Scientific Statesmanship, Governance and the History of Political Philosophy

Kyriakos N. Demetriou, Antis Loizides, Kyriakos N. Demetriou, Antis Loizides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317817307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Over the centuries, the question of "good" or "effective" governance has undergone several transformations and ramifications to fit within certain social, cultural and historical contexts. What defines political knowledge? What is the measure of expert political leadership? Various interpretations, perspectives, and re-conceptualizations emerge as one moves from Plato to the present.

This edited book explores the relationship between political expertise, which is defined as "scientific statesmanship or governance, " and political leadership throughout the history of ideas. An outstanding group of experts study and analyze the ideas of significant philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Burke, Comte, and Weber, among others. The contributors aim to interpret these thinkers' approaches to "scientific statesmanship, " deepening our understanding of the idea itself and decoding its theoretical complexities.

In the face of the ongoing crisis of the traditional party system and the eroding structures within the new cultural-financial and political environment in the era of globalization, tracing the connection between Plato's idealist statesmanship to twentieth-century modernist politics is an important and ever-challenging enterprise; one that promises to interest scholars of the history of western political thought, philosophy, classics and the classical tradition, political science, and sociology.

1 The Platonic Moment

Political Transpositions of Power, Reason, and Ethics

John R. Wallach

The moment at which Plato took up his memory of Socrates and instantiated it into dialogical inquiry has caught the attention of classicists and political theorists from the beginning of the twentieth century until today.¹ For pre-war theorists, it marked the birth of critical inquiry out of the morass of democratic politics.² For many post-war theorists, it illustrated the elevation of philosophy above politics as the coping stone for ethical and political thought and action—one of dubious value, especially according to liberals (e.g., Popper, Berlin, Vlastos), political existentialists (e.g., Arendt), political democrats (e.g., Wolin), and post-Nietzscheans (e.g., Geuss).³ But Plato also has enduring interest as a theorist of “the political,” which gained new traction in the twentieth century with the work of Schmitt, Arendt, and Wolin. My interest in what I call “the Platonic moment” is historical, theoretical, and political: did Plato’s critical writing effect a new attitude toward politics amidst the turbulence of fourth-century BCE Athens? If so, how did it resonate in subsequent, often quite different, historical moments? My puzzle about the Platonic moment concerns its nature as a particular place in space/time that attracts significant intellectual attention in virtually every space/time; what occurs along with what is gained and, perhaps, lost, in Plato’s pivotal turn toward written, dialogical inquiry as the royal road to truth and justice, and how the Platonic notion of the political relates to contemporary iterations of the political. My argument is not a moral or political judgment of Plato’s attitude toward philosophy, politics, and democracy, nor is it an effort to explain Plato’s literary turn in relation to orality or “why Plato wrote.”⁴ Rather, it is a study of the creation and significance of a theoretical, critical, and dialogical constituent of “the political” and political judgment as a moment— literally, pivotal turning point (fr. L. momentum )—in historical time, of what comprises Plato’s decision, in the wake of Socrates’s trial and death, to pursue justice and remedy the ills of humanity through philosophy rather than politics.⁵

Relative to the contributions of this collection, the result of this inquiry points to Plato as both foundational and marginal to the study of statesmanship: foundational, because his dialogical treatments of politics, justice, and statesmanship are benchmarks for subsequent critical discussions of statesmanship and governance; marginal, because he provides neither a single model of statesmanship as an idea, fact, or value nor a view of statesmanship and governance that can be neatly differentiated from other major concepts and phenomena (such as virtue, knowledge, truth, law, politeia, etc.). As a result, we shall see how the Platonic moment in the history of political thought about statesmanship has relatively open implications for political practice when that standard is respected and sustained. The puzzle of this moment is how it is both philosophical and political, so long-lived and so Hellenically atmospheric, so traditional and so radical. I start with some relatively generic comments about Plato and the political; comment on specific terms of ordinary language (technê, logos, politika, and politeia) that Plato redefines, and then close with a historically grounded comparative analysis of Platonic and contemporary conceptions of the political, particularly as they pertain to statesmanship.

I. Plato and the Political

As a thoughtful Athenian citizen, growing up when its democratic politeia experienced its most severe bouts of stasis, Plato experienced the raw sides of its whole political life. In response—to this and other particular historical factors—he subjected the features of Athenian political life to critical scrutiny. The result was the first systematic account of what later came to be called “the political,” a word that has ambiguous equivalents in Attic Greek. In so doing, Plato transposed the erga of Athenian (and many dimensions of ancient Greek) political life into his dialogical realm of logos and connected all of its elements (to varying degrees, depending on the context) to the idea and virtue (aretê) of justice (dikaiosunê). Most fully expressed in The Republic, many other Platonic dialogues (some, but not all, mentioned above) engaged this issue. Yet Plato never thematized “the political” itself. In the Republic (Politeia), he approached “the political” via the idea of justice, and his other directly “political” dialogues, the Statesman (Politikos) and Laws (Nomoi), also did not interrogate “the political.” As a result, it is Aristotle, not Plato, who is identified as the first “political scientist.” Plato, nonetheless, is the one primarily faulted for an authoritarian, if not totalitarian, conception of “the political” that harbors essentially anti-democratic features. This view was popular in the mid-late twentieth century (Popper, Arendt, Strauss, Connolly, Mouffe) and lingered because critics focused not so much on conceptions of the political as on the dangerous tendencies of the practical application of theoretical reason. To appreciate the historicity of the Platonic moment, let us not adhere to these views and return to pivotal places in Plato’s dialogues where “the political” is addressed so as to better understand what he has written and how Plato’s theorization of the political arguably speaks to us.

II. The Political Dimension of the Platonic Moment

The most important factor for explicating the Platonic moment is determined by what he was intending to do by taking up the writing of dialogues (especially in the way he did, by highlighting “Socrates”) and founding the Academy. If we take dialogues such as the Apology of Socrates, Crito, Gorgias, and Republic, along with the Seventh Letter, as useful evidence, then it is clear that Plato was radically exasperated with Athenians’ politics and politeia. Consequently, he believed that critical philosophy offered a better path to justice than the prevailing alternatives in logos—such as tragedy, comedy, poetry, sophistry, rhetoric, Isocratean philosophy, and ordinary and institutionalized politics. His focus on the limitations of these kinds of discourse stemmed with his profound disappointment with the overall course being followed by Athenian political life—the adequacy of its public institutions to their charge; its practice of education; its growing economic inequality; its ethical standards; and its practice of political friendship. In other words, the moment of and motivation for Plato’s philosophical turn toward justice and truth involved dissatisfaction not only with Athenian logoi but Athenian erga—erga that had been severely compromised by the loss of the Peloponnesian War and two oligarchic coups, along with Socrates’s indictment, trial, and execution.⁶

In using this moment to create new forms of logos (the dialogues) and erga (the Academy), Plato did not start with a blank slate. He, of course, was an Athenian, and he most likely fought in the Peloponnesian War. He was exposed not only to Socrates but also to the Sophists, poets, tragedians, and comedians. He may have attended the Assembly and Courts, unlike Socrates, and, like Socrates, most surely served on the Council. Having come from a well-to-do family and initially intrigued by a career in public life, he surely sensed the nature and wide range of Athenian cultural and political practices. And when he turned away from political action toward philosophy, it did not mean wholesale withdrawal from Athenian political life—although, like Socrates, he seems to have stayed away from the Assembly and, unlike Socrates, he travelled for short periods of time outside Athens to Egypt and Sicily.⁷ To the contrary, he sought to address these Athenian realities in a different discursive key. Indeed, Plato is not known for inventing a new philosophical vocabulary, pace Aristotle, as much as he is for endowing ordinary language with new meanings—whether it be the technê of politics, philosophia, Greek myths, aretê, or paradeigmata.⁸ The most elusive target for his critical reconstruction was the activity of politics itself, insofar as it was available to the dêmos (though—crucially—not women, metics, or slaves) and could affect every walk of life but remained under the aegis of nomoi of the Athenian politeia, the sources of authoritative social conventions and law for politics and ethics.

One might say that there was no ancient Greek conception of “the political”—at least not on the order stipulated by Carl Schmitt. But although that was true literally—no exact linguistic equivalent exists—the Greek word politeia designated the body of citizens arranged in a particular scheme for conducting power. Insofar as it did not transpose their individual beings it constituted a political realm, or “the political,” a logos whose definition was defined by the erga of practical political life. The phenomenon was not lost on Plato. In the Republic, Socrates’s typology of unjust forms of politeia in Books VIII–IX, judged in terms of the politeia of kallipolis (mostly spelled out in Books III–VII), indicates that Plato had some conception of the political that he wanted linked to justice. But whatever conception he had of it, it does not seem to have assumed the character of an immutable form. The good constitution (politeia as paradeigma) that an actual citizen is supposed to use to guide his life (592a) is defined in the context of individual action. And when Plato later defines, in The Statesman (Politikos), the nature of an individual statesman (ho politikos) empowered to enact a good (or better) constitution under nonideal circumstances, there is no law superior to his judgment (293c–d). As in the Republic, the aim of citizen, statesman, or philosopher is to imitate the perfect or true politeia without anyone other than these individuals able to state what true or just political actions are other than by their political actions. One can see why Plato was so insistent on justifying the need for and merit of his kind of philosophy. For without it, Platonic political action becomes tyrannical—precisely the kind of action that is anti-political and most destructive of social life.

But now comes the rub. For Plato opposes the meaning of philosophical skill to, for example, standard-variety poetic and political understandings of “expertise,” “craft,” or “skill” (translations for the Greek technê or epistêmê).⁹ And, like Socrates in the Apology and Crito, the Athenian Stranger/Visitor (Xenos) says that such expertise is unavailable to a “mass of people” (plêthos, 292e, 300e). Does Plato’s belief in the need for a technê unavailable to a crowd illustrate an anti-democratic conception of the political? The answer is not easy to come by, because it depends on one’s view of what Plato is trying to accomplish by defining the just politeia, the good politikos, etc. The answer is only a flat “yes” if Athenian conventions offer the best possible nomoi for politics and ethics. If one does not accept that premise, then the answer only is “yes” if the theoretical generation of a standard of political judgment “higher” than convention automatically delegitimizes the nomoi, citizens, and politicians of democratic Athens more than it does those of other city-states and their constitutions. It certainly decapitates claims to the sufficiency of whatever virtue the Athenians as a polis of citizens claim to have (which could have encouraged imperial ventures i...