Wallach 2014

polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek
Political Thought 31 (2014) 28-58

brill.com/polis
Platonic Power and Political Realism

John R. Wallach
Hunter College & The Graduate Center, The City University of New York,
New York, NY 10065, USA
jwallach@hunter.cuny.edu
Abstract
Despite often being condemned for having a paradigmatically unrealistic or dangerous

conception of power, Plato expends much effort in constructing his distinctive con-
ception of power. In the wake of Socrates’ trial and execution, Plato writes (in Gorgias
and Republic I) about conventional (Polus’, Polemarchus’), elitist (Callicles’), and radi-
cally unethical (Thrasymachus’) conceptions of power only to ‘refute’ them on behalf
of a favoured conception of power allied with justice. Are his arguments as pathetic or
wrong-headed as many theorists make them out to be – from Machiavelli to contem-
porary political realists, from ‘political’ critics of Plato ranging from Popper to Arendt?
And if not, has our understanding of power been impoverished? This question has
been surprisingly unasked, and it is one I address by asking Plato and his critics: What
are the dialectical moves Plato makes in refuting Socrates’s opponents and construct-
ing his own conception of legitimate (i.e., just) power? Exactly how does he interweave
his conception of power with a kind of ethics? How does it compare to recent concep-
tions of political realism and the power-politics/ethics relationship – e.g., after Marx
and Foucault? While addressing these questions I also attend to the issue of Plato’s
historicity: to what extent do the limits of his language and world affect our reading of
Plato and his political critics? Ultimately, I argue that and how Plato’s conception
of power and its political dimensions realistically have much to teach us that we have
not learned.
Keywords
Plato – power – realism – political – democracy – theory & history
From his contemporaries to Machiavelli to ours, Plato is often faulted for being
either woefully naive in his understanding of worldly power or blithely and
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/20512996-12340002

platonic power and political realism 29
inhumanely arrogant in the way he believes that philosophy can usefully

inform politics. Yet Plato developed his thinking about politics by directly
engaging those who used and had views about power. And given his highly
developed political and philosophical antennae, it is unlikely that his views
about power were blind, cruel, or obtusely unrealistic. Moreover, it’s not as if
Plato’s principal dialogical opponents for constructing his own view of power –
primarily Meletus, Callicles, and Thrasymachus – have modern proponents that
make their ancient predecessors mere fall-guys. Yet, current proponents of
political realism and critics of his view of political power and knowledge make
Plato a fall-guy for them and arguably have impeded our appreciation of Plato’s
conception(s) of power and thereby power more generally. This paper would
alter this intellectual condition by identifying the chief constituents of the
ideas of power Plato favours in his dialogues. Ultimately, I argue that the most
irritating features of his account of just power stem from his radically anti-
conventional and dialectical views – which are not politically unrealistic nor
radically anti-democratic – and the existential uncertainty of personal and
political judgment. Insofar as ‘democracy’, literally understood, is unconven-
tional relative to the currently authoritative character and distribution of
power – after all, nowhere does a contemporary incarnation of the demos exer-
cise kratos – my argument can improve our understanding of the ethical, intel-
lectual, and political dimensions of power – particularly democratic power.
After recalling critiques of Plato made by modern, primarily political realist,
interpreters of Platonic political theory (Part I), I analyze three pivotal
moments in Plato’s dialogues – from The Apology of Socrates, Gorgias, and
Republic – that construct compatible views of power (Parts II-IV), and close by
finding lessons from Platonic power (Part V).1
Two hurdles face this endeavour at its outset but also disclose part of its
value. The first is linguistic. There is no exact equivalent in Attic Greek for the
1 Other dialogues that treat ‘power’ indirectly or from ideas in other dialogues – e.g., Protagoras,
Statesman and Laws – only will be mentioned in passing. For a monograph on Plato on
power, see Kimon Lycos, Plato on Justice and Power: Reading Book I of Plato’s Republic (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1987). For accounts via analytical classical philosophy, see Terry Penner, ‘Desire
and Power in Socrates: The Argument of Gorgias 466A-468E that Orators and Tyrants Have
No Power in the City’, Apeiron, 24.3 (1991), pp. 147-202, Heda Segvic, ‘No One Errs Willingly:
The Meaning of Socratic Intellectualism’, in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 19 (2000),
pp. 1-45. I owe these references to Malcolm Schofield. The most recent, thorough treatment
of Plato’s political philosophy is Malcolm Schofield, Plato: Political Philosophy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006). Schofield offers insightful accounts of Plato’s views of power,
but he does not differentiate dunamis and kratos (cf. below) and does not directly thematize
or theorize Plato’s conception of power.
polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 31 (2014) 28-58
30 wallach
English word, ‘power’.2 Instead, the semantic range of the English word ‘power’
is mostly covered by two words in Attic Greek, the denotations of which are
not mutually exclusive. One is dunamis, often translated as capacity, ability,
potency, or potentiality, as well as power. Dunamis is a necessary feature of
social practice; it may be but is not necessarily good. It is composed of desire,
motives, habits, and skills. The other is kratos, translated as force as often as
power. It implies the use of force that, unlike dunamis, faces determined (not
‘natural’) resistance. For example, demokratia constantly has to overcome and
resist oligarchical tendencies in society, even as it also was said by many to
produce the most possible political good. Insofar as the meaning of each
potentially leaks into that of the other – after all, powerful members of the
political elite were known as dunatoi – I shall attend to instances of both (and
their cognates, such as strength and violence, ischus and bia) as contributing to
a Platonic notion of power.3
The second hurdle is historical and stems from radically different features of
Plato’s political context compared to ‘ours’. Plato’s political world was intensely
human, lacking in hardened institutional barriers to political action. It was not
a world inflected by monotheistic religious traditions and hierarchies, states,
standing armies, capital and its offsprings, programmatic ideologies, totalitar-
ian or inverted totalitarian regimes, carceral continuums, political orders
whose populations top one billion human beings, vast inequalities of wealth,
nuclear-tipped drones, or looming climactic disasters. In the Athenian polis
(Plato’s prototypical exemplar for ‘the political’), political power inherently
expressed human agency, and judgments about its quality concerned individu-
als or associations of individuals (koinoniai). These historical differences
should condition our understanding of Platonic power, but they do not fore-
stall inquiry into its meaning or utility. Initially, we simply need to attend to the
various iterations of dunamis (primarily) and kratos, which together make up
what we call ‘power’, in those Platonic dialogues where their political character
is best expressed. Then, we recognize the extent to which their meanings are
2 The Oxford English Dictionary identifies initial usages of ‘power’ (derived from the Latin,
potere, in the late 13th century), but its first major treatments in political theory and philoso-
phy occur (interestingly!) in the relatively liberal works of Hobbes (Leviathan) and Locke
(Essay Concerning Human Understanding).
3 In his book on Plato’s view of justice and power (supra, n. 1), Lycos connects ‘Socratic justice’
in Book I with dunamis. He finds in Plato valuable counterpoints to modern-day, individual-
ist conceptions of political ethics. However, his straight-up reading of the complementarity
of ‘power’ (mostly understood as dunamis) and ‘justice’ does not adequately account for the
tension Plato recognizes between his logos of power and its usage in the world, especially as
kratos – a tension which itself is part of Plato’s conception.
historically conditioned. Finally, we assume critical responsibility in identify-

ing the effects of these conditions in situ as well as for us as we make sense and
use of the Platonic conception of power. Throughout, I conceptualize Plato’s
conceptions of power as efforts to reject conceptions of power that fail to pro-
mote justice.
I ‘Modern’ Critiques of Platonic Power
Two sets of political thinkers take aim at Plato. The first and most durable
set took shape principally via Machiavelli’s dismissal of political idealism in
The Prince:
For many have imagined republics and principalities that have never
been seen or known to exist. However, how men live is so different from
how they should live that a ruler who does not do what is generally done,
but persists in doing what ought to be done, will undermine his power
[piuttosto] rather than maintain it.4
Machiavelli probably had in mind contemporary Christian authors who drew

on Cicero or Augustine’s imagined ‘city of God’ more than Plato when he wrote
the above passage, but it certainly applies to Plato; for Plato notably shunned
estimations of practical success as the principal guide of good political rule.5
Plato seems to have urged his readers (understood more as citizens than actual
rulers) to act personally and politically according to a city (polis) constructed
in reason (logos) as a paradigm (paradeigma – hypothetical model) rather
than according to political conventions.6 This could lead them either to seek
shelter from the political storm under the umbrella of philosophy or to enact a
plausible link between his conception of logos and the resistance posed by
ergon – which may call one to clash with ruling authorities. Above all, it should
be seen as sanctioning the merits of thought and theory for constituting – not
dominating – political action. Plato seemed to have chosen both courses of
linking logos and ergon in his life in Athens in the wake of Socrates’ trial and
4 Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
p. 54.
5 On Machiavelli’s intentions in writing The Prince, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of
Modern Political Thought – Vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1978), especially pp. 118-38.
6 See Plato, Republic, 592 a-b.
32 wallach
execution. Mostly, he stayed out of practical politics, writing dialogues while

establishing and leading the Academy. But he also tried (and failed) to educate
Dionysius II of Syracuse (in Syracuse) so as to make him a better, philosophi-
cally inclined, and law-abiding ruler (Seventh Letter, 332d-e, 334c-d).
Plato constructed imaginary republics in both The Republic [Politeia] and
The Laws [Nomoi]. In this respect, they fit Machiavelli’s bill. But Plato never
was a ruler nor sought to be one, and cannot be said to have perversely used
ruling power and authority based on these political paragdeigmata. None
theless, Machiavelli’s critique of an idealistic political perspective reasonably
regards Plato as an idealist (though Plato would have regarded himself as a
realist). The result launched an argument between political ‘idealists’ and ‘real-
ists’ that remains current. In it, the latter presumptively win the debate because
they grasp ‘reality’; consequences of political action; the future (!), and power
better than leaders or ordinary citizens indebted to Platonic political thought.
(Which is not to say that actual leaders adopt this perspective.7) In their con-
ception of power, kratos dominates dunamis. Political realists assert the right-
ness of their argument and the irrelevance of political ethics by claiming that
they accurately account for necessities of political life – features of political
action and practice that cannot be other than they are and hence are not sub-
ject to ethical deliberation.
Apart from the Machiavellian-realist critique of Plato and his conception of
power is a second set of Platonic critics that also charge that Plato has misun-
derstood political reality. These ‘political’ critics of Plato have a larger, more
diverse following – especially among contemporary political theorists who
champions their own view of the nature of politics, the political realm, or
political knowledge. Here’s a recount of the now familiar list: liberal positivists,
such as Karl Popper, identify Plato’s political thought as the ancestral ground
of (anti-political) totalitarianism; doctrinal elitists, such as Leo Strauss, view
7 Note the virtually universal condemnation by International Relations ‘realists’ of President

George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. See John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘An
Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy, 134 (2003), pp. 51-9, and their petition signed by thousands
of American academics. Of course, many theorists of International Relations have been
notoriously wrong about the ‘real power’ of the Soviet Union in the 1980s or autocratic Arab
states before the Arab Spring. One is reminded of the highly remunerated expertise of macro-
economists for their supposed grasp of reality, despite being regularly disproved by actual
economic activity. I should say here that I am not referring to the contextual realism perspec-
tive of Raymond Geuss, who uses the terms ‘real’ or ‘realistic’ mostly to encourage attention
to political action, practical displacement over time, and effective discourses of legitimation
over the intuitive doctrinalism of contemporary liberal (i.e., Rawlsian) political theory. Geuss
recognizes a constitutive but secondary role for ethics, belief, and motivation in politics. See
Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Plato as authoring ideas of Truth and Virtue that have authoritative, perennial
and political value over and against any constitutive significance to ‘power’;
ethical liberals, such as Isaiah Berlin and Gregory Vlastos, associate Plato’s
political ideas with authoritarianism, and modern-day advocates of reviving a
republican or democratic enactment of ‘the political’, namely Hannah Arendt
and Sheldon Wolin, read Plato as anti-political because he improperly views
political power through the frame of single-gauged ideas displayed as a techne
(craft, skill). Other notable critics (e.g., Foucault, Rorty, Connolly) regard Plato’s
efforts to identify notions of knowledge, virtue, or truth as ineluctably arguing
for Knowledge, Virtue, or Truth, which reveals how Plato has lost touch with
the complexity and ambiguity of political life.8 But I have argued that these
theorists, whose political perspectives can stand on their own, do not fully
appreciate how Plato insistently identifies the importance of linking logos and
ergon via judgment and distinguishes a political techne from other forms
of technai.9 These interpretive mistakes impede one’s grasp of the Platonic
conception of power. But I mostly do not take issue here with the ‘political’
critics of Plato – partly because each clearly positions their reading of Plato
within a Weltanschauung that does not depend on Plato (except for providing
arguments – or anti-arguments – from a towering intellectual figure) and
mostly because my aim is to give a Platonic conception of power its due –
taking particular note of how its ethical dimensions connect to justice, politi-
cally or personally. Instead, I shall focus on the realist critique of Plato’s
conception of political power.
8 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1 – The Spell of Plato (Princeton, 1964
[1945]; Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969); Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1964); Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1994); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958); Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), Ch. 2.
Foucault acutely comments on Plato’s political texts in The Government of Self and Others:
Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Yet he notably avoids analyzing them in terms of power. Haber-
mas offers a trenchant critique of Arendt’s political theory for not adequately accounting for
‘power’ in ‘Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power’, Social Research, 44.1 (1977),
pp. 3-24. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979); William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1995).
9 On the importance of the links and disjunctures between logos and ergon in Plato’s political
thought and the differences between the political art from other kinds of technai in Plato’s
dialogues, see John R. Wallach, The Platonic Political Art: A Study of Critical Reason and
Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).
34 wallach
II Apology of Socrates: Power as Collective Opinion
I begin with Plato’s Apology of Socrates, because its account of the trial and
death of Socrates in 399 provides a relatively genuine historical source
and practical anchor for Plato’s thinking about power that is at least partially
independent of Plato’s own experience. It exhibits the nature and limitations
of the ‘power’ (dunamis and kratos) of Socrates’ own logos and character, in the
face of the accumulated force of collective opinion and its effect on Athenian
laws and politicians. The conflict between the excellence or virtue (arete) of
Socrates and the Athenians’ practice of their demokratia – itself a combination
of the dunamis of the demos and its active exercise as kratos – created what has
been called ‘Plato’s Socratic Problem’.10 In the dialogue, however, that problem
is only intimated. We simply see Socrates coming up against both the brunt
of the power (dunamis and kratos) of collective institutions he distrusts (juries,
the Assembly) and a history of prejudice that he believes has domed him no
matter what he argues cogently in his apologia. Since Plato’s Socrates believes
that he ought to live, that he is innocent of all charges against him (the infor-
mal ones identifying him as a reckless sophist and speculative materialist cos-
mologist and the legal indictments lodged by Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon for
corrupting the young and impiety) and argues that he is a good Athenian –
despite which his accusers win the backing of the majority of the jurors (280-
221) to convict him as a law-breaker and punish him with death – we need to
understand the nature of both Socratic and anti-Socratic power expressed at
the trial, particularly the extent to which each is democratic. Doing so sets us
on the most revealing path for understanding the conception of power Plato
later promotes in his less historically anchored dialogues.
The principal manifestation of kratos in Plato’s Apology of Socrates results
from collective discourse – that is, not discourse, character, or force expressed
by individuals as discrete agents but collectivized as prejudice or imperson-
ated by influential politicians. Plato’s Socrates, if not the historical Socrates,
here takes issue with the potential of this discourse and its agents – i.e., the
demos, as an anonymous, personified, or institutionalized agent – to act arbi-
trarily if not tyrannically – qua demos tyrannos.11 The historical Socrates adds a
10 See John R. Wallach, ‘Plato’s Socratic Problem, and Ours’, History of Political Thought, 18
(1997), pp. 377-98, and The Platonic Political Art.
11 Democracy was lampooned in comedy as demos tyrannos. But since the democratization
of Athens after the constitutional reforms of Kleisthenes and their extension by Miltiades,
democracy was mostly hailed as the antidote to tyranny. Note the association of the birth
of democracy with the late sixth-century tyrannicides but also its subsequent problema-
philosophical coating to criticisms of Athenian democracy, even as he does not

regard it as beyond redemption, in five charges levied at it in Plato’s Apology of
Socrates.12 They are: first, the manner of speaking sanctioned in a trial – in
which the defendant is encouraged to appeal to hundreds of jurors by engag-
ing their emotions more than their reason (and may encounter roars of shock
or disapproval – thoruboi – as Socrates did a number of times at his trial); sec-
ond, the history of collective views about Socrates that prejudice the opinions
of the jurors (which catalyzed the informal charges against him); third, the
support behind Socrates’ accusers (who surely had previously garnered sup-
port for their indictment against Socrates); fourth, the presumption that politi-
cal institutions and associations produce arete (pace Meletus vs. Socrates’
elenchus about who improves the young), and fifth, the sacred character of the
honours Socrates lampoons (when he suggests that his punishment should be
free meals at the Pyrtaneum).13
Insofar as the opponents of Socrates acted during the Athenians’ democracy
and utilized its institutions to promote their aims, their actions reflected the
workings of Athenian democracy. But their actions and power (dunamis and
kratos) more specifically stem from their ability to legally empower the force of
unnecessarily ignorant collective opinion. Such discourse does not directly
manifest the practical reason or deliberated judgment of democratic citizens
as much as it does ephemeral conditions and sanctioned institutional, but
legally loose, power. (Socrates was indicted under the notoriously malleable
impiety decree.) In other words, the opposition to Socrates does not come
from the Athenians as individuals or from the demos per se but from the demos
aggregated and guided not by critical knowledge but by an orchestrated singu-
larity of opposition to Socrates’ way of being and speaking as a democratic citi-
zen of Athens – even though it was arguably a valid manifestation of what it
tization in Thucydides and Athenian tragedy and comedy. As Athens and its democracy
became wrapped up with its arche and war, its image became seriously tarnished. See
Kathryn Morgan, ed. Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Ancient Greece
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), particularly the essays by Raaflaub, Kallet,
Henderson, Morgan, and Ober. For a recent interpretation by a political theorist of
Aristophanes, see John Zumbrunnen, Aristophanic Comedy and the Challenge of
Democratic Citizenship (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013).
12 On the importance of identifying the historical Socrates, see Gregory Vlastos, ‘The
Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy’, Political Theory, 11 (1983), pp. 495-516 and
John R. Wallach, ‘Socratic Citizenship’, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), pp. 393-413.
13 For more recent illustrations of how demagogues whip up public opinion to act tyranni-
cally, see the Norwegian realist playwright Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama, An Enemy of the
People and the 2012 movie by the Norwegian filmmaker, Thomas Winterberg, The Hunt.
36 wallach
meant to be a citizen in the Athenian democracy. (See the speech of ‘the Laws’
in Plato’s Crito). For Socrates, the demos may be using its dunamis to enact
tyrannical kratos. But apart from expressing doubts about the inherent virtue
of majorities, Plato’s Socrates never makes this point explicitly, and such a
judgment is qualified by the democratic procedures followed by the (rela-
tively) democratic jury designed to guard against its judgment and power
(dunamis and kratos) from being tyrannical.14
Power suffused the social life of the Athenian polis and its democratic activ-
ities. Socrates’ complaint about political power was not so much about its
democratic character as its collective, political quality – which would surely
accompany public action in other political regimes. In the Apology of Socrates,
Socrates took issue with the Athenian politicians who presumptively claimed
virtue (arete) for themselves and its major political institutions. Socrates did
not believe this could be the case, and he spent his life searching for the mean-
ing of virtue and inquiring about it in one-on-one dialogues with anyone he
met in the Athenian agora – citizen or non-citizen (Apology, 30a). Insofar as a
class of citizens acted as rulers who led others without their deliberate partici-
pation, they formed a phalanx of power that prevented less powerful citizens
from expressing the ethical dimensions of their own political potential.
The ‘many’ lost their plurality and acted as ‘one’, potentially like a tyrant
(tyrannos) – whether as a class, principal agents of the city, or supporters of the
Athenian empire (arche).15 While this phenomenon occurs whenever a collec-
tivity deliberates and comes to a singular decision, the consolidation surely
results in epistemological and ethical compromises about what shall count as
authoritative political knowledge. The resulting political monolith warrants
critical discourse and challenges (parrhesia).16 But such a scenario does not
directly anticipate the dichotomies of the powerful vs. the powerless, private
vs. public, or the state vs. the citizenry, binary frameworks of the presence or
14 The burden of the Athenians’ arche as a tyrannos was famously articulated by Pericles
(II.63.2) and Cleon (III.37.2) Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. For Thucydides,
the tyrannos of the Athenian empire was a mordant observation that referred to Athens
as a polis and a democracy. See W. Robert Connor, ‘Tyrannis Polis’, in Ancient and Modern:
Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Else, eds. J. H. D’Arms and J. W. Eadie (Ann Arbor: Michigan
University Press, 1977), pp. 95-109. Early in the Fourth Century, the Athenians adopted
more procedures to forestall rash judgments by the Assembly without diluting its power.
15 For literary accounts of popular tyranny or the effects of a demos tyrannos, see the articles
by Kallet, Henderson, and Morgan in Kathryn Morgan, ed. Popular Tyranny.
16 On parrhesia in Plato, see Michel Foucault, The Government of the Self and Others and The
Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the College de France,
ed. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011).
absence of kinds of power in political life that became central in the work of
Machiavelli and from Hobbes forward.
The ethical relationship between agents of political power and their sub-
jects was less well-defined, even more subtle, in ancient Athenian democracy.
Two features of the discursive context in which Plato wrote make this clear.
First, when treating the demos as a collective in the late fifth and early fourth
century, literary criticism addressed problematics of politics in various politi-
cal orders as much as democracy per se: dramatists addressed tyrannical
actors; Plato and Aristotle found greater fault with oligarchies than with
democracies.17 Democracy and political life are inextricably combined in 5th
and 4th century Athenian practices, insofar as democracy is a kind of polity,
which makes it impossible to tag responsibility for the Athenians’s defeat in
the Peloponnesian War on its character as either a powerful polis or a reckless
demos (a practical conflation that surely influenced the anti-imperialist Plato).
‘Mistakes were made’, one might say in the vein of contemporary political rhet-
oric, because responsibility for them is difficult to pinpoint. Besides, they result
from culture and politics as much as democracy. These factors also might have
signified either the dark side of the otherwise beneficial possession of political
power, or human beings’ natural proclivity for greed.18 The answer is impossi-
ble to determine conclusively in scholarship. Critics of Plato, however, are
prone to conflate them thoughtlessly, reading his criticism of politics as a
derivative criticism of democracy or as a condemnation of politics per se.19
Secondly, asserting a clear gap between Platonic power and ethics ignores the
extent to which virtue (arete) was a practice as well as an ethic and Plato aimed
to enact virtue as a good in logos and ergon.
The power of ancient Greek virtue was distinctive and infused Plato’s dia-
logues. In conventional discourse, virtue (arete) was supposed to exhibit power
as dunamis, not kratos. Virtue signified effective goodness and, as exercised by
its possessor, was supposed to generate beneficial consequences, results, or
17 On Plato, see Wallach, The Platonic Political Art, chapters 4-5; on Aristotle, Politics, IV.11.
18 On the role of pleonexia in Greek literature and political theory, see Ryan K. Balot, Greed
and Injustice in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
19 For example, Josiah Ober funnels Plato’s criticism of politics and democracy through the
lens of an anti-democratic political disposition. In this, he follows the interpretations of
Plato offered by Popper and Vlastos. See his Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Six
Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For a hierarchical
view of the relationship between philosophical and political virtue, see Leo Strauss,
‘What Is Political Philosophy?’ in What Is Political Philosophy? and other studies (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1959). For a more differentiated view, see Wallach, The Platonic
Political Art.
38 wallach
outcomes. But that goodness was not guaranteed as one can count on the
result of a mathematical function. It could be thwarted; it may lack kratos
because his or her virtue failed them).20 This issue arises in the Apology, when
Socrates employs the horse-metaphor to challenge the foundations of the
charge against him of having actually corrupted the young. It reappears in
the Gorgias and the Republic when Socrates argues that those with arete actu-
ally have more power than tyrannical characters, who seem to be happier and
more practically successful because of their propensity to push others around
and commit injustice. The issues of the relation of a potential virtue in democ-
racy and the power of virtue are best illuminated by interpreting Plato’s con-
ception of power in the latter two dialogues.
III Gorgias and Republic I: Power in Rhetoric, Nature,

and Political Rule
The confrontation between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias and between
Socrates and Thrasymachus in Republic I present the classic sites for witness-
ing Plato’s attempt to justify a conception of power rooted in arete and duna-
mis rather than kratos. The rationales for doing so in each case relate to each
other and, insofar as they deal with power in the public realm, harken back to
Socrates’ confrontation with his accusers and the Athenian jury in the Apology.
The differences between the Gorgias and Republic I do not evince philosophi-
cal differences, although they assume unlike forms in response to related but
not identical issues. Callicles enters the dialogue after two previous, interlocu-
tors – the famous rhetorician, Gorgias, and one of his fans, Polus – have been
pummelled by Socrates’ elenchus into agreeing that the effective power caused
by their rhetorical conceptions and strategies is ‘actually’ an evanescent mirage –
essentially useless except as a tool of tomfoolery. Thrasymachus enters the
Republic after Socrates convinces Polemarchus (who continued a discussion
about happiness and justice initiated by Socrates and Polemarchus’s father,
Cephalus) that living an unjust life yields no benefits to its agent. In both dia-
logues, Socrates builds his claim about the power of arete by denying episte-
mological and ethical – and, hence, practical – authority to its conventional
definitions. In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that conventional definitions of
rhetoric as a skill (techne) actually lack authority; rhetoricians succeed only as
20 This phenomenon is known all too well to American citizens who watch their Congress,
intended by Founder James Madison to manifest public virtue but now mostly wagged by
their major financial contributors and the allure of personal-political kratos.
managers of ignorance – even amid their esteem in the politics of democratic

Athens (cf. Cleon and Socrates’ accusers).21 In the Republic, Socrates intellectu-
ally breaks the connection between justice and power as domination (law
as kratos) by disputing a claim that he tags on Thrasymachus – that justice as
power must exhibit features of a techne (and so serve its subject, antithetical to
Thrasymachus’ initial claim that justice is in the interest of the stronger).
Drawing on the shared features of arete and techne as practical, knowledge-
able, social, and aesthetically approved – but transcending them by expressing
socially valued standards of successful conduct for the individual as a whole –
enabled Plato’s Socrates to argue that a tyrant lacked virtue and, hence, was
powerless. Such claims by Plato’s Socrates in each dialogue rejected evidence
stemming from conventional observations of personal and political success.
Socrates denies that power (dunamis) reliably flows from the kind of domina-
tion which convicted Socrates, because it fails to exhibit or promote arete.
These pivotal moments in the dialogues are typically read as illustrating
Socrates’ or Plato’s ignorance about politics and the useless or dangerous polit-
ical features of their philosophies. They justify not only the scorn of Callicles
and Thrasymachus but also the early modern Machiavelli’s apparent disdain
for Plato and the mid-20th century anger of Berlin and Arendt about the egre-
gious effects of politically empowered philosophy, justifying the beliefs of all
three in philosophy’s marginally useful role in determining ethical and politi-
cal knowledge.22 In light of these Platonic arguments, what shall we say about
their criticisms? Is Plato turning his back on the world, resentfully creating a
path for vengeful philosophy to get back at unjust politics? Or, is something
else going on? Arendt grounds her critique of Plato by charging him with
exclusively using ordinary technai as a model or paradigm for his conception of
politics.23 Indeed, analogies from technai and the generic features of a techne
21 See Thucydides, III.37-40, etc. For a sympathetic view of Cleon, see M. I. Finley, ‘Athenian
Demagogues’, in his Democracy: Ancient and Modern, rev. ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1985), pp. 38-75. About the extent to which the dialogue encourages
democratic or anti-democratic perspectives, see Benjamin Barber and J. Peter Euben’s
articles in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, eds., Demokratia: A Conversation on
Democracies Ancient and Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
22 See Arendt, The Human Condition and ‘What is Authority?’; Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of
Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118-72;
‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, in Against the Current (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 25-79
and ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1990),
pp. 1-19.
23 See Arendt, The Human Condition and ‘What is Authority?’, from Between Past and Future:
Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968).
40 wallach
inform Socrates’ arguments in both the Gorgias and the Republic, but they are
not models. Plato’s Socrates renders the highest intellectual art, dialektike, as a
second-order art that supervises the use of ordinary technai. But is the use of
techne as a touchstone amid a wholly unstructured and unguided field of polit-
ical activity as reprehensible from a political or democratic point of view as
Arendt makes it out to be, especially given its acceptance as a constituent of
political deliberation by the Athenians’ democratic Ekklesia? Let us look more
carefully at how the concept of techne informs Plato’s conception of power.
First, the Gorgias. There, Socrates employs the techne analogy to undermine
logically the power and authority of conventional rhetoric and rhetoricians’
associated claims that they possess a distinctive kind of politically useful
knowledge.24 Gorgias claims that the techne of his rhetorike was marked by its
purely discursive, elevated character relative to other craft-arts (demiourgike
techne) and its power (dunamis) to command them in ways that benefitted
both rulers and the city as a whole in so far they exhibited knowledge about
justice and injustice. (450b-460a). He vouchsafed that his rhetoric even could
be more persuasive about medical matters than the knowledge and techne of a
doctor. The key to its success was that the source of judgment and approval of
rhetorical claims stems from that of a gathering, such as that which occurs in
the Assembly or a ‘crowd’ (ochlos). It is not, therefore, engaged in teaching-
persuasion but conviction-persuasion. (455a) This eventually leads Socrates
in his subsequent discussion with Polus (Gorgias’s subsequent defender in
the dialogue with Socrates) to tar rhetoric as nothing more than a knack
(empeiria) – not an art (techne) – success in the practice of which depends on
flattery and immediate gratification of the crowd’s desire for pleasure.
(461e-465a) Socrates argues that rhetoric has no sturdier guidepost than that
which satisfies the pleasures of the majority in a crowd, despite the fact that it
presumes to be able to manage and direct the way in which citizens seek
pleasure.25 Callicles, Polus’s successor, is horrified by this association, insofar
as he associates his own power with the ability to transcend the character,
knowledge, and experience of ordinary citizens (482c-486c). Moreover,
Socrates now drags the most revered Athenian politicians and statesmen –
Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Pericles – into the category of rhetori-
24 It is a more discursive and ethically neutral posture than that presented by the sophist
Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras, where Protagoras believed that his distinctive
techne provided a kind of politike techne and arete to citizens that would enable them to
become better and more powerful in both private and public affairs (318a-b, 318e-319a),
25 As he did with regard to sophistry in Protagoras (351e-357e).
cians who fecklessly lead the multitude into making political blunders.26 (455e,
503c, 516a-518e) Plato’s Socrates has employed a highly dubious standard of
political evaluation. If their leadership does not result in the political and edu-
cational improvement of citizens, then they must not be practitioners of their
art – a dubious claim that presupposes hospitable conditions for good listen-
ing and acting, and judges the possession of art (techne) and power (dunamis)
solely by the ‘success’ of its agents (which he rejected for judging his own dis-
course about virtue).
Plato, of course, is writing in the wake of the Athenians’ loss of the
Peloponnesian War as well as the trial and execution of Socrates. Perhaps more
revealingly, he also is not writing in a Christian, post-Machiavellian, capitalist
world which imagines the malleability of time and space by religion, politics,
science, or capitalist technologies. There is no temporal trajectory of redemp-
tion (pace Augustine); no calculus (of often dubious reliability) of conse-
quences in the face of internecine city-state conflict; neither fortuna nor the
interpretive screen of Christianity; no sense of knowledge as the power to
change nature (pace Bacon or genetic modification), digitize or monetize our
minds; no pressure to generate ever-larger quarterly profits; no power to digi-
tize or practice of the basic elements of political knowledge or leadership. In
turn, we also need to keep Plato’s different economic, ethical, and political
world in mind when interpreting his conception of a techne. It is unhinged to
‘technology’; rather, it is a sign of a reliable, knowledgeably informed practice –
nothing more presumptuous than that. To be sure, it is ‘anti-political’ in the
Arendtian sense – for Plato relies on it to produce a critical point of reference
for improving the conventional dynamic of politics as played out in public
institutions among politically active citizens, traditional educational stan-
dards, leaders who may lack minimal ethical or intellectual credentials, and
rhetoricians. It also is anti-political insofar as philosophy is superior to politics
as the best tool for overcoming civil strife (stasis) and attaining justice.27
This is the political and socio-cultural scene – the domain of logos-ergon –
with which Plato is engaging as a philosophical dialectician interested in justi-
fying a new kind of politics and philosophy that would complement one
another (See Republic 473c-e). It is much less a complaint about ‘democracy’
per se (whose meaning we have great difficult truly imagining today) than it is
26 Political leaders in Athens had no official, executive power that enabled them to exer
cise political power without the endorsement of the demos.
27 This is hardly surprising, if we accept the well-known passage from the Seventh Letter
(325e-326a) as evidence of Plato’s actual thoughts about his life and attitude toward the
relationship of philosophy and politics.
42 wallach
about the distance between contemporary politics – in e.g., the Athenians’

democracy, the Spartans’ oligarchy, or the Persians’ monarchy – and justice.
His project is to generate greater authority for philosophy as a practice that
could, when joined with political power (dunamis), alter politics so that it
would be marked more by virtue (arete) than ignorance and force (kratos). To
think that Plato believed that he could actually institutionalize kallipolis as if
on a blank canvas – a paradeigma for its perfect articulation (501a-c) – indi-
cates a post-Platonic view of philosophy as doctrinalism that is incompatible
with both Plato’s embrace of dialogue and his view of education in the Republic.
It also suggests a visceral aversion to the kind of radically unconventional
political thought that Plato invented.28
Pivotal to the course of the discussion from now on in the Gorgias and simi-
larly at a comparable turning point in Socrates’ discussion with Thrasymachus
in Republic I, are two arguments. One relies on a unique (and controversial)
definition of power (dunamis) in critical discourse (logos) and the linkage of
that definition to new renderings of political knowledge that may be exhibited
actually (in ergon) in an individual’s (or group’s) capacity to exercise power
and effect good – i.e., to be an agent of virtue (arete). As mentioned previously,
power as dunamis principally signified power in relation to ability rather than
brute force (kratos). But that didn’t mean that dunamis had no relation to the
capacity to get things done, accomplish matters of consequence, or make
things happen. Moreover, power as dunamis could indicate domination over a
resistant material or person. But for Socrates the measure of power as dunamis
was understood in terms of its ultimate purpose rather than immediate signs
of effective force – and that value was primarily derived from philosophical
argument rather than religious belief, sheer force, or teleology.29 Thus, a doctor
who failed to prescribe a cure that treated the illness, even if it temporarily
28 This view is hardly original and carries much scholarly support. See the views of George
Grote and his mentor, J. S. Mill. For a full monograph on Grote and Athenian political
thought, see Kyriakos N. Demetriou, George Grote on Plato and Athenian Democracy: A
Study in Classical Reception (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999) as well as a series of his
more recent studies, Studies on the Reception of Plato and Greek Political Thought in
Victorian Britain (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011). For a brief account of Grote
and Mill’s conceptualizations of Athenian democracy and Platonic thought, see Melissa
Lane, Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind (London:
Duckworth, 2001), pp. 23-8. For the first thorough account of the fertile mix of Victorian
and Greek thought, from a more ideological perspective, see F. M. Turner, The Greek
Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
29 Much of this argument is emphatically made by Schofield, Plato, pp. 66-70.
alleviated pain, was powerless as a doctor. In Book I of the Republic, that mis-
take would reflect him acting as something other than a doctor, since crafts-
men (demiourgoi) as such never make mistakes when they practice their craft
(techne). The same analysis applies to a navigator who didn’t bring his ship to
port, or a politician who didn’t improve the material and ethical condition of
the citizens who trusted his leadership. Just as a doctor as such knows the
techne that aids the health of his patients, a politician was supposed to exercise
a techne for the souls of citizens! (Gorgias, 465c) Although this consideration
appears presumptuous nowadays, when we don’t expect politicians to ensure
our happiness or well-being, we expect them (in public discourse) to minimize
unemployment and maximize access to appropriate and well-paid jobs; ensure
competent healthcare for all; guarantee effective public education, and pro-
vide for the common defence – which surely contribute to an individual’s
potential for happiness or well-being.
The line of argument pursued by Plato’s Socrates here elaborates his attempt
at the beginning of the Gorgias (447a) to transcend the dichotomous meta-
phor of battling deeds and words. If rhetoric as a political discourse is simply
war by other means (cf. Foucault), then it will be no better than war as a tool
for settling conflicts according to justice. Brute force carries the day in war but
does nothing in the aftermath to create a peaceable collective (or community –
koinonia) among the previously warring parties. Socrates’ argument with
Gorgias – and eventually Polus and Callicles – is that their practices of rhetoric
may subdue their opponents temporarily, via power as force (kratos), but will
not foster civility or promote the kind of mutual understanding that a political
order requires. Rhetoric’s only ‘skill’ (in Plato’s framework) entails the ability to
persuade members of a crowd to find ephemeral pleasure. As such, it is not a
techne and does not have power as dunamis. (459e-460a; cf. Republic, 477d).
Socrates tries to bring Gorgias along to his side by obtaining his agreement to
the view that rhetoric is supposed to be useful to others and that such utility
depends on an awareness of its effects, which have longer legs than immediate
pleasure. Gorgias initially indicates a lack of concern about its effects – e.g.,
whether the acquisition of the art of rhetoric promotes justice or injustice –
but affirms that he wants his art to be used for just purposes, even if there is no
guarantee that his students will do so. (457b) (Here, Socrates is the consequen-
tialist.) Plato’s Socrates rounds out his debate with Gorgias by noting in dia-
logue with Polus that rhetoric, to be a techne, must be reliably grounded in
knowledge about the purpose of the act and its just consequences. Power
(dunamis) is a good (agathon), and it is effective, in general or as a techne,
only if it does good, i.e., that for the sake of which it was intended. But this
44 wallach
presupposes a reality in which no practice is long sustained by badness – kakon

465a, 466a-468e). Socrates, thereby, has transformed the legitimacy of rhetoric
from a discursive tool of political schemers adept at demagoguery to a political
discourse whose power depends upon knowledge, and educable citizens. But
his presuppositions about the nature of reality sound goofy to Callicles and, in
the Republic, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus.
In the Gorgias, Plato’s Socrates has moved much too far and too fast for
Callicles’s taste in damning the power of rhetoric. After all, Socrates has not
named an agent who either could know the substantive discourse (or logos)
of goodness or enact it usefully as a constitutive element of political practice
(or ergon). This is a political question, insofar as rhetoric was ipso facto a politi-
cal discourse. (In the first part of the Fourth Century, when Plato wrote the
Gorgias, politicians were called hoi rhetores.30) Callicles believes he has an
answer to the problem of agency by affirming that rhetoric, indeed, is a tool,
and should generate justice, but only justice which conforms with nature, not
convention, and with the perceptions of the naturally superior few (e.g. The
Thirty, which acted tyrannically against the well-being of Socrates and the pre-
ponderance of Athenians) rather than with the inferior but numerous many
who typically dictate cultural and political conventions (nomoi) (488b-e).
Callicles, however, cannot say what counts as naturally superior or better, and
Socrates contends that Callicles’ standards of successful rhetoric actually stem
from the many whom he would dominate. The reader is left with two unseemly
alternatives for identifying a proper art of rhetoric or political art: (1) Callicles’s
practice of presumptively aristocratic demagoguery that satisfies the desires of
‘the best’, or (2) the conventional practices of Athenian democratic institu-
tions, personified either by politicians identified by Socrates as incompetent or
the demos (512e) which had been persuaded by rhetoricians and orators to
judge that Socrates’ logos and arete legitimated his capital punishment.31 In
the face of such accusations, Plato’s Socrates says that the ‘good’ produced by a
genuine techne of rhetoric and politics is potentially available to all citizens
(507e-508c). Plato ‘solves’ this problem of political agency, of identifying some
practical figure or phenomenon that exemplifies his definition, by having
Socrates counterfactually claim – the historical Socrates avoided the Assembly
30 See M. H. Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell,

1991).
31 ‘I won’t have anything to say . . . I shall be like a doctor on trial before a jury of children,
with a chef as a prosecutor’ (521e, trans. Tom Griffith). One might think of respectable
climatologists trying to make an argument before many Republicans in the Congress of
the United States.
and Courts – that he is the only one able to practice the political art (politike
techne), which replaces the art of rhetoric (521b).
Most interesting is the next political move Plato’s Socrates makes in both
the Gorgias and Republic I. He flips the discussion from a political to a personal
context, which enables him to address the question of agency in a personal as
well as philosophical way. So what if Socrates’ practice of the political art led to
his death? He will not be harmed, at least psychologically – which is most
important – for it is worse to do injustice than to suffer injustice. A claim that
Plato’s Socrates intimated in Plato’s Apology of Socrates receives philosophical
substantiation in these two dialogues. The character of agency and its relation
to justice is now relatively depoliticized, and rests solely on philosophical
foundations. The justification used by Socrates in both dialogues does not
depend on the exercise of political power. The criteria of Plato’s Socrates for
arete in the Gorgias trump the life promoted by the ‘naturally’ superior Callicles
and, in Republic I, silence Thrasymachus’s defence of the life of injustice as a
powerful vehicle for achieving happiness. Republic I ends much like the Gorgias
(before its closing myth). Just as Plato ironically or irreally has Socrates in the
Gorgias claim that he, exemplar of virtue, is the master of the political art, so
does Plato generate a Socrates in Republic I who seriously argues that no unjust,
insufficiently virtuous person can exercise power. For he would not know how
to have the trust and friendship necessary for cooperative action, a sine qua
non of political power.
If Plato is actually interested in generating a feasible conception for a justly
practiced art of rhetoric, the Gorgias only yields an empty set. The question
then becomes, what has Plato been doing in this dialogue? Is he simply decon-
structing conventional modes of political discourse that presume to exhibit
useful political knowledge and techniques? Is he offering another venue for
rejecting the demos as a political authority? Or is he demonstrating the
difficulties facing the construction of a reliable, knowledgeable, and just
mode of political discourse? Similar problems become evident in Republic I, in
which Thrasymachus’ exasperation with Socrates’ unwillingness or inability to
define justice per se lead him to barge into the discussion and affirm the con-
ventional but unsettling definition of justice as the effect of the interest of the
stronger – i.e., power as kratos. This not only turns on its head Socrates’ defini-
tion offered in the Gorgias that political power (politike dunamis) only can be
the effect of knowledge and virtue, i.e., justice; it motivates Glaucon and
Adeimantus to challenge Socrates in the Republic to define justice in a world of
potentially hospitable consequences for unjust action. Socrates has utilized
philosophical argument to refute his opponents, but that argument still has no
political complement; its practical dunamis awaits the rest of the Republic.
46 wallach
IV Republic II-X: Power in Justice
The discourse of the Republic, to recall, is not supposed to articulate a notion

of justice that has unhappy or harmful results. Plato conceptualizes justice
(dikaiosune) as a good in itself in order to secure the philosophical merit of
justice from dependence of justice on unjust, extant political institutions. He
does not deny that it also has beneficial consequences. So Socrates begins to
generate a conception of justice that relies on relatively ordinary ideas (what
societies need to exist; how they grow, etc.); a belief that justice as a virtue for
the soul (psyche) can be seen better in terms of the structure of a state (polis
and politeia); a sense that societies are not naturally self-regulating, and so
require some sort of expertise and virtue for political rule to make power just
(which Socrates ultimately identifies as a hyper-critical form of political phi-
losophy); citizens to care for each other despite the inevitable differences that
accompany higher or lower status in the polis, and receptive conditions for
belief in the virtue of philosophical intelligence. This is how he uses philoso-
phy to set the baselines for a more virtuous and well-informed exercise of
political power, the wherewithal for radical psychological and political educa-
tion (as noted by Rousseau in Emile) and new social structures. These mea-
sures, of course, are extremely problematic and invariably can be abused, but
it is not as if any society has managed to sustain a coherent, adequately ethical
identity without using them. Moreover, Plato obviously is aware of them, and
demonstrates that awareness in his discussion of political and personal forms
of injustice in Books VIII-IX of the Republic, as he narrates stories of four
forms of injustice – timocracy or timarchy; oligarchy; democracy, and tyranny –
that readily follow from the inability of philosophical guardians in a Platonic
aristocracy to mate at the ‘right’ time. Notably, he describes these forms of
injustice after he describes the shocking measures needed to establish a just
polis.
The most troublesome parts of the Republic for us do not concern his critical
construction of the need for philosophy and virtue as captains of power –
although that is where he most directly engages ordinary political conventions
and which traditionally attracts the most attention as ‘the third wave’. For us,
no raw nerves are struck; imagining Ivy League or Oxbridge philosophers exer-
cising authoritative political power is implausible on so many levels that it
bothers no one. Rather, they concern how the kallipolis that would be a model
for a just psyche could come into being. Since Plato does not endorse force as
an instrument of education but only believes that radically unconventional
political ideas can ground a good society, he constantly faces genuine conun-
drums – conundrums that have bedevilled subsequent radical political theo-
rists in the history of Western political thought (such as Machiavelli, Rousseau,

and Marx). How does one portray and justify radical political education that
would make possible a more just, sustainable, and democratic society – espe-
cially when the habits and prejudices of ordinary citizens (fortified by the
powers that be) resist them? Plato, Rousseau, and Marx recognized these
nearly insurmountable difficulties and envisioned improbable means to
address them – e.g., the Noble Lie, the omniscient (but human) Lawgiver, and
a politically knowledgeable and virtuous proletariat.32
In the Republic, the challenges of Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus
prevent Plato’s Socrates from worrying about the immediate practicality or
popularity of his arguments and paradeigmata. But he does worry about the
cultivation of virtue in kallipolis. So, to build a polis in logos, he: censors Homer
and recasts Greek religion; eliminates all institutional barriers to equality
between the sexes; opposes rulers’ primary attachments to their immediate
families; predisposes citizens not to harbour prejudices against their nearby
neighbours or neighbouring poleis so as to avoid civil discord (stasis), and seeks
to overcome antagonism to dialectical education and philosophy. Such phi-
losophy sets guidelines for a virtuous and well-informed exercise of political
power. It overcomes practical resistance to its authority that stems from power
as domination (kratos). In the Republic such philosophy can theoretically per-
suade a demos that initially is portrayed as susceptible to the wiles of sophistry
and antagonistic to philosophy (492b, 494a ) to welcome its political advice
and philosophical education (499d-500a). The demos can turn away from the
dark world of manipulated illusions to philosophical self-understanding
(518b-e) – though Plato’s Socrates believes that few are likely to do so.
For the past three decades, one has often heard hackles about ‘enlighten-
ment’ (or the Enlightenment) or praise for the virtues of otherness, difference,
and opposition – as if they automatically exhibited political virtue (thus sim-
ply inverting the modal objects of their criticism) or as if virtue was inherently
a political vice. Such criticisms surely have broadened our understanding of
cramped and self-serving renditions of both the meaning of humanity and
where potential for human virtue can be found. But they have not offered a
practical politics for an extant demos. For Plato, there is just and virtuous
power, which works, and unjust power, which doesn’t – at least in the medium to
long run. His belief that the latter doesn’t work stems not only from philosophy
32 One can imagine proposals today for political reform by a hypothetical Courageous
Democracy Party, but no candidate for Congress or the Presidency would receive 5% of
the vote for measures that would directly benefit 95% of the population. For examples
of a hypothetical platform for this hypothetical party, contact the author.
48 wallach
but also from historical experience. Yet he hasn’t experienced the rule of phi-
losophy or a genuine philosopher educated by the regimen delineated for him
or her in the Republic. After all, neither Socrates nor Plato himself meets the
latter’s standards. Yet Plato’s readers readily presume that they know what they
actually would consist of and how they would be actually practiced – viz.,
badly. More often than not, this sort of fear of philosophy has misplaced tar-
gets: ‘mob rule’, ‘tyranny of the majority’ (since no ‘mob’ or demotic majority
has ever ruled in a political order for a significant length of time), or a ruling
elite that more nearly resembles The Thirty than Plato’s philosopher-guardians.
Besides, even Athenian majorities were minorities, insofar as their constitution
excluded women and slaves. Today’s readers of Plato refrain from thinking
radically about politics. They regard a Platonically philosophical diet for politi-
cal rule with as much scepticism as Athenian politicians then or American
politicians now who enjoy the benefits of the status quo. Plato, too, was fearful
of elitist rule. But he was fearless when it came to using philosophy for diag-
nosing stasis and devising means for overcoming injustice.
There is, of course, the familiar canard that Plato was essentially anti-dem-
ocratic. But as much as any of his ‘realist’ critics, he thought principally about
the condition of just politics (unless one just reads Plato’s discourse as garden-
variety ideology). Moreover, there is no evidence that not thinking about jus-
tice as an aim of good politics (pace Machiavelli, et al.) enhances one’s practical
views of the general welfare. Plato’s literary portrayal of a descending cre-
scendo of unjust, ideal-typical political regimes – is usually used as evidence
for his antagonism to ‘democracy’, since democracy appears after timocracy
and oligarchy, only ‘ahead’ of tyranny.33 But Plato is not offering a philosophi-
cal judgment of that political form in the actual world – any more than he has
written a historical-ethical thesis about the rise and decline of timocracy, oli-
garchy or tyranny. Rather, Plato’s Socrates has described ‘forms’ of injustice,
removed from their historical contexts. No actual society that has flattered
itself by naming itself a ‘democracy’ has ever existed without cultural beliefs,
social conventions, reverence for the law, dedication to the value of politics,
and acceptance of some hierarchies of power that leaven and supplement the
open-ended practices and values associated with the democratic principles
of liberty and equality.34 That is because democracy is only partially a self-
legitimating political order. It is partially legitimated by the participation of the
citizenry in ruling themselves; that must be an unqualified good for any demo-
crat. But those democratic citizens need certain dispositions to make their
33 See, for example, Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‘Democracy, Equality, and Eide: A Radical View
of Book 8 of Plato’s Republic’, American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), pp. 273-83.
34 See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
practices just. Insofar as Plato’s Socrates finds fault with ‘democracy’ in Book
VIII of the Republic, its troubles stem from the inability of its ‘natural’ values of
liberty and equality to sufficiently generate political or personal virtue.
We have returned to the problem Socrates faced in addressing his accusers.
He loved addressing anyone he met about the meaning of virtue, his accusers not
withstanding. Similarly, problems arose in addressing the question of how
whatever presumptive virtue they claimed to possess could be transformed
into powerful political practice, when issues of strategy had to be confronted
and compromises accepted.35 Plato’s democracy in Book VIII was not the
imagined democracy of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Thucydides’ History, where
those who did not participate in politics were ‘useless’ (achreion, II.40.2). In the
typified democracy of Book VIII of the Republic, interest in politics was occa-
sional, not widespread (557e-558a; 561c-d) – just the opposite of the descrip-
tion of the Athenian democracy’s political habits offered in Thucydides’ (also
typified) account of Pericles’ Funeral Oration or Plato’s generically Protagorean
account of the commonly shared, virtuous sense of justice and reverence (aidō
te kai dike) shared among ordinary Athenian citizens (Protagoras, 322d-323a).
Plato’s unjust democracy had power (dunamis and kratos) by having over-
thrown oligarchy – the political form that assured the institutionalization of
stasis by dividing the polis into rich and poor – but it did not naturally know
how to practice its power virtuously. Its citizens are so enamoured by equal
freedom that they disregard law, seeding soil for tyranny to take root (563d).
Virtue or excellence is supposed to guide the political practice of citizens
and leaders as they forge their future, yet democracy’s core principles of liberty
and equality per se are insufficient agents of political virtue.36 Ultimately for
Plato, the problem is formulating the means for practically exercising political
power in any form. Such power is inherently necessary and inherently prone to
corruption at a collective and individual level. ‘Tyranny’ follows upon ‘democ-
racy’ in Socrates’s story of unjust political forms in Book VIII as a condensed
result of the injustice that marked the degenerations from aristocracy to timoc-
racy, namely not adhering to philosophically sanctioned virtue. (547a) Plato
does not flee from political realism or loathe the demos; he simply but radically
seeks the sufficient conditions of political virtue.
35 Alasdair MacIntyre dubbed a version of this problem in a sceptical, if not entirely accu-
rate, vein when he said that Marxists who gain power become Weberians. See Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 243.
36 We associate political virtue with liberty and equality only because of underlying reli-
gious beliefs or preference for procedural guarantees of the practices of political liberty
and equality over and against any predetermined substantive conception of political vir-
tue – dubious as we are about how that would be practically defined.
50 wallach
The above account of Plato’s view of political power differentiates his belief
in the potential of the ordinary citizen and his despair at what results when
they act collectively. One might think he resembles modern-day liberal indi-
vidualist. But that hardly is the case. For Plato (like every other ancient Greek)
does not value individuals per se apart from the contingent combination of
their natures and the habits they socially develop, and certainly does not sanc-
tion any set of those as ‘rights’. He also offers a most fragile account of indi-
vidual integrity, declaring that it only exists when the three components of
one’s soul (psyche) manifest the right relationships among one another.
(586e-589c) In turn, Plato does not believe that ‘power corrupts’, a mantra of
anti-governmental liberals, because power as dunamis constitutes social life.
In Plato’s dialogues, power as dunamis nonetheless cannot be understood
without accounting for its use, and it is the improper use of power (broadly
understood as kratos) that fosters corruption. This allows Plato to modulate his
conception of the political art (politike) and laws (nomoi) in the post-Republic
political dialogues (Statesman [Politikos] and Laws [Nomoi)] that deal with
non-ideal conditions under the aegis of his theory of justice adumbrated in the
Republic’s unlikely but possible kallipolis.
I mention the later dialogues only in relation to Plato’s conception of power.
The Laws depends on an array of assumptions about ancient Greek political
life that need not concern us; it is the Statesman’s discussion of how to achieve
justice via politike that harbours the most material for understanding Plato’s
conception of power. It regards force as an intrinsic part of political power. The
connection between power and force stems from Plato’s Eleatic Stranger’s
account of human nature as incorrigible, making conflict inevitable, so that a
statesman must use force to achieve justice.37 But here, as in the Republic, the
decision about when one no longer can rely on philosophical persuasion to
achieve justice but must use force (in the Statesman, bia or ischus) is left to the
judgment of the statesman trying to find the right connection between his
conception of justice and the necessarily limited possibilities for its actualiza-
tion (304d).38 This is a matter of judgment – just as the reader of the Republic
37 See Melissa Lane, Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), and C. J. Rowe’s Plato: Statesman, with trans. & comm. by
C. J. Rowe (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1995).
38 Whether or not Plato regards such use of force as ‘tragic’ or simply ‘necessary’ is a matter
of interpretive contention. The majority of scholars take the latter view. The former view
is notably put forth by J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990). For a Platonic view of ‘good’ rhetoric that will be rightly persua-
sive, see Plato, Phaedrus, 277b-c.
must judge how to interpret the ideal coincidence of philosophy and political
power for his psyche and in his life (592a-b). But Plato does not theorize the
activity of judgment, not because he disregards its significance but because
judging the link between logos and ergon in any particular instance transcends
the limits of what he can or wants to provide in a text (cf. Phaedrus, 274b-277a).
V Is Platonic Power a Political Virtue?
For secular-oriented (as well as religiously inspired), pivotal authors in the his-
tory of Western political thought – e.g., Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Weber, and Rawls – Plato offered no basis for a worthy
political party, program, or outlook. Nor has Plato’s political thought lent itself
to programmatic politics (unless one follows the outrageous interpretations of
Popper & Co.). His texts offer no political recipes and require interpretation
and judgment on the part of his reader – even though this doesn’t reduce the
meaning of his texts to the judgments of readers. But the dominant tradition of
history of Western philosophy and political thought from Aristotle to the end
of the twentieth century (despite a smaller tradition of sceptical readers) has
mistakenly categorized Plato as a metaphysician who dictates political prac-
tice from a philosophical plane and instrumentalized his view of power.
The Platonic conception of power, nonetheless, is inadequate. Its dimen-
sions are not sufficiently detailed to provide much direction for shaping indi-
viduals and societies (although considerably more detailed in relation to a
conception of justice than anything the historical Socrates ever provided). In
addition, the detail it has only appears in an improbable, ideal world with
agents whose immunity to vice is fragile at best and presupposes the necessity
of a hierarchical, tripartite order within the state and soul. It is easy to under-
stand, therefore, that readers of Plato in the relatively depoliticized eras that
followed Plato’s found Plato’s work politically wrong and irrelevant or most
open to elaboration in philosophically or religiously doctrinal directions. I
think Plato would have been disappointed but not surprised; he recognized
that his ideas were unlikely to gain power unless a group of friends could be
found to promote political change – an improbability (Seventh Letter, 325c-d.).
What, then, about the meaning of Platonic power now? What kind of political
power did he think his ideas possessed?
Plato forged his conception of power in a society where the conventional
defects of political power were most graphically demonstrated in a democratic
constitution (politeia) of a small-scale, pre-capitalist, polytheistic, male-
dominated, slave-sustained, society. Nowadays, democracy in its radical sense
52 wallach
is nowhere continuously effective. At best, the power of the demos appears

episodically as a force that challenges conventional structures from outside
them.39 In ‘liberal’ or ‘deliberative’ democracy, inequalities of civil society that
jeopardize political liberty and equality are given marginal consideration.
What are called liberal democracies seek to severely limit the supposedly cor-
rosive effects of collective and demotic action that worried Plato – but in so
doing, empower elites.
In the twenty-first century, if ‘democracy’ can perform a critical function on
behalf of justice, its ‘power’ will need to be understood differently than it was
by Plato. A different world faces us, one marked by massive institutional struc-
tures that minimize and deflect the political agency of citizens. But that does
not make Plato’s conception inherently unrealistic or anti-political, and think-
ing that it has these features artificially limits our political and democratic
horizons – by either restricting our sense of what is potentially political or
foreclosing our sense of make might generate justice of and by all. (See
Appendix.) Because of having marginalized Plato for political critique and
understanding, critics of Plato and political power fail to appreciate fully the
realism of his political radicalism, what he reveals about political possibilities
beyond political conventions. The difficulty for us in reading Plato today is to
read beyond (not between) the lines, to appreciate the radical and unconven-
tional character of Plato’s thinking about power and justice, to adapt Plato’s
thought to the present – not entirely unlike the activity in which readers of the
history of political thought always must engage. For Plato was preoccupied
with the epistemological, ethical, and political deficiencies of collective
thought and action. For him, political thought too often amounted to a kind of
group-think; political action was too often thoughtless. The situation vitiated
the paradigmatic and dynamic relationship between logos and ergon eulogized
by Pericles (in Thucydides’ account of his Funeral Oration, II. 40. 2). His posi-
tion as a radical anti-conventionalist meant that his conception of power was
reconstructed out of the present but positioned beyond it. Given the promi-
nence of democracy in the Athenian society in which he lived (for which he
39 See Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and
Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996) and Democracy Incorporated: Managerial Democracy in the Age of Inverted
Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a more heated, shorter,
but comparable argument, see John R. Wallach, ‘No One is a Democrat Now’, Theory and
Event, 13 (2011). The consternations of those who feel disenfranchised by electoral pro-
cesses have appeared recently and notably in the various Occupy movements, the opposi-
tion in southern Europe to EU austerity measures, and the major demonstrations against
elite power and corruption in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Ukraine.
also fought and in which he established the Academy) it is unlikely that he

thought he could appreciate the value of politics as decision-making by the
demos, whether as a group of individuals or a collectivity, without also endors-
ing other unjust features of its constitution. But this makes it anachronistic to
view his political thought as essentially anti-democratic, anti-political, unreal-
istic or impractical. After all, he did not face the behemoth of the modern state
or the goliath of global capitalism; he was not in a position to see democracy as
a counter-conventional kind of power that could move political thought and
action in more just directions. If Plato were revived, he could well regard the
promotion of democracy as the best counter to the unjust power of tyrannical
elites, one which could foster the best practical conditions for the widespread
achievement and expression of political virtue.
To some extent, Plato recognized this. Among the unjust regimes typified in
Republic VIII, democracy is the most hospitable to political philosophy and
most free from the institutionalized power of injustice authorized by the cor-
rupted virtue of other regimes. (557b-d, and previous sections of Bk. VIII). In
the Statesman, democracy is the best of regimes for non-ideal circumstances
in which laws do not accord with justice (303a). But Plato’s chief preoccupa-
tion was not to bolster the image of democracy but that of critical philosophy
as a precondition of just political leadership, to reconstruct the educational
roots for knowledge and virtue of the political art, an art that from his experi-
ence was probably accessible to only a few but was conceivably accessible to
anyone – similar to the premise of Socrates’ vocation but now spelled out in
philosophically, ethically, and politically dialectical writing. Those who reject
Plato out of hand today as an authoritarian philosopher, whether liberals or
self-styled radicals seem to deny their own efforts to establish intellectual
prominence for their own work or its political effects were it to gain traction as
a discourse of persuasion and power. ‘Difference’ and ‘agonism’ usefully dis-
turb the complacency and discrimination of the ruling classes, but they pre-
suppose rather than justify conditions for the appreciation of what counts as
difference and how agonism can be constructive; that is, how to ameliorate
conflict on behalf of justice, how to persuade those who, as members of a
demos, have not found reason to contest the rewards that have gone to the Wall
Streeters that have made others suffer because of their actions that brought us
the Great Recession of 2008 and its dismal aftermath for most.
The critical issue for understanding the significance of Plato’s view of the
use of political power in either his critical and aporetic voices or the more con-
structive voices expressed in the Republic, Statesman, or Laws, is whether or
not one reads his textual statements as deeds that command the reader to
act – which amount to denying Plato’s emphasis on the superiority of speech
54 wallach
to writing, of dialogue and dialectic, of active interpretation over doctrinal

obedience.40 By contrast, if one reads his dialogues as exemplary philosophical
explorations of how logos and ergon correlate in philosophy and politics, par-
ticularly insofar as they would express and promote virtue (arete), Plato’s polit-
ical aims of fostering knowledge and virtue in the conduct of political life can
reclaim their intellectually invigorating and politically radical character. That
is, if one reads Plato dialectically, then his perspective on political power and its
relationship to justice still warrants our attention, despite the far different cul-
tural and practical contexts that inevitably shape our appreciation of what he
has to offer.
To be sure, if one sees unconventional, radically critical aims (or human
nature) as inherently corrupt, rather than just corruptible, then Plato’s politi-
cal thought poses serious political dangers. For in that case, most obstacles to
political betterment are insuperable, and efforts to overcome them ought to be
minimized because of ‘the limits of politics’ (pace Strauss). Yet Plato’s radical,
political criticism does not accept this view, a view that effectively endorses
traditional inequalities. As such, it does not deny the power and force of real-
ity; it rather recognizes how one’s own priorities and political contributions
constitute the realities of the discourse of justice that legitimates every politi-
cal order. Moreover, even ‘realists’ have to justify their recommendations as not
only accurate but also beneficial; they just take more of what is given as an
acceptable point of intellectual and political departure for understanding the
political good. Platonic power affirms that one always has the responsibility of
deciding how to accommodate the differences and conflicts that beset our
lives in a non-doctrinaire fashion, critically evaluating the inherently authori-
tarian and arguably unjust character of so much of social life beyond the politi-
cal system – including early child-raising, gender roles, inequalities of rank and
status, of various types, not to mention economic activity – because of their
political elements.
If we accept, as we should, current scholarship on Plato’s Academy as a
highly unauthoritarian institution that he created and nurtured for most of his
adult life; if we also regard the claims in the Seventh Letter (whether or not they
came from Plato’s hand) that affirm his dedication to the rule of law in extant
political orders and antipathy toward tyrannical political behavior as accurate,
40 See Phaedrus, 274b-277a, 277e-278b. For an interpretive inversion of this claim, see Jacques
Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981 [1968]), pp. 61-171. For identification of this debate as a long-stand-
ing one in the history of philosophy, see Myles Burnyeat, ‘Master-Mind Lecture: Plato’ (13
April 2000), Proceedings of the British Academy, 111 (2001), pp. 1-22.
and if view the Sophists and Athenian democracy known to Plato as lacking
the best method for acquiring political knowledge (let alone actually having it)
or exhibiting all the practices that offered the best guarantees for achieving
political virtue, joining power and justice, then the Platonic conception of
power as dunamis that may be allied to kratos and arete by an educated demos
may be a fine place to start thinking theoretically and realistically about how
to promote justice today as a kind of political and ethical power.41
Appendix
Here are three examples: one from the American liberal democratic political
theory of Michael Walzer; one from the French political and democratic theory
of Jacques Ranciere, who reads the history of Western political philosophy as
anti-political, and one from an Anglo-American anarchist, David Graeber, who
accepts a definition of anarchy as democracy without government.42 Walzer’s
critique stems from his view that radical (i.e., Platonic) philosophical criticism
invariably eviscerates democracy for two reasons. First, it operates as
unchecked power that ethically disdains the demos, and, secondly, it is ‘exter-
nal’ rather than ‘internal’ criticism and has merely ethereal connections to the
intuitions and beliefs of the citizens whose lives it would improve. Walzer
would rather live, work, and criticize ‘in the cave’. But this rhetorical flourish
depends on Walzer’s belief in the sufficient foundation of liberal principles of
liberty, equality, and moral pluralism (in political isolation from each other),
supplemented by the intuitions of citizens along with internal criticism
focused mostly on discursive and political leaders who do not respect these
41 This view is substantiated in the most respected, relatively recent account of Plato’s
Academy. See John P. Lynch, Aristotle’s School (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1974) as well as Christopher J. Rowe’s interpretation of Plato as a philosophical writer,
Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
42 For illustrations of these perspectives, see: Michael Walzer, ‘Philosophy and Democracy’,
Political Theory, 9. 3 (1981), pp. 379-99 and ‘Liberalism and the Art of Separation’, Political
Theory, 12.3 (1984), pp. 315-30, along with Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jacques Ranciere, trans. J. Rose, Disagreement
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [1995]) and Dissensus: on Politics and
Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), and David Graeber (an intel-
lectual hero of the Occupy movement): Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and
Desire (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007); Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House,
2012); The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (New York: Spiegel & Grau,
2013).
56 wallach
principles. But Walzer ignores Plato’s deep involvement with the practices and
beliefs in Athenian society, and he reads his philosophical discourse as founda-
tional rather than critical. Moreover, in tying his political theory to intuitions,
Walzer’s criticisms flow along the surface of democratic politics; they do not
have the wherewithal (as Platonic critical evaluation of power does) to take
issue with the structures of power and ethics that predispose the intuitions of
conventionally positioned contemporary democratic citizens to accept struc-
tures of injustice and vote (or not) against their practical interests. It accepts
the conservative aspect of democracy, which relies on the judgment of actual
citizens, and delimits the radical potential of democracy, in which the demos
has dunamis and aspires to virtue.
Ranciere has no particular allegiance to the intuitions of citizens but rather
to the primacy of his interpretive conception of ‘politics’. This is not an
Arendtian conception of politics that demarcates it from other from other
kinds of human activity (especially technai) and eulogizes its capacity to link
words and deeds.43 Instead, Ranciere eulogizes ‘politics’ insofar as it maintains
distance from conventional political practice and condemns the ‘archipolitics’
of Plato (and its variants in the history of political philosophy) – which, he
claims, gravitate towards ‘policing’.44 But apart from the limits of his argument
by stipulation, Ranciere offers one-dimensional readings of Plato, in which the
status accorded to philosopher-guardians is simply anti-democratic, mostly
designed to supplant the kratos of the demos.45 He ignores the question of the
good or virtue in politics – that is, what makes some politics usefully demo-
cratic or ghastly (when it promotes ‘policing’) – as well as the difference
between dunamis and kratos in relation to the power of the demos. Ranciere’s
problems with interpreting Plato stem from two flaws: the familiar one of col-
lapsing Plato’s critical epistemology, ethics, and politics into a critique of the
demos, and the failure to recognize that Plato’s conception of justice responded
to Thrasymachean political realism by viewing it in relation to human tenden-
cies toward arrogance and hubris, not merely the problem of disagreement.
(Republic 373a-374e) After all, Platonic justice does not deny the inevitability of
disagreement; it engages it to understand how to foster its contribution to
human and political well-being.
43 See Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Ranciere (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), pp. 40-48.
44 See Ranciere, Disagreement, pp. 61-72. This is how Ranciere both distances (by highlight-
ing ‘politics’) and connects (by emphasizing ‘policing’) his work to Foucault’s work.
45 See Ranciere, Dissensus, pp. 49-50; Chambers, The Lessons of Ranciere, pp. 115, 135, etc.
Graeber’s anarcho-democratic project has struck a deep chord among the

politically disenfranchised across the globe, whom Hannah Arendt saw in
the United States of 1970 as forced to practice ‘civil disobedience’ in order to be
political because of their systematic exclusion from the tables at which basic
decisions about social power were being made. Graeber theoretically and prac-
tically shuns arche, which he understands as institutionalized leadership or
authority as well as the beginning of a course of political action. As such,
Graeber not surprisingly does not like Plato, referring to his thought as ‘totali-
tarian musings’, adopting the Popperian view and ignoring Plato’s recasting of
political power via a critique of convention.46 But Graeber is too quick to find
fault in Plato’s focus on the conditions of philosophical knowledge and politi-
cal leadership, the constituents of virtuous arche. To recall, Plato personally
endorsed no actual political process in Athens by which a few ideas or indi-
viduals would be systematically elevated above the demos (even though Plato’s
views associated the actual power of the Athenian demos, rightly and wrongly,
with the Athenians’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the legal condemna-
tion and execution of Socrates). Plato believed that there should be no coerced,
non-consensual, institutional elevation of the few over the many – even as he
sought to elevate dialogical, philosophical knowledge as the pivot of political
leadership in a just society. To be sure, if one believes that ‘democracy’ needs
no more to be said for it than (in Graeber’s words) ‘ordinary people collectively
managing their own affairs’, then Plato and Rousseau are useless. Plato is,
because of his preoccupation with the art of politics as an art of virtue and his
belief in the natural character of arche, including the arche of democracy
under non-ideal conditions (which he had the Athenian Stranger in Laws say
was favoured by the gods and blessed by fortune when exercised by the casting
of lots).47 Rousseau is, because, despite his endorsement of an ideal social con-
tract society under the aegis of popular sovereignty, he believed that if democ-
racy involves both the authorization of political power and its management it
is suitable for ‘gods, not men’.48 While both theorists are criticized for writing
theories that overly depend on consensus, one might say the same about the
Occupy movement, the difference being that Plato and Rousseau generated
their political theories as engaged, thoughtful responses to what both believed
to be the inevitability of civil strife (stasis). But while the Occupy movements
46 Graeber, Possibilities, p. 365.

47 Plato, Laws, III. 689e-690d. The Athenian Stranger subsequently stated that injustice was
most likely to stem from the actions of kings than from the demos (690e), a sentiment
presaged by arguments in Republic, VIII.
48 Rousseau, The Social Contract, III.4.
58 wallach
have been hopeful signs of democratic protest over the last three years and have
been central in drawing public attention to economic inequalities supported
by political systems, one of the obstacles to the enlargement of these move-
ments has been their difficulty in determining criteria of authority and
leadership.

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polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek

Political Thought 31 (2014) 28-58

Platonic Power and Political Realism

Despite often being condemned for having a paradigmatically unrealistic or dangerous

Plato – power – realism – political – democracy – theory & history

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/20512996-12340002

inhumanely arrogant in the way he believes that philosophy can usefully

historically conditioned. Finally, we assume critical responsibility in identify-

I ‘Modern’ Critiques of Platonic Power

Machiavelli probably had in mind contemporary Christian authors who drew

execution. Mostly, he stayed out of practical politics, writing dialogues while

7 Note the virtually universal condemnation by International Relations ‘realists’ of President

II Apology of Socrates: Power as Collective Opinion

philosophical coating to criticisms of Athenian democracy, even as he does not

III Gorgias and Republic I: Power in Rhetoric, Nature,

managers of ignorance – even amid their esteem in the politics of democratic

about the distance between contemporary politics – in e.g., the Athenians’

presupposes a reality in which no practice is long sustained by badness – kakon

30 See M. H. Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell,

IV Republic II-X: Power in Justice

The discourse of the Republic, to recall, is not supposed to articulate a notion

rists in the history of Western political thought (such as Machiavelli, Rousseau,

V Is Platonic Power a Political Virtue?

is nowhere continuously effective. At best, the power of the demos appears

also fought and in which he established the Academy) it is unlikely that he

to writing, of dialogue and dialectic, of active interpretation over doctrinal

Graeber’s anarcho-democratic project has struck a deep chord among the

46 Graeber, Possibilities, p. 365.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/20512996-12340002