Understanding the Political Philosophers

From Ancient to Modern Times

Alan Haworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136329401
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Understanding the Political Philosophers is an absorbing and accessible introduction to the major philosophers and core texts of western political philosophy.

Organised historically - beginning with Socrates and Plato, and concluding with post-Rawlsian theory - Alan Haworth presents the key ideas and developments with clarity and depth. Each chapter provides a concentrated study of a given thinker or group of thinkers and together they constitute a broad account of the main arguments in political philosophy.

There are chapters on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, the Utilitarians, Marx, and Rawls's early work. This revised second edition has been brought fully up-to-date, and includes expanded coverage of the period from the death of Aristotle to the sixteenth century, as well as a new chapter on Rawls's later philosophy and the direction of post-Rawlsian philosophy.

Including a chronology and suggestions for further reading, Understanding the Political Philosophers is an ideal introductory text for students taking courses in political philosophy or political theory.

Part I

Athens

1

Socrates

Our story opens in Athens because it was in that city that the earliest major work of political philosophy – The Republic, as it is now called – first encountered the light of day. This was in approximately 375 BC. (The precise year isn’t known.) Its author, Plato, would have written it with a stylus, a pointed implement with which he inscribed his sentences on rolls of papyrus. The first copies must have been made using the same laborious technique. Since then there have been times when any copy of an ancient Greek work must have led a precarious life: the fall of the Roman Empire; the Dark Ages; the early medieval period, during which the only guardians of literature were monks and when handwritten manuscripts had to be transported from monastery to monastery on the backs of mules; the burning of the great library at Alexandria in AD 640, when many original Greek texts which had survived up to that time were finally lost. You could say that the most remarkable thing about The Republic is the simple fact of its survival. Against many odds, and after almost 2,400 years, you can now download a copy from the internet, or go along to any reasonably good bookshop and find a translation, in paperback, produced with the help of the most up-to-date technology.

The Republic is, thus, the earliest available text relevant to my subject. Therefore, there are at least two good reasons for beginning my narrative proper with an account of its main arguments (as I shall in the next chapter). I have already given one, namely that Plato’s work is the earliest known. The other is that it is still available. This means that The Republic’s argument confronts us just as directly as it confronted Plato’s contemporaries. It demands our attention, just as it demanded theirs. We cannot ignore it. We have to come to terms with its arguments for ourselves and figure out where we stand in relation to them.

The availability of a text also accounts for why I have chosen to start with Plato rather than with his mentor, Socrates. By most accounts, Socrates was unusual and charismatic. He inspired the younger Plato to such an extent that his influence remained with Plato for the rest of his life. Moreover, Socrates is certainly a good candidate for the title ‘first great philosopher’, and an even better one for ‘first political philosopher’. From our point of view, however, the problem with Socrates is that he never wrote anything. This means that he spoke more directly to his fellow Athenians than he ever could to us. Even so, I should give a brief account here of Socrates’ approach to philosophy, and his life, because it is with the story of Socrates that the story of Plato really begins. Without some knowledge of the former story, it would be impossible to fully appreciate The Republic’s point.

Socrates the Philosopher

The fact that Socrates never put his thoughts down in writing distinguishes him from every later philosopher. Whereas the others are remembered mainly through their books, Socrates practised philosophy by means of a purely ‘word of mouth’ technique. To the Athenians he was a familiar figure. They would encounter him in the marketplace as he debated philosophical questions with anyone prepared to engage in a discussion with him. This can make Socrates appear truly remarkable to present-day philosophers.

However, it doesn’t really make him as remarkable as all that, for Socrates was a contemporary of the sophists, wandering scholars who would, in the typical case, move from place to place, providing tuition in return for a fee. There were many sophists and, like Socrates, all tended to work through speech rather than writing. So, it wasn’t the simple fact that Socrates practised his teaching orally, in public, which made him so exceptional. If we are to understand what it was, we must consider how Socrates and the sophists differed.

There were a number of differences. One was that, unlike most sophists, Socrates made no charge for his services.¹ Another was that, whereas most sophists travelled from place to place in the course of their work, Socrates left Athens only once in his life.² More significantly from our point of view, Socrates and the sophists differed in the reasons they had for working as they did. On the one hand, it was Socrates’ opinion that philosophy could only be properly taught and practised orally. ‘Dialectic’ was the route to truth. As this suggests, it would be wrong to think that Socrates just never found the time to write, or – perhaps – that he never managed to make the effort. On the contrary, he considered writing an inappropriate technique. (I think most present-day philosophers would agree with him that discussion is central to philosophy, although they would be less dismissive of the written text.) It is consistent with this interest in truth that Socrates should have insisted, as he did, on the primacy of reason and logic, on rationality. His approach would be to challenge the person with whom he was arguing to formulate a definition of the thing – usually a virtue – they were discussing. Socrates would then call the definition into question, forcing his opponent to defend it. (This has come to be known as ‘the Socratic method’.)

By contrast with Socrates, the sophists tended to attach more importance to the arts of rhetoric and persuasion than they ever did to seeking truth through the use of reason. The opinion of one sophist – a contemporary of Plato’s called Isocrates – is on record. According to him, ‘likely conjecture about useful things is far preferable to exact knowledge of the useless’ (Isocrates 1954–56: 63). Socrates strongly disapproved.

In fact, it is easy to appreciate why the sophists took this attitude in favour of rhetoric. It is what they were hired to teach. There was a demand for their services, partly because anyone who lacked the skill of speaking persuasively in public could never succeed in getting his³ way at meetings of the Assembly, Athens’ supreme legislative institution. The Assembly passed laws, and decisions of policy were made there. It met every ten days or so, and any citizen could attend and speak. When you think that citizens composed roughly a quarter of the population, you can imagine how large the more well-attended meetings must have been. (There were about 30,000 citizens in all and, out of that number, about 6,000 regularly attended meetings of the Assembly.)⁴ Moreover, if a citizen took out a case against you, the legal system required that you should be tried before a court of fellow citizens, usually numbered in hundreds. You would have to defend yourself. No wonder it was so important to the Athenian citizen that he should master the skill of persuading others by rhetoric, and that sophists were able to command high fees for teaching it. Some sophists may also have been experts in this or that field of learning but, if they taught that too, it came secondarily, as a bonus.

To sum up, then, one difference between the typical sophist and Socrates was this. Whereas the sophist taught rhetoric and sometimes claimed specialist knowledge, Socrates sought truth through the use of reason. More than that, far from claiming to know anything, Socrates professed ignorance. At his trial, in his address to the jury, Socrates related a story about it. He claimed that an old friend of his, Chaerophon, once visited the oracle at Delphi and asked the god whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates himself. Apparently, the god replied that there was not. According to the story, when he heard of this Socrates was so puzzled that he set about interviewing those with a reputation for wisdom. It turned out that no one’s pretensions to knowledge could survive Socratic interrogation. Therefore – and here is the moral – only Socrates knew that he knew nothing, and it was this knowledge which made him wiser than everyone else (Plato 1954a: 49ff.).

For a further distinctive feature of Socrates’ approach we need to consider how he differed, not from the sophists, but from other philosophers. Of course, philosophers had lived and worked in Greece long before Socrates appeared on the scene. Examples of other Greek philosophers are Thales, who thought that everything was made from water; Empedocles, who explained natural change with a theory of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water; Pythagoras, who believed that history repeats itself in an endless cycle; Heraclitus, who believed that everything is an eternal, ever-changing modification of fire; and Democritus, who thought that matter was composed of atoms. But, as these examples make clear, those philosophers were mainly interested in the fundamental nature of the universe. They were trying to answer questions which, nowadays, would more often than not be raised by scientists – cosmologists or physicists. By contrast, Socrates was primarily interested in moral questions. Like the others, he sought fundamentals, but in the defining characteristics of virtue – love, for example, or justice.

Socrates and Athens

In addition to the distinctive features of Socrates’ approach to philosophy, we should consider the remarkable events of his life. It is well known that in 399 BC he was brought before the Athenian court having been charged with heresy and corrupting the minds of the young. There is general agreement that these were pretexts rather than credible, serious charges. Socrates was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed (by poison). Plato thought this a wicked and shameful act, a reaction which was only to be expected from one of Socrates’ disciples and, ever since, there has been a tendency to portray Socrates as a hapless martyr for reason and truth (not least because a great deal of what we know about Socrates is based on Plato’s testimony). For example, the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill ranks his execution with Christ’s crucifixion. In the second chapter of his On Liberty – a celebrated defence of free speech – Mill describes Socrates as the ‘acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived’ and ‘the man who probably of all then born had deserved least of mankind to be put to death as a criminal’ (Mill 1991a: 29). But it could be that Mill was painting a rosy picture here and, as so often, there is another side to the story. We should consider this, beginning with events which took place when Plato was quite young, and Socrates the mentor and inspiration to a circle of young men which included Plato’s elder brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus. (It is here, then, that Plato first appears on the scene.)

At this point, perhaps I should re-emphasise that I am not out to write the history of Athens. My subject is philosophy, not history, and philosophy’s central subject matter is ideas and arguments – the relations between them, the presuppositions on which they are based, and so on – not the sequence of past events. However, sometimes it is only possible to fully appreciate a philosophical argument, or a text, if you know something of the historical context in which it was first formulated or written, and that is why I am giving a brief outline of certain historical events here.

In fact, quite a number of the texts I shall be discussing are associated in one way or another with a political upheaval – a war or a revolution. In the case of The Republic the upheaval in question was a terrible war, the Peloponnesian War, between a league of city-states led by Athens and, opposing them, the armies of Sparta. This lasted for 27 years and came to an end in 404 BC, when Socrates was 66 and Plato 24 years old. For our purposes, the most relevant facts are as follows.

First of all, Athens was a democracy whereas Sparta was not. To see just how democratic Athens was you need only recall my earlier account of how the Assembly functioned. (Of course, there were some respects in which it was less democratic than a modern ‘representative democracy’. For example, the franchise did not extend to slaves or women. Nor did it extend to residents of Athens who lacked an Athenian pedigree, which is why even Aristotle was denied the vote. But you could certainly argue that, on the other hand, the degree to which citizens participated in decision making made it far more democratic.) Moreover, on the whole the Athenians were proud of their constitution. In his History of the Peloponnesian War – published in 410 BC or thereabouts – Thucydides records a funeral speech given by the great Athenian statesman Pericles at the end of the war’s first year. Pericles says this:

Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics.

And he adds,

this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.

(Thucydides 1954: 145)

This was the Athenian ideal, a system in which every citizen has a right to participate and take an interest in public affairs and, moreover, where there is an expectation that each citizen will do just that. Sparta was completely different. It was a repressive tyranny run by an elite military caste.

Second, during the closing years of the war, Athens suffered a period of political instability. The democracy was twice overthrown, the first time, in 411 BC, by disaffected pro-Spartan conspirators. Then it was restored after a four-month period known as the Reign of the Four Hundred. It was overthrown again in 404 BC, when Athens was finally defeated by the Spartans. There followed an eight-month period known as the Reign of the Thirty Tyrants. These were not mere changes in the system. Each tyranny – that of the Four Hundred and that of the Thirty – was a reign of terror. Thucydides records that, during the time of the Four Hundred, although the Assembly and the Council whose members it chose by lot continued to meet,

they took no decisions that were not approved by the party of the revolution; in fact all the speakers came from this party, and what they were going to say had been considered by the party beforehand. People were afraid when they saw their numbers, and no one now dared to speak in opposition to them. If anyone did venture to do so, some appropriate method was soon found for having him killed, and no one tried to investigate such crimes or take action against those suspected of them. Instead, the people kept quiet, and were in such a state of terror that they thought themselves lucky enough to be left unmolested even if they had said nothing at all.

(1954: 575)

It is a picture which has remained depressingly familiar. A further attempt to overthrow the democracy looked likely in 401 BC – just two years before Socrates’ trial – but this never materialised. It is easy to appreciate that, for most Athenians, the 12-year period prior to the trial must have been insecure and jittery.

In connection with these events, we should bear in mind – third – that the democracy was not equally popular with all elements of the population. It was popular with the ordinary people, the poor. It was also popular with middle-class traders and merchants, some of them quite wealthy. (In a cosmopolitan seaport like Athens, which depended for its wealth on trade with the outside world, this class would have been particularly strong.) However, it was far less popular amongst the hereditary aristocracy, many of whom would have regarded it as a threat to their own power and influence. The crucial points to note here are, first, that Plato’s family and associates were members of this class; second, that – as a teacher – Socrates was closely associated with the same class; and, third, that in both 411 BC and 404 BC groups of young aristocratic males, much like the ones Socrates used to teach, were instrumental in bringing about the democracy’s fall. In the nervy atmosphere of post-war Athens, it could be that the activities of the philosopher in the marketplace – once apparently harmless and eccentric – came to take on a more sinister, conspiratorial, aspect. Perhaps it was this that inspired the charge of ‘corrupting the youth of the city’.

So, was Socrates really a martyr, someone who suffered for the stand he took on behalf of freedom of thought? Or, were the suspicions that he was deeply involved with subversive, anti-democratic, elements justified? If I were to pursue these questions any further, I really would be straying from the point. So, let us now move on to consider The Republic’s argument.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Socrates

See Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991) for a commentary by a leading expert. I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates (1988) is a readable account of the events leading up to Socrates’ trial and execution. So is Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (2010). In fact, if you want to get a sense of what the Athens of Socrates’ time was really like, you could hardly do better than read Hughes’s book. John Thorley’s Athenian Democracy (2004) is a readable ‘in-depth’ a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• PART I Athens
• PART II Reason and revolutions
• PART III Modern times, modern themes
• Timeline
• References
• Index