its immediate social milieu, one can both distinguish its parochial relevance from what is of value“in relation to larger contexts” (p. 8) and define its fundamental preoccupations. Indeed, to ignore the importance of social context in the analysis of political thought givesan interpreter license to treat theories as if they were written today, thus transforming them “from ’ living political works into mere passive vehicles for our own values to be exploited at our own will and to serve our own ideological purposes” (p. 12). And this means that we become