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The Key Texts of Political Philosophy
This book introduces readers to analytical interpretations of seminal writings
and thinkers in the history of political thought, including Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, the Bible, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, and Nietzsche. Chronologically
arranged, each chapter in the book is devoted to the work of a single thinker.
The selected texts together engage with two thousand years of debate on
fundamental questions, which include: What is the purpose of political life?
What is the good life, for us as individuals and for us as a political commu
nity? What is justice? What is a right? Do human beings have rights? What
kinds of human virtues are there and which regimes best promote them?
The difficulty of accessing the texts included in this v~lume is the result not
only of their subtlety but also of the dramatic change in everyday life. The
authors shed light on the texts' vocabulary and complexities of thought and
help students understand and weigh the various interpretations of each phi
losopher's thought.
• Contains accessible interpretive essays on the greatest texts in the
history of political thought, from Plato to Nietzsche.
• Includes key passages plus a succinct discussion that glosses the text,
examines later-day interpretations, and guides students in forming
their own interpretations.
• Allows students to learn from, rather than only about, each thinker,
and to apply their thought to the present day.
Thomas L. Pangle holds the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies in
the Department of Government and is codirector of the Thomas Jefferson
Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at
Austin.
Timothy W. Burns is Professor of Government at Baylor University.

The Key Texts of
Political Philosophy
An Introduction
THOMAS L. PANGLE
University of Texas at Austin
TIMOTHY W. BURNS
Baylor University CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
[)o-o.'2 p1,3

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
,,2
AvenueoftheAmericas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
Cambridge University Press is pan of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University's mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ 9780521185004
©
Thomas L. Pangle and Timothy W. Burns 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is availabl,e Jrvm the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Pangle, Thomas L.
The key texts of political philosophy: an introduction/ Thomas L. Pangle,
Universitv
of Texas at Austin,
Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University.
pages cm
Includes index.
IS!lN
978-1-107-00607-2
(hardback) -
JSllN
978-0-521-18500-4
1.
Political
science-Philosophy.
I. Burns, Timothy, 1958- II. Title.
JA71.P3383 2014
320.01-dc23 2014015719
ISBN 978-1-107-00607-2 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-18500-4 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy ofURI,S
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Heather and
Sophia, Daniel
and David

Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction
PART I CLASSICAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
I.
Plato's
Apol,ogy of Socrates
The Challenge to Our Way of Thinking
The Peculiar opening of Socrates' Defense
The "First Accusers"
The Delphic Oracle Story
The Cross-Examination of Meletus
The Pu:z.zling Longest Section
Begi,nning to Piece Out the Pu:z.zle
~-
Plato's
Republic,
Book One
The Refutation of Cephalus
The First Refutation of Polemarchus
The Second Refutation of Polemarchus
The Third Refutation of Polemarchus
The opening Drama of Thrasymachus
The First Refutation of Thrasymachus
The Second Refutation of Thrasymachus
The Just Life Is Superior to the Unjust
3·
Aristotle's
Politics
The Human Is
uy
Nature a Political Animal
Moral Virtue and Political Rule
The Contest over the "Political Regi,me"
The Standard for Judgi,ng the Contest among Regi,mes
vii
page
xiii
1
13
14
15
16
18
25
28
32
36
38
43
47
49
52
54
56
63
67
68
73
76
81

viii
Contents
Democracy vs. Oligarchy
89
The Case for Democracy
92
Kingship vs. the Rule of Law
96
Practical Advice to Lawgivers and Statesmen
105
Trans-Civic Leisure
112
PART II
BIBLICAL
POLITICAL THEOLOGY
4·
The Bible
117
Creation
118
The Second Account of Creation and the Fall
119
Cain, Abel, and the Founding of Cities
121
Abraham and the Binding of Isaac
124
Jacob/Israel, Joseph, Egypt
126
Moses and the Divine Law
128
The Chosen People
129
The Pre-ivlosaic
Biblical Forms
of Human Authority
130
Liberation from
Human
Despotism to Divine Law
131
Fromjosh1w lo
David
135
From the Old lo
the New
Testament
142
5·
St. Thomas
Aquinas's Treatise on Law
153
The Broad Historical Context
153
The Distinctive Character of Thomas
'.s
Writings
155
Natural Law
156
How Is Natural Law Known?
157
The Contrast
between Thomas
and Aristotlc
159
The Framework
of Law
160
Natural Law
in Detail
162
Natural Laws
as Categorical
Imperatives
166
Divine Law as
Transcendence
of Natural Law
168
PART III MODERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
6.
Machiavelli's
Discourses
and
Prince
1
73
Machiavelli's Puzzling Initial Self-Presentation
1
73
The Organization and Opening of the
Discourses
1
75
The New Conception
of the
Common Good
1
77
The Emerging
Critique of the
Roman Republic
1
79
Machiavelli the
Philosopher
190
Explaining the
Worldly Power
of Christianity
195
The Prince:
The Other Face of Machiavelli
199

Contents
Ascending Stages in the Teaching of
The Prince
The Deepest Meaning of "the New Prince"
Religion's Effect on Modern Military Power
The New Meaning of the Traditional Virtues
Humanity s Power over Its Fate
7.
Bacon's
New Atlantis
Bacons Machiavellian Scientific Method
The Critique of Aristotl,e
The Narrators opening
A New Christian Revelation
Founding the New Order
The Truth about Sawmon s House
The New Moral Ethos
The New Religious Tol,eration and Pluralism
8. Hobbes's
Leviathan
The Broad Historical Context
The Attack on Aristotl,e and Aquinas
The New Foundation in the Passions
The Centrality of Power
opposing the Bihlical Conception
The State of Nature
The Natural Basis of Justice
Specifying the New Moral "Laws of Nature"
The Social Compact
Organizing and Administering Government
"Inalienabl,e" Individual Rights
Sovereifs'l,ty
by
Acquisition
9. Locke's
Second Treatise of Government
Locke's Rhetorical Genius
The State of Nature Property The Family
The Civic Spirit of a Lockean Commonwealth
Constitutionalism
10.
Montesquieu's
spirit of the Laws
The Norms of Nature
Despotism
Monarchy and Republicanism •
IX
202
206
215
216
218
223
223
224
228
230
232
236
240 2
43
246
246
247
250
255
258
2
59
262
265
269
272
273
2
74
276
277
280
288
298
300
301
3°7
308
3
1
3
3
1
4

X
Contents
The Philosopher's
Critical
Perspective
The Superiority of Modems to Ancients
The Apotheosis of the English Constitution
The Allure of Globalized Commercialism
PART IV MODERNITY IN QUESTION
11.
Rousseau's
First
and
Second Discourses
The Historical Context of the
First Discourse
17w
New lvleaning of "Virtue"
17ir-: Least Unhealthy
Political
Order
TheEvils of Scientific Enlightenment
The Outstanding Exception: Socratic Science
The Project of the Second Discourse
The Original State ofNature
What Distinguishes Humans from Other Animals
The Histo1y of
Our Humanity
17ie Birth of
Human Social
Existence
The Tennination
of the State
of Nature
Natural Right
The Puzzling
Legacy
12.
Marx and Engels:
The CommunistManifesto
History vs. Nature as Norm
The Literary Distinctiveness of the
Manifesto
The
Manifesto's
Audience
The 0/Jening; and the Question, of the
Manifesto
The
Uniqueness
of the Bourgeoisie
17ze Uniqueness
of the
Prol,etariat
The Communist
Intelligentsia
After the Rruolution?
13. Tocqueville's
Democracy in America
Tocquevill,e vs. Marx
The Tyranny of the Majority
The Spiritual Isolation of the Democratic Personality 17ze
Syndrome of "Individualism"
Equality vs. Liberty
The Democratic Counterweights
14.
Nietzsche and His
Zarathustra
Nietzsche vs. Marx and Tocqueville
33
1
33
2
334
337 34°
34
2
346 348
35
1
354
355
358
360
363
365 365 368
369
37
1
372
377
378
379
381
381
383
388
39°
39
1
392
397
398

Zarathustra
s
Prologue
Zarathustra
s
Discipks
The Will to Power
Justice vs. Equality
Contents
The Monstrosity of the Modern State
Conclusion
Name Index
Su!Jject Index
Xl
402 4°7 408
412 4
1
3
4
1
5

Acknowledgments
A section of Chapter 4, "The Bible," was previously published as "The
Hebrew Bible's Challenge to Political Philosophy: Some Introductory
Reflections" by Thomas Pangle, in Political Philosophy and the Human
Soul edited by Michael Palmer and Thomas Pangle. We wish to thank
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers for their kind permission to reprint.
We also wish to thank the Earhart Foundation for providing generous
summer funding during the composition of this book.
xiii

Introduction
What is political philosophy? Why is its study important? And why should
political philosophy be introduced as it is in this volume - through a
sustained encounter with a very few old books
1
whose authors lived in
civic cultures profoundly unlike our own? Why do we not begin from
books and thinkers of our own time? How will we get at the problems
that are most important for us today through_reading long-dead authors?
Are not the important issues of politics those that are pressing, urgent,
"the burning issues of the day?" What is in these old books that could be
more significant?
The answer is simple. The books that we will be studying embody
humanity's most powerful attempts to grapple with the truly funda
mental and enduring questions about human existence. What are the
ultimate ends or purposes of our lives, as individuals and as political
communities? What constitutes human fulfillment and flourishing? Can
security,· health, prosperity, and entertainment be all that our existence
is for? Or must not these goods be understood as, at best, a foundation
and means or opportunity, for higher activities and concerns? To speak
of the "higher" is to speak of that which has and bestows
dignity;
what is
it that gives our existence dignity? What is it that makes this particular
life-form - a human life - deserving of special respect or even reverence?
What makes us different in rank from the other animals, so that we feel
that we are free to eat and to enslave them, but not our fellow humans?
We express our respect for humanity by speaking of "human rights."
Respect for human rights is a major dimension of what we call justice,
or righteousness. What is the full meaning of
justicir
Most obviously, we
discern two massive aspects: Justice means distributing to each and every
person what is fairly due; including but going beyond the former - justice
means caring for the
common good
of society as a whole. On what basis 1

2
The
Key
Texts of Political Philosophy
does justice, in both these senses, make a claim on us, as individuals, such
that we feel obliged (and we think that others ought to feel obliged) to
respect and to care for justice, even or especially when this entails sub
stantial personal cost - sometimes even the ultimate sacrifice of one's
life? Is not this distinctly human capacity, for deliberately subordinating
one's personal good to what one believes to be right, a major dimension
of what dignifies human life, as a life that is more than that of a very clever
animal? Isjustice not a
virtue-
an admirable quality of character, a defin
ing trait of a truly good person and of a healthy soul? But does beingjust,
then, involve not
so much
self~denial as, instead, self-enhancement: ls
being just not a crucial component of one's own truly greatest personal
good? Or is there not a puzzle here, at the heart of our conception of
the value of justice - a puzzle as to the sense in which justice is good, and
for whom it is good? Does not a similar puzzle lurk in our conception of
the value of other moral virtues, such as courage and generosity or char
ity? Do not these virtues entail selflessness or self-transcendence, while
yet simultaneously being essential to self-realization in full dignity? What
exactly docs each of these moral virtues entail, and how are they related
to one another and to justice? To what extent should the civic common
good en tail the communal cultivation of these moral virtues?
We have brought into focus major dimensions of our human~ty's self
transcending or self-transfiguring concern for what is beyond narrow self
interest. Yet the most passionate expression of such concern is found in
love and friendship. How are the claims made on us by love, and friend
ship, and family, related to the claims of justice and the other moral
virtues? Are there
not grave
tensions among and between these diverse
claims and obligations? How ought we to contend with these tensions?
The self-transcending dimensions and claims of human existence,
when they are
experienced
deeply, lead beyond themselves to a further
vast field of questions. For we are aware that we are situated in a larger
cosmic whole - of which we humans, as a species, are not the masters,
and not necessarily even the peak. We experience an awe for nature, of
which we sense that we are the custodians, and not the owners. What is
the meaning, and basis, of this awe and sense of responsibility? What is
the ultimate source and ground of, nature as we thus experience and
revere it? Is there a deeper level of reality behind or above what we pri
marily experience as "nature?" What other beings, deserving equal or
even higher respect than us humans, may exist? Does divinity exist? Does
it afford us the possibility of an escape from the limits of our appar
ent natural mortality or finitude? What is the evidence for, and against,

Introduction
3
the existence of higher, ruling and redeeming, divinity?
If
there is such
divinity, what claims does that divinity make on us, and how are these
claims related to the claims of justice, of friendship, of love and family?
How should political life and human laws relate and respond to the pos
sibility that there are supreme divine commandments or divine laws?
Up to this point we have stressed fundamental questions about our
senses of dedication or obligation to what is beyond ourselves. But another
key constituent of human dignity is personal liberty. What is
genuine
lib
erty? Is it merely freedom from physical and other constraints? Is it living
as one pleases? How does one distinguish liberty from license? Does not
full liberty require participation in republican self-government - taking
on a responsible and meaningful share in shaping the common life of
one's society? Is not civic liberty closely akin to the virtue of justice, as an
intensely active virtue?
But is not the fullest human liberty a liberation of our
minds,
to and
through
thinking,
for ourselves, and acting in accordance with our
inde
pendent
judging? Does this not entail a critical
questioning
of our society's
beliefs, demands, customs, even its laws? But if so, how does this intellec
tual liberation fit together with political liberation, entailing law-abiding
citizenship dedicated to the common good? How may one seriously ques
tion society's laws and customs and culture, while still remaining a loyal,
dedicated citizen? What is the relation between such intellectual virtue
and moral or civic virtue? Is there not here a gravely tension-ridden chalc
lenge? Can most people rise to this challenge - or is true freedom of the
mind possible only for a few, very strong and unusually independent,
even solitary, souls? Is this rare wisdom and strength of soul the truest
meaning of
inteUectual
virtue or excellence?
Yet
equality,
and respect for others as equals, is also a demand of jus
tice. What exactly
is
the morally compelling meaning of equality, and
how is this meaning of equality related to virtue and to liberty? Is it not
very problematic to suppose that people are equal, in many important
respects - in intelligence, in artistic talent, in capacity tolove, in their
moral care and civic zeal? In what sense then can everyone deserve equal
respect, let alone equal treatment?
This leads on to another big set of questions: What kind of political
order or regime most completely fulfills and lends dignity to its mem
bers? We have been raised in a mass liberal democracy, and of course
have had bred into us, from early childhood, the claim that ours is the
best, or even the sole legitimate, form of government and society. But is
that true? What are the proof, the arguments, and the evidence? Have

The Key Texts of Political Philosophy
not other, very different, forms of government bred citizens who believed
with equal passion and conviction that theirs was the best, or even the
sole legitimate, form of government and society? Have not other forms
of government implicitly or explicitly claimed to be based on notions of
human dignity, of happiness, of excellence, of divinity, of love, and of
justice or the common good that are decisively superior to our notions?
\,Vhat are the arguments for those claimants, and how do they measure
up against the arguments that can be marshaled for the rightness and
goodness of our liberal democracy? Until we hear or engage in such
debate, will we really have more than a merely dogmatic, inbred opinion
as to the superiority of our democracy?
In raising these last questions, we begin to sense what is so contro
versial about political philosophy. Authentic political philosophy, as the
sustained pursuit of questioning of the sort we have begun to sketch, is
an unsettling and disturbing enterprise. Political philosophy was initi
ated by Socrates, who was tried and executed by the Athenian democ
racy as an impious corrupter of the young. And this was no accident,
Plato teaches, in the first work that we shall examine. For citizens nat
urally become upset when they hear these fundamental questions pur
sued seriously and relentlessly. All human beings, not only citizens of
democracies, are born and raised in one or another specific political
and social culture that inculcates fundamental opinions that give the
official answers to life's most basic questions. These answers tell citizens
what they are supposed to think about all the important issues: what is
right and wrong, just and unjust, good and bad, noble and base; who
and what they ought to love; what friendship is, what a good family is,
what divinity is; what one ought to admire and to strive for. The offi
cial answers constitute the very foundations of each society, and of its
people's attachments - to their families, to their jobs, to their religions,
Lo their friends, to their country. Political philosophy arises out of the
awareness that these authoritative answers, until they are critically scru
tinized, are held as mere opinions: They, and the culture or way of life
they constitute, can be questioned, doubted, challenged to give a justi
fication. Political philosophy began in earnest when Socrates became
the first philosopher to make his central focus the striving for genuine
knowledge
about these most important matters - about what is truly right,
good, noble, and just; about what constitutes true love and friendship;
about what god or the gods might truly be. But when his fellow citizens
sensed that these questions were being pressed and pursued intransi
gently, and that this meant that the respectable, traditional answers were

Introduction
5
being severely interrogated, the citizenry became -for understandable
reasons -alarmed.
In every age and culture where it has appeared, political philosophy
has meant questioning what is sacred, doubting what one is not supposed
to doubt. This means that the questioning that is at the heart of political
philosophy is a dubious and even a dangerous enterprise. It can do vast
harm; it can undermine society; it can leave individuals bewildered and
weakened. We are thus confronted with one of the most agonizing prob
lems of human existence: There is no simple harmony between what is
good for social or personal stability, for civic commitment and attach
ment, and what is good for genuine freedom of the mind.
This problem persists in our own, liberal democratic, society and cul
ture, but the problem takes on a distinctive new character. Like every
other culture, ours has its own set of authoritative answers to all the big
questiorts of human existence. Our civic society stands or falls with respect
for tolerance, for freedom of religion and of expression, for the free
market, for majority consent as the sole legitimate basis of government,
for human rights-conceived as each individual's freedom to pursue hap
piness as he or she wishes, so long as this does not prevent anyone else
from enjoying the same freedom. Yet as the adjective "liberal" connotes,
our civic culture, more than any that ever came before, pri,des itself on
being open to, and in some measure encouraging of, critical and even
radical questioning or doubt. How far, and how truly philosophically,
we ought in public life to press this doubt is a very big, very serious, very
fraught question.
But we cannot today avoid political philosophy in some form and
degree. We are spurred toward the radical self-doubt, the self-critical
questioning, that is political philosophy by more than simply our liberal
ethos. For we are haunted by the awareness that there are many reasons
for viewing our present-day civic culture with unease, not to say alarm. To
be sure, we have major sources of satisfaction and pride. At least in North
America and Europe, modern democracy has achieved unprecedented
security, prosperity, technological power, rule oflaw, and liberation from
oppression. These benefits have been spread to more and more previ
ously subordinated or exploited groups, including, notably, women and
all sorts of downtrodden or marginalized minorities. But it is much less
clear that we have progressed in virtue, civic or moral or intellectual; and
in our efforts to continue our progress in more basic respects, we con
stantly encounter the obstacles thrown up by a grave deficit in our civic
and personal virtues -and more generally, in the spiritual elements of

6
The Key Texts of Political Philosophy
culture. Our lives are largely given over to working for a living, in jobs
that have little civic dimension; to attending to our immediate families;
and to relaxing or entertaining ourselves in rather mindless ways that
allow escape and recuperation from the toil or narrowness of our jobs.
The concept of true "leisure," communal and personal, has almost disap
peared from our consciousness. The concept of true leisure is developed
by Aristotle at the end of his
Politics.
Aristotle contrasts "leisure" with
both work and play (as relaxation or entertainment). Entertainmen.t and
relaxation are unserious and restorative, even escapist: They give us plea
sures that afford recuperation from, and for, the burdensome work that
we make the serious business oflife. Business (work) and play ( entertain
ment) thus form a life cycle of seriousness without pleasure and pleasure
without seriousness. Leisure breaks out of that cycle. Leisure is
serious
pleasure or joy.
Leisure means the energetic, passionate, and freely cho
sen engagement in spiritually enlarging, uplifting, and fulfilling activity,
reaping the profound joys of the soul. In our culture, however, the time
and effort spent on studious reading, thoughtfully reflective conversa
tion, religious worship, philosophic inquiry, artistic production, and, last
but not least, sustained political participation, has not grown in any pro
portion to the growth in our more basic achievements. Is this the way it
has to be? Does modem democracy have to purchase its manifest, basic
benefits at the cost of a populace that tends toward becoming politically
apathetic and childlike, socially atomized, and spiritually shallow? We
are forced to wonder: Could there be something truly defective about,
something important that is missing from, our liberal democracy's basic
principles? Or, on the other hand, could it be that our culture has devel
oped historically in such a way that it has lost sight of major rich dimen
sions of what our original liberal principles mean or imply? Have we as
peoples over time forgotten key aspects of the spiritual depths and aspi
rations belonging to liberal republicanism, properly understood?
These daunting questions intensify, for us here and now, the centuries
old needs to which authentic political philosophy is the response, in all
times and places. We today experience, if in a distinctive way, the age-old
hunger to liberate our minds from simple submission to our present
civic culture and its breeding of us. We are impelled in our own way
to ask: What are the cogent reasons for, the decisive justifications of,
the underlying aims or purposes that animate our form of government
and cultural way of life? Is there no need or possibility for far-reaching
reform of what we have been given in the way of answers to these basic
questions about our historical existence?

Introduction
7
Can any serious person living in today's liberal democracies
not
feel
the need to engage in such critical questioning, challenging, and testing
of the outlook that has been instilled into us? But as soon as we respond
to this felt need by seeking the path to philosophic questioning, we con
front a massive obstacle. It
is
doubtful whether anyone, in any time and
place, can really understand the meaning of the compelling arguments
that validate "our" form of government and way of life unless one hears
those arguments tested by searching questions and strong
counterargu
ments from
alien
viewpoints - from intelligent advocates of contrasting
or opposed forms of government and ways oflife. Ifwe are to partake of
political philosophy, we need to encounter, and to listen to, and to argue
with profound, articulate thinkers who do not share, who dispute, our
fundamental assumptions about morals and politics. But where and how
can we encounter such bracing challenges? How can we avoid remaining
trapped, often without fully realizing it, in the mind-set of the culture in
which we grew up? Won't all our questions be formed by, won't they in
one way or another simply echo, this culture that we and everyone alive
today around us has been brought up ip? How can we obtain a radically
critical perspective, one that is truly outside modern culture? The answer
is not to be found in mere trips to the exotic, either vicarious or actual.
What we need is to encounter deeply thoughtful critics who challenge
our most basic civic and moral assumptions by confronting us with radi
cally contrasting civic and moral arguments.
It is at this point that there comes into sharp relief a key reason why
genuine political philosophizing today begins from protracted medita
tion on a few old books. It is only through studying and wrestling with
the sort of books that will be introduced in the following pages that we
today are enabled to encounter the profound sort of challenges that can
liberate our minds from servitude to contemporary dogmas. It is only in
the sort of books that we will be discussing that we can find articulate,
deep political thinkers who do not share, who pose radical alternatives
to, our inbred basic assumptions about morals and politics.
We start from classical republican political philosophy, founded by
Socrates and fully elaborated by Plato and Aristotle. These thinkers draw
us into sustained reflection about participatory republicanism, grounded
in a strongly communal civic culture. Such an "illiberal" political order
proves to be, paradoxically, the matrix out of which emerges the idea of
philosophy as a distinct and superior way of life - the way of life, highly
individual or self-sufficient, and even somewhat iconoclastic, lived by
Socrates.

8
The Kev Texts of Political Philosophy
In Part II we turn to the very different, but by no means hostile, civic
and moral thinking rooted in obedient fidelity to biblical revelation.
We focus first on key political dimensions of the Hebrew and Christian
Scriptures, and then on Saint Thomas Aquinas 's grand project of subor
dinating classical political philosophy to Christian theology through the
conceptual framework of "natural law." Part
III introduces successive versions of the "modern" rationalist and
humanist political philosophizing that arose in the Renaissance and cul
minated in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. What unites
these thinkers is their shared rejection and critique of both classical
political philosophy and the medieval Christian natural law synthesis.
What individualizes them are the diverse, original, comprehensive, polit
ical theories that they devised as replacements for the classical and medi
eval frameworks. In studying the "modems," and especially Locke and
Montesquieu, we will be engaging the theorists who laid the philosophic
and moral foundations for our own liberal democratic constitutionalism
and free market economic system. We will be analyzing the grounds for
our own society - in the light of the challenges posed by classical and
medieval political theory. We will begin to reenact, by and for ourselves,
the great debates and arguments that the founders of our way of life
and thinking undertook as they brought into being for the first time the
ideas that we now take for granted. We will thus no longer take those
ideas for granted. Instead, we will think them through in. the way that
they were thought through by the thinkers who could not possibly take
them for granted because they were arguing for them for the first time,
in a skeptical and even hostile culture shaped by a previous classical and
Christian tradition.
Finally, in Part IV, we will come to grips with subsequent thinkers who
rebelled against the Enlightenment's ideas of liberal constitutionalism
and the free market, doing so in the name of competing visions of alto
gether different and - these thinkers argued - superior ways of organiz
ing human society. We will thus put our way of living and thinking to
another radically thought-provoking test. At the same time, we will begin
to understand why and how our culture today is riven with deep divisions
and antagonisms: For the critical ideas of Rousseau, Marx, Tocqueville,
and Nietzsche have had a continuing powerful impact, putting into
question, but also supplementing and enlarging, Enlightenment polit
ical theorizing and practice.
Our overall aim in this book has now become clearer. We seek to help
readers, through their study of these texts, to begin to move toward a

Introduction
9
position from which they can freely judge for themselves whether and to
what extent they should embrace, or should take a critical distance from,
the principles underlying and animating our civic culture. We hope to
stimulate and to respond to a thirst in readers to confront and to wrestle
with the most fundamental questions, to reenact the titanic controver
sies that animate the history of political philosophy and that cannot ever
cease to underlie civilized existence. The thinkers and works of the past
are studied here not as dated museum pieces or objects of antiquarian
curiosity; they are confronted as powerful voices that challenge us to join
in searching debates. The point is not to learn
ahout
these thinkers and
texts, but
from
them.
This overall aim has dictated our highly selective choice of texts. We
have certainly not surveyed or summarized the entire history of politi
cal thought. Nor have we provided a full synoptic epitome of any single
thinker or vision. Each chapter seeks to be no more and no less than a
provocative invitation and guide to the reader's own further, ever-deeper
encounter with each alternative
way
of thinking. In full awareness that
our choices are contestable and that we have been constrained to leave
aside crucial works and towering thinkers, we have sought to provide,
within the limits of a manageable volume, sustained examples of how
to interpret key texts that are both accessible to beginning students
(of all ages) and that introduce most clearly and profoundly the major
alternative visions and axial turning points in the history of political
philosophy.

PART
I
CLASSICAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

1
Plato's
Apology of Socrates
The history of political philosophy may be said to begin with the
courtroom drama that led to the execution of the thinker who
founded the enterprise. Socrates (469-399 BC) wrote nothing for
publication. In his own lifetime he was made notorious as the central,
dubious character in Ancient Greece's greatest comedy, the
Clouds
by
Aristophanes (446-386 BC). After his execution, Socrates was por
trayed much more favorably and seriously in numerous dialogic dra
matizations by his students, above all Xenophon (431-355 BC) and
Plato (427-347 BC). None of these depictions of Socrates purport
to be histories. They are products of the dramatic art. Their purpose
is not to preserve an exact record of what Socrates actually said, but
rather to convey what it was like to encounter Socrates - and thereby
to be aroused to intense, perplexed, and critical thinking about
profound and abiding problems of human existence. All of Plato's
Socratic dialogues, and not least his
Apology of Socrates,*
are rich in
deliberately provocative puzzles meant to stimulate probing detective
work - through repeated rereading, with alertness and with dogged
and even suspicious questioning. The Platonic dialogues are meant to
constitute a kind of training ground for becoming a human being who
goes through life truly awakened, by Socrates and Socratic question
ing, to life's depths and challenges.
*
We recommend the trans.lation by Thomas G. and Grace Starry West, in
Four Texts on
Socrates,
revised edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Our translations,
referring to the text by standard Stephanus pagination, are from this edition, with minor
emendations. Our focus will be on Socrates' speech prior to the vote of the jury to
convict him.

14
Classical Political Philosophy
The Challenge to Our Way of Thinking
Plato's
AjJology
presents Socrates delivering his sole public account of his
life as a whole and what he lived for. But the account takes the form of
a defense in a criminal trial that culminates in Socrates' death sentence.
Plato thus provokes a number of questions: What is it about Socrates,
and his way of life, in relation to the political society around him, that
leads to so dire a clash with the legal authorities? Is this not a blam
able, avoidable crime on the part of the Athenian democracy? Or at
least a terrible accident, the result of a deep misunderstanding? Or is
there something essential to Socratic political philosophy that makes it
unavoidably threatening to lawful society, and hence always in danger of
lawful punishment? What answer does Plato mean to teach us?
The most eligible place to start our search for clues is the official
indictment, which Socrates recites (24b): "Socrates does injustice, by
corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city
believes, but in other divine things
[dairnonia]
that are novel/strange."
Now
our
first reaction to this, coming as we do from a liberal democratic
culture, is that the very charge reveals a decisive and pervasive flaw in
Athenian democracy: The indictment expresses an arrant denial of the
basic human right to freedom of speech and freedom of thoug~J, includ
ing freedom of religious belief. We see at once that the direct democracy
of the Greeks was emphatically not
liberal
democracy. Classical repub
licanism lacked our notions of freedom of thought, speech, and reli
gion. We are tempted to rush to the judgment that
this
is the problem of
Socrates, and that the solution is to live as we do. Socrates would never
be put on trial in our liberal democracy, with our Bill of Rights.
But is this the way Plato understands and presents the problem of
Socrates? Does Plato have Socrates make a plea for freedom of speech?
Or are we not simply imposing on the text our viewpoint, our cultural
assumptions about what really matters?
Ifwe look at the text with inquiring and open minds, we see that in fact
Plato never has his Socrates argue for freedom of speech, or freedom of
thought, or religious freedom. In fact, Socrates never once criticizes the
law under which he is indicted; he never once says that the law, penal
izing with death anyone who does not believe in the gods of the city, is
an unjust or a bad law. (Plato has Socrates show that he is quite willing
to criticize a law he does regard as bad [3 7a].) Instead, Socrates defends
himself by saying that he did not commit the crime with which he is
charged. He insists that he never broke the law, that he always conformed

Plato's
Apology of Socrates
to belief in the lawful gods of the city, and that he did not ever lead any
of the young to doubt or to question such belief. Here at the start we
encounter an enormous challenge to our way of thinking. We are forced
to ask: Why doesn't Plato have his Socrates plead for freedom of thought
and freedom of speech and freedom of religion? What are Plato's and
his Socrates' reasons for not seeing things the way we have been brought
up to see them? What is the radically different view of healthy political
life that Plato's Socrates has that is so alien to our own? We need to keep
these questions before us, as the spurs to our own liberation from uncrit
ical conformity to our inherited current beliefs.
The Peculiar Opening of Socrates' Defense
Plato has Socrates begin, not by responding to the formal charges, or to
the arguments and evidence introduced by the prosecution speeches, but
instead by a blanket attack on the veracity of the prosecution speakers:
"They have said, so to speak,
nothing
true" ( 1 7a, our emphasis). The most
amazing of their lies
was
a warning that Soc~tes is a cleverly deceptive
speaker. This lie is most shameless, because it will immediately be seen
that "I am not a clever speaker
at all."
Swearing an oath by Zeus, the high
est Greek god, Socrates proclaims that he will tell "the whole truth," with
out beautiful adornment, speaking "at
random,
in the words that I
happen
upon" (17c, our emphasis). This is the way of speaking, he claims, that
he usually employs in public. What is more, he claims that he is as totally
unfamiliar with Athenian court proceedings and the manner of speaking
in Athenian trials as a "foreigner" would be. He puts forward this claim as
a seventy-year-old citizen in a participatory democracy, where (as we see
vividly from this trial) juries of five hundred are regularly empanelled,
day after day, to decide cases tried before large crowds. Has Socrates in his
long life really never served on a jury or witnessed a trial?
The preposterousness of what Socrates is claiming about himself
becomes plain in the speech that follows. Like all Socratic speeches por
trayed in Plato, it is obviously anything but unplanned, uttered at ran
dom, and poorly delivered by a simple old man who is unfamiliar with
courts and is not good at well-thought-out, clever courtroom speech Gust
consider the way Socrates ties his accuser Meletus in knots in the cross
examination!).
In other words, Plato has his Socrates make it fairly easy at the out
set, for anyone who stops to think critically, to see that Socrates is far
from speaking the plain truth: That he is in fact being slyly jesting or

Classical Political Philosophy
"ironic" - pretending comically to know much less than he does (and
doing so while making a solemn oath, by the highest God, part of his
joking).
We are thus confronted with a big initial puzzle: Why does Plato have
his Socrates begin with such transparent irony? One reason that soon
suggests itself, as we proceed further,
is
that Socrates thus immediately
provokes the thoughtful in the audience to wonder what might be his
strange rhetorical strategy. This prepares the alert listeners to realize that
the entire speech unfolds as elusively ironic. Plato has Socrates begin in
a way that prompts one to see that to understand what Socrates is going
to convey, one must take everything with a grain of salt and try to figure
out the sly point of the irony at every turn.
An
important relevant fact,
which we learn a bit later, is that a number of young followers of Socrates
are in the audience - including Plato (33e). From the outset Socrates
provokes especially these young followers, making them wonder what he
is trying to teach them, by his example, about how one ought to speak
in public, in defensive explanation of the life and enterprise of political
philosophy.
Th,e
"First Accusers"
Immediately after this provocative beginning, Socrates provokes more
wonder by suddenly making the whole case infinitely more complex -
declaring (18a, our emphasis) that the official charges and accusers are
only the tip of an iceberg, as it were. "More dangerous" are certain
''first
false charges and
first
accusers," who have generated long-standing "slan
der," beginning years ago when Socrates was a younger man.
What were these "first" and more dangerous accusations? Socrates
states them as if they were formalized in an indictment: "Socrates does
injustice and is meddlesome, by investigating the things under the earth
and the heavenly things, and by making the weaker speech the stron
ger, and by teaching others these same things" (1gb; cf. 18b). Socrates
is further accused of being a practitioner of deceptive, tricky rhetoric
and of being a teacher of all this. What does all this mean? The answer
becomes vividly clear ifwe read Aristophanes'
Clouds
and its depiction of
Socrates, to which Socrates refers us. In that play Socrates is portrayed as
living a life dedicated to scientific investigation of nature, on the basis of
which he teaches that beliefs central to Greek piety are untrue: the belief
that under the earth is a divine place named Hades, where the spirits of
the deceased go, and the belief that in the heavens dwell the Olympian

Plato
'.I-
Apology of So_crates 17
divinities ruled by Zeus, who sends the thunder and lightning as part of
his punitive providence. Socrates is depicted in the
Clouds
as "making the
weaker argument the stronger," and teaching others how to do so.
It is not difficult to see why these older, unofficial charges are "more
dangerous." They make it clear that Socrates is not being condemned
as some sort of religious dissident, but instead as an atheist: "Those,
men of Athens, who have scattered this report about, are my dangerous
accusers; for their listeners hold that investigators of these things also do
not believe in gods" (18b-c). A~ is said in another work of Plato's, peo
ple "think that those who busy themselves with such matters, through
astronomy and the other arts that go with it, become atheists, having
seen that, as much as possible, actions come into being by necessities
and not by the thoughts of an intention concerned with fulfillments of
good things"
(!Jnos
gb7a). The Athenian citizens think that scientific
investigations lead to disbelief in Zeus's and the other gods' rewards and
punishments that support justice. The citizens think that this leads to
or goes with the replacement of civic virtue, with its stern demands for
self-overcoming, by a corrupt outlook that no longer sees good reason to
subordinate or to sacrifice personal profit and pleasure. The Athenians
think that those who are thus corrupted by natural science turn to the
study of tricky rhetoric (lawyers' skills), especially for courtroom use, but
also for employment in the assembly, in order to defend or to hide their
corrupt, exploitative activities. The teaching of such deceptive rhetoric is
associated with the famous itinerant "sophists," who make large sums of
money teaching techniques of self-advancement through clever rhetoric,
especially courtroom rhetoric. Socrates repeatedly stresses ( 18b and c)
that these first and more dangerous accusations, associating him with
atheistic natural science and tricky rhetoric, were lodged, and took root
in the jury members, years before - when the jury members were impres
sionable youths or children, and hence unable to judge the truth about
what he was actually doing.
How does Socrates defend himself against these "first and more danger
ous"' charges, which
he
himself has injected into the trial? He vigorously
denies that he ever was such an investigator into the religiously crucial
aspects of nature. To establish the truth of this denial, he introduces only
a single, massive piece of evidence: He calls the jurymen themselves as
his witnesses. "Many among you" have "heard me conversing"; "teach
and tell each other if any of you ever heard me conversing about such
things" (19d). This appears to be impressive testimony; what witnesses
could be more convincing to the jury than the jurymen themselves?

Classical Political Philosophy
There is only one unobtrusive but decisive flaw. A moment before,
Socrates had said repeatedly that most of the jury members were children
at the crucial time, and were hence unable to judge what the truth was
about what he was doing! Yet this is the sole evidence Socrates provides to
refute the charge lodged years ago that he was an investigator of the natu
ral phenomena relevant to religious belief. What Socrates presents as con
clusive evidence for the untruth of the accusation proves on inspection
to be a tricky lawyer's maneuver that begs the decisive question. Perhaps
Socrates has not
recently
been
ojJenly
pursuing such investigations into
nature, but he himself has insisted on spotlighting the question whether
such investigations were not his preoccupation when he was a
younger
man, perhaps laying the foundation for his philosophic life. What is
more, Socrates says here emphatically (at 19c) that he does
not
dishonor
this "sort of science"
~
indeed, that he hopes no one will ever charge him
"with such great lawsuits as that." He speaks as if he regards being charged
with clishonoring such investigations as being charged with a crime more
serious than that of not believing in the gods of Athens.
½11at of the charge that he practiced tricky rhetoric? Socrates never
explicitly denies this and offers no evidence whatsoever to refute it.
As
for the accusation that he was a teacher, Socrates responds by
strongly denying that he has ever taught
for pay.
But this is a,,red her
ring; the first accusations, as Socrates recited them repeatedly, never
charged him with teaching
for pay.
Socrates has trickily substituted, and
responded to, a different charge from the charge that he ascribed to the
"first accusers."
Socrates has introduced into the trial, only to leave looming, these large
questions about himself and his life: Is he not in fact a teacher? And if so,
of what? What has been his real attitude toward tricky rhetoric and the
practice and teaching ofit? Is he not showing, in this very speech, that he
is a master of tricky rhetoric? What has been his real posture toward, and
relation with, the sophists? Above all, what has been his true involvement
with the investigations into, and the teaching to others of, the scientific
truth about what is under the earth and in the heavens - and all the radi
cal religious implications that flow from such investigations?
The Delphic Oracle
Story
At this point Socrates conjures up someone in the audience who is sus
piciously dissatisfied and who demands an account of how these slanders
could ever have arisen if Socrates was in fact not at all involved in such

Plato
'.5
Apology of Socrates
things (2oc-d). In effect, Socrates shows how he expects or hopes an alert
listener will react to what he has said: With doubting, critically suspicious
questioning. Socrates responds by telling an amazing tale about how
he learned, through the Delphic oracle ( the most authoritative voice
of divine revelation in Greece), that he possesses "human wisdom" - in
which "probably I really am wise." Socrates predicts that some listeners
are going to think he is ''.joking" or "being playful"
(jJaizein-
20d). But he
promises that the story will provide "the whole truth" about the source of
the "slander" by the first accusers (20d, 21 b).
But
does
this story that Socrates proceeds to tell explain what he was
doing years ago? No, not at all! In fact, the story has the enormously
clever effect of lulling the listener into forgetting the question that
the story is supposed to be answering. The story fixes our attention on
what has been taking place in
recent
years in Socrates' life, or, as he puts
it, "even now" (23b): The story tells what has happened
since
the pro
nouncement of the Delphic oracle, not what happened
before -
not what
made Socrates so famous that the most authoritative religious voice in
Greece proclaimed that no one was wiser. As_Socrates says at the end of
the story ( 2 3d-e), it has explained where the
present
accusers - including,
above all, Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon - come from, and why
they
"say the
things that are ready at hand against all who philosophize," about "the
thing aloft and under the earth." Yet, after finishing the story, Socrates
reminds his listeners of the distinction he began by stressing: He says that
he has been making a defense speech "about the things which the
first
accusers accused me of' and that he will turn
next
to "Meletus" and "the
later
accusers" (24b, our emphasis). Socrates thus again pretends that he
has been explaining the first accusations, and thus prods his thought
ful listeners to wonder: What
is
the explanation, and why is he
avoiding
giving it? What was he doing
before
the Delphic oracle spoke? What way
of life was he leading? What was it about that way of life that made the
chap named Chaerephon go all the way to Delphi to ask the god such an
amazing question - whether anyone was wiser than Socrates?
In another dialogue, the
Phaedo
(96), where Plato presents Socrates
speaking in private to close friends on the day of his execution, we hear
Socrates explain at length that as a young man he was an enthusiastic sci
entific investigator of nature, and that he became a student of the works
of Anaxagoras (whose denial of the existence of the lawful gods Socrates
cites later in the
Apology
[26d]). What is more, Socrates tells his close
students that when he turned away from studying nature in the
manner
of his predecessors, he never abandoned the study of nature - but rather

20
Classical Political Philosophy
developed a new and more effective mode of studying the whole of
nature, a study he has continued to carry on all his life, as he demon
strates in his final conversation with them.
Once we recognize that Socrates has called attention to his reputa
tion as an investigator of natural necessities that draw into question core
beliefs of Greek piety in order to hint that there is an important measure
of truth in Lhat reputation, we are in a better position to recognize what
the story of the Delphic oracle signifies. The story is manifestly So.crates'
way of conveying, as best he can when on trial in public, the deep and
decisively crucial
change
that occurred in his philosophic life: the turn to
the
refutativedialogues
with nonphilosophers, centered on their opinions
about
morality,
which constituted his distinctive activity as the first
political
philosopher, the first philosopher concerned with "human wisdom" -
which is wisdom about justice, nobility, and the good, about the most
fundamental norms that define how one ought to live.
A~ Socrates' story goes, when the oracle was asked whether there
was anyone wiser than Socrates, the god replied that there was no one.
"v\Then I heard these things," Socrates says, "I pondered them like this:
'v\That ever is the god saying, and what riddle is he posing? For I am con
scious that I am not at all wise, either much or little"' (21b-c). Socrates
already knew for certain that he was not wise. He did not nee_d the god
to learn that. But precisely this knowledge of his lack of wisdom impelled
him to take the enigmatic revelation of the god with the utmost serious
ness -to ponder and to puzzle "for a long time" over what message the
god might be conveying. For Socrates stresses that he also knew, in the
second place, that the god could not be lying, "For that is not lawful
[thernis] for him" (21b). In other words, Socrates also knew that pur
ported divine revelation is inseparable from some conception of moral
law that is believed to bind even divinity itself to truthfulness, in its sol
emn revelations.
Ifwe put this together with what Socrates has previously provoked us
to surmise, bolstered by what we learn from the
Phaedo,
we arrive at the
following. Socrates began his philosophic career actively involved in the
investigations that seemed to uncover the truth about the necessitated
nature of the cosmos -and that thus seemed to show the untruth of core
religious beliefs. But at some point in his early maturity, Socrates became
convinced that the investigations into nature encountered major limita
tions that rendered them inconclusive. He became impressed and per
plexed by the incapacity of science to dispose of the possibility, powerfully
testified to by apparent religious experiences (some of which Socrates

Plato's Apology of So~ratcs 21
himself may have undergone [33c]), that all existence is governed by
supernatural divinity intervening to administer with rewards and punish
ments a somewhat mysterious moral order that transcends and drasti
cally qualifies what appears to reason to be "necessities" of nature. And
Socrates confronted the severe implications for any attempt to acquire
independent wisdom through merely human reasoning.
If
suprarational
divine revelation is true, then what would seem to be called for is a hum
ble submission to guidance by that higher divine authority, as delivered
through oracles and diviners and inspired poets.
As
Socrates says after
he has recounted his elaborate reaction to the oracle, "it is likely that"
the god through the oracle "is saying this: that human wisdom is worth
litLle or nothing" ancl that the god "made use of my name, making me
an example, as if be would say that 'this one among you, humans, is wis
est, who like Socrates knows that he is in truth worth nothing as regards
wisdom"' (23a). This statement tempts us to think that Socrates' story
tells how he abandoned any attempt to guide his life by his own rational
lights and sought instead authoritative guidance from conduits of the
gods - the inspired poets, diviners or prophets, and oracles.
But when we consider the Delphic oracle story as a whole, we see that
this is not at all the picture painted by the story. To begin with, Socrates
refused to accept the authority of the Delphic oracle. Reluctantly but
firmly, he insisted on launching an "investigation" of the oracle's state
ment, with a view to "refuting" it and proving, to the oracle's face, that
its revelation was wrong (21 b-c). Of course, as the story unfolds, it turns
out that what Socrates has proven is that there really can be found no
one wiser than he. To this extent the story has him vindicating the ora
cle. But the story does not have him doing so in a way that relies on, or
that leads to, faithful obedience or reverent hearkening or submission
to any religious authority or personally experienced divine guidance.
Instead, the story has Socrates establishing his own superior wisdom
through public, rational refutations of civil society's authorities -politi
cal leaders, poeL,, and craftsmen. Through direct questioning and con
versational argument, Socrates demonstrates that "all those reputed to
know something," and first and foremost the statesmen or civic leaders,
do not "know anything noble/beautiful-and-good" (kal,os kagathos, the for
mula for conventional gentlemanly virtue [21 c-d, 22a, our emphasis]).
In his dialogues with the poets, the voices of divine inspiration, the car
riers of Greek religious tradition, Socrates says, "I soon recognized that
they do not make what they make by wisdom, but by some sort of nature
and while inspired, like the diviners and those who deliver oracles - for they

22
Classical Political Philosophy
too say many
nobl,e/beautiful
things, but they know
nothing
of what they
speak" - that is, they understand nothing of the noble or beautiful (22b,
our emphasis). Socrates shows his interlocutors to be incapable of artic
ulating a coherent account of their most basic normative principles, by
which they guide their lives and lead society.
At first, Socrates' tale gives the impression that his ongoing refutations
of all the respected opinion leaders aroused in onlookers nothing but
hatred, and that this hatred is the source of his being accused (21d-e;
22e-23a). But this turns out to be misleading, for the tale suddenly takes
a dramatic new turn (23c-e). Socrates says that the crowds before whom
he carries out his public refutations include many
young
people, who
enjoy what they see, to such an extent that they are in large numbers imi
tating Socrates, publicly refuting "a great abundance of human beings"
all over Athens. What has caused him to have accusers, he explains, is
not
the hostile reaction to his
own
refutations, but the fact that adults all over
Athens are being refuted by the
youth,
who are known to be doing this
in imitation of Socrates. At the end of the story, Socrates admits that he
has had a deep and widespread spiritual impact on the youth of Athens,
converting many to imitation of his iconoclastic life-activity, and that
that
is the source of his troubles.
How is this project, with its vast influence on the youth, something
that the oracle ordered or advised him to do, even by implication? After
all, the only thing the oracle said was that no one is wiser. Socrates
claims,
to be sure, that his amazing project has all been "in accordance with" the
god (
2 2
a,
2
3 b), "helping" (
2
3 b) the god, carrying out an act of "pious
devotion" (
latreia -
23c). But
beneath these claims we can discern that
Socrates
reads
into
the oracle
his own imperative project of inducing in
the young critical
skepticism,
an educational project that was never even
hinted at by the
oracle.
In
effect, Socrates takes over the oracle. A kind
of peak in this regard is reached when Socrates tells how he
asked ques
tions
on behalf of the oracl,e-
as if he, Socrates, really is the oracle: "I asked
myself
on behalf of the oracl,e
whether I would prefer to be as I am, being
in no way wise in their wisdom or ignorant in their ignorance, or to have
both things that they have. I answered myself
and the oracl,e
that it profits
me to be just as I am" (22e1-4, our emphasis). These last words make
it clear that Socrates' knowledge of his own ignorance of "the noble
and-good" entails knowledge, rather than ignorance, of what is truly
profitable or beneficial, for himself. Socrates later makes it even clearer
that his Delphic oracle story and its pretense of "obedience to god" is
his "ironic" way of conveying in public the distinctive kind of dialogic

Plato's
Apology of So~rates
23
examination through which he achieved with confidence his own (and
his followers') very great good. After he has been convicted, and when
he is asked to propose a counter-penalty, he conjures up another ques
tioner: "Someone might say, 'by being silent and keeping quiet, Socrates,
won't you be able to live in exile for us?"' Socrates replies: "If I say that
this is to disobey the god, and that because of this it is impossible to keep
quiet, you will not be persuaded by me, on the ground that I am being
ironic." And, "on the other hand, if I say that this even happens to be a
very great good for a human being - to make speeches every day about
virtue and the other things about which you hear me conversing and
examining both myself and others," and that "the unexamined life is not
worth living for a human being, you will be persuaded by me still less."
But "this
is the
way it is, as I affirm" (37e-38a).
Socrates thus discloses that his Delphic oracle story is an image,
expressing how and why his mature philosophizing became largely
defined
by a
distinctive project of justifying and grounding, through
refutative argument, the
life
of independent, critical, rational examina
tion - in the face of the challenge posed by_ the claims of suprarational
divine revelation and authority, and given the absence of an adequately
complete or self-:iustifying scientific account of nature as intelligibly
necessitated. However baffled Socrates initially was by the challenge
of revelation, he eventually responded by conducting refutations cen
tered on civic opinions as to the "noble-and-good" - the supreme soci
etal moral norms that are believed to be sanctioned and commanded
by suprarational divinity. Evidently a key dimension of Socrates' pre
Delphic knowledge of his own ignorance was his having arrived at the
conclusion that what was generally opined to be "noble-and-good"
was
something that he could not rationally understand. Upon close exami
nation, his reasoning detected in the accepted moral opinions specific,
deep puzzles, ambiguities, vacuities, and contradictions. These concep
tual difficulties were of such gravity that when he laid them out clearly
to himself, he could no longer be governed by such opinions. What is
more, he discovered that, as a momentous consequence, he could not
seriously entertain any longer the possibility that he received communi
cation from any divinity standing behind such norms, sanctioning and
commanding or inspiring his obedience to them. He was impelled to
ascend to rationally coherent norms, and a rationally intelligible con
ception of their cosmic basis, entailing a major rational reinterpretation
of the divine. Yet he realized that this ascent was open to serious ques
tion, above all because he did not know whether in all this he was not

24 Cl,assical Political Philosophy
idiosyncratic. He did not know whether this whole unfolding experience was
not a manifestation of something wrong with him ( a hypertrophy of
rationalism), something condemned in the eyes of radically mysterious
and demanding, all-powerful divinity. Socrates therefore set out to test
whether others could ( or could not) be brought, by rationally analyz
ing their received moral opinions, to the same transformative moral and
theological experience to which he had himself been brought - or at
least to partial but manifest versions or adumbrations of such experience.
Ceaseless experiments with interlocutors have confirmed over and over
again at least two very important facts. First, a number of young people
(presumably those, especially, with strong, deep hearts and sharp, still
flexible minds), having grasped what Socrates is showing about the gen
erally accepted notions of the "noble-and-good," have been converted to
his way of thinking and living. Socrates has thus found repeated strong
evidence that his transformative moral-theological experience was by no
means idiosyncratic. Second, the elders whom he cross-examines and,
what is more, the many adult onlookers, have been deeply pained and
antagonized by his cross-examinations; this is not only or primarily on
account of his conversions of numerous young onlookers. The elders'
pain and hatred are in immediate reaction to Socrates' own success in
manifestly compelling them, as his interlocutors, and the audience as a
whole, to recognize gross conceptual confusions in their opinions about
the noble-and-good. The story suggests that the elders' passionately hate
ful reaction gives evidence of their undergoing the experience of having
their deepest commitments and beliefs truly shaken, at least temporarily.
This reaction that Socrates produces in the adults by his own refutations
is repeatedly confirmed by its reproduction in the reactions to the refu
tations executed by his young imitators. Socrates thus has gained a sec
ond and broader (though less completely clear or unambiguous) kind
of strong evidence - this time from people who were not candidates to
join him in his life and outlook - that his own moral-theological reaction
to the discovery of the conceptual difficulties in the opinions about the
noble-and-good is by no means peculiar.
Yet the hatred on the part of the elders that is the result of all these
Socratic refutations is dangerous for Socrates and for his youthful imita
tors. Moreover, the hatred is understandable and even to some extent
justifiable. For the Socratic refutative activity as depicted in the Delphic
oracle story portrays Socrates as having a widespread subversive effect
on the youth of Athens, who all over the city are refuting in public their
elders. And it is noteworthy that neither Socrates nor his many young

P/,ato
'.s
Apology of So<:rates 25
followers are portrayed as refuting the sophists or other philosophers.
The Socratics and Socrates are not defending the city's views or religious
tradition against sophistic or philosophic criticism. Does not the story
in effect admit, and indeed make vivid, how severely Socrates has been
undermining the moral and religious foundations of Athens, especially
among the young? Plato's Socrates thus provokes the question:.How can
this be a responsible thing to do? How can a civic republic be sustained
on the basis of the young becoming Socratic skeptics, spending their
lives questioning and refuting their society's leaders?
At this point, Socrates leaves these questions hanging. What he
does next gives us evidence that helps us to begin to answer another
big question that we have been provoked to by the preceding: What
are the Socratic conversational refutations actually like? That is, what
exactly are they about? In the next part of the defense speech, we get
to watch Socrates refuting an authority - one of his accusers. We get a
glimpse of what a Socratic refutation looks like and what topics Socrates
focuses upon.
The Cross-Examination of Mektus
The refutation ofMeletus has three parts, on three different topics, each
requiring and provoking reflection. First (24d-25c), Socrates asks and
forces Meletus to answer the question of who really educates, rather than
corrupts, the young.
As
he had already shown in his first report of a dia
logue, with the father Callias, a primary question that Socrates pursues is:
What would one need to know, and who can claim to know, what it means
truly to educate young people so that they acquire the "virtue of human
being and citizen" ( 2oa-b). Socrates calls into question the claim that
Meletus advances in response, that "everyone" knows - which is a claim
that society makes, insofar as it turns over to parents the main responsi
bility for educating morally their own children. Socrates casts doubt on
parental authority as regards moral education; he insists on asking what
qualifies parents to be able to educate their young to become truly good
human beings and citizens. Isn't the case that as regards moral and civic
education, as in all very complex and difficult enterprises, the truly qual
ified are very few? Through Meletus's responses we see exposed the fact
that society tends not to stop to think much
if
any about this question.
The second or central refutation (25c-26a) is the most revealing
about the radical questions Socrates raises concerning the coherence of
widespread, basic moral beliefs. Socrates argues that if he - or anyone

26
Classical Political Philosophy
else - were in fact corrupting the young, then he or anyone doing that
would necessarily be doing so involuntarily, since it would be out of ignorance
of what he was doing. The law as well as everyone agrees that
wrong done out of genuine ignorance of what one is doing does not
deserve punishment. Instead, the proper response to such ignorance is
education.
To see the
full
significance of this central Socratic refutation, one
must start to think through the radical implications. Socrates is prod
ding us to ask: What do we necessarily mean by saying someone is
respon
sible
for his or her choice and action? Must we not mean that he or
she acts
deliberately -
as a being with known options, among which a
choice is made according to what consciousness sees to be better, and
action is carried out executing that consciously deliberated decision?
But this implies that when people are responsible for their actions, they
are always choosing what seems or appears to them, at the moment of
choosing, to be what is best to do. If or since crime and injustice are in
fact truly very
bad -
if being a criminal makes one a much worse per
son. vicious and sick in one's very character and personality and soul; if
becoming criminal is like gelling cancer, but of the spirit not the body
then becoming a criminal must always be the result of
not realizing
this
terrible, true meaning of crime and injustice, for oneself, for.-one's life
and very soul. How then can we blame the criminal, or say he deliber
ately, knowingly, did wrong? Still worse, how can it possibly make any
sense to seek to inflict on such a terribly ignorant and damaged per
son more suffering or hurt, to intensify his already bad condition of
ignorance?
Someone might try to escape this Socratic conclusion by arguing that
the criminal
does know
clearly that, and how, the crime is bad, for him
self: That the
criminal
embraces injustice knowing that it will make his
personality and life much worse. But this implies that committing crime
is like someone drinking an awful poison, or being an addict who knows
he is destroying himself but can't stop. Can that mean anything except
that the criminal is no longer able to guide himself by his consciousness
of what is best and most choice worthy for himself? Does that not mean
that he is suffering from a terrible psychic sickness, in which he somehow
cannot do what he knows to be best, like a person spiritually paralyzed?
Doesn't this mean that the criminal is even more sick than if he were
ignorant - even more pitiable, and not at all a responsible agent? How
can we possibly say the criminal deserves to suffer more for being in such
a pathetic condition, of mental paralysis and compulsion?

Pl,ato's Apology of So~rates
An alternative
way
of trying to escape the Socratic conclusion is to
contend that crime is voluntary because it is a deliberate choice of what
really
is
the best thing for a person to do at that moment. And it does
seem that something like envy of criminals lurks in all retributive justice,
or in all societies' ways of talking and thinking about the punishment of
crime. For why otherwise do we say that the criminal who has not suf
fered punishment "gets away with it"? If crime or injustice is truly bad - if
being a criminal is a deformation of one's personality-how is a criminal
who is not caught "getting away" with anything? Isn't such a criminal like
someone "getting away" with cancer? For crime is cancer in one's very
soul, not in one's body. But why, similarly, do we say that when the crimi
nal is punished, he "pays his debt to society"? Does this not presume that
he truly profited from his crime - that prior to being made to suffer, he
is well off, or in a good condition, as a successful criminal - rather than
being sick or confused or in a terribly unwholesome inner condition?
Does this not betray the fact that somehow we think that being just, or
being law-abiding, is bad for the person who is so - unless he or she gets
some reward? But what can this mean? That criminality is becoming a
better human being, and not a worse one? That crime and injustice arc
good for one's core being? That being a just person is being a worse per
son? But is not justice a virtue, an excellence, something admirable; are
not injustice and criminality despicable?
The issues Socrates has raised obviously require and call for a much
more extended, painstakingly precise analysis and self-critical soul
searching. But Socrates here points to his characteristic bringing to light
of deep confusions, radical incoherence, in our commonest, most pas
sionately held convictions about justice, crime, responsibility, and pun
ishment. These are convictions deeply connected to the notions of guilt
and sin - and of divinity that punishes people for their sins. Socrates
begins here to indicate how radical a gulf separates his coherent concep
tion of justice from the incoherent notion that predominates in civic life,
and especially in criminal law and traditional religion. Thus at the center
of his cross-examination, we get a momentary glimpse of one major par
adoxical Socratic thesis, namely, that all vice or crime must be a product
of some deep ignorance, and hence not voluntary; that there is no guilt
in the way common sense and all traditional religion assumes that there
is; that retributive punishment makes no sense.
In the third refutation (26a-27e), Socrates presses the question of
whether the indictment and charge addressed to him are coherent in
their understanding of what lack of faith (and therefore faith) in divinity

28
Classical Political Philosophy
must mean. Socrates shows that Meletus gives expression to unresolved
confusion in society's notion of what is meant and understood by"divinity"
and thus by "belief in divinity." Here we get a glimpse of another kind
of questioning Socrates engages in: He asks the deceptively simple ques
tion, "What is a god? What is meant by 'divinity'?" We cannot help not
ing that in this last part of the cross-examination, Socrates is especially
playful. In a slyly comic
way,
he shows how he can assert that he believes
in what the city believes in, while yet leaving his beliefs radically ambig
uous; he can do this because the city's beliefs are themselves radically
ambiguous or unclear.
The Puzzling L_ongest Section
With the end of the cross-examination of Meletus, Socrates appears to
have completed his defense. He declares that what he has said is "suffi
cient" as an answer to the charges (28a). But his speech goes on, and in
fact we now get the longest portion of the speech (28b-35d) - whose
purpose or function Socrates never makes explicit. Plato sets us the chal
lenge of figuring out what Socrates is up to.
Socrates introduces this part as he introduced the Delphic oracle story
by conjuring up a hostile questioner. But this time the challenge is of a
very different character: "Perhaps, then, someone might say, 'Then are
you not ashamed, Socrates, of having followed the sort of pursuit from
which you now run the risk of dying?'" (28b). Now this question is in
itself ambiguous, or susceptible of more than one meaning. But Socrates
replies by giving the question a base interpretation. He takes the ques
tioner to mean that Socrates should be ashamed of ever having to risk his
life for anything. Socrates replies by taking very high moral ground. After
attacking the baseness of the questioner, Socrates launches into what he
calls "the just speech" or "the speech of justice." The leading point of
this speech is that one must be prepared to die heroically for justice,
as the heroes of Homeric poetry died in the Trojan War. Socrates thus
commences a new, heroic self-portrait. He now claims that the model
for his own life-activity has been the traditional Greek hero, Achilles, as
portrayed by Homer- the authoritative poetic source of Greek religious
and moral views. Socrates now quotes with approval Homer's authorita
tive poem, the Iliad, as his own guide in life. In other words, Socrates now
presents himself in highly traditional terms. And throughout this whole
longest part of the speech, Socrates shows his enormous concern for his
own and for his city's manliness, and manly "reputation" as champions of

Plato's
Apology of So~rates
justice. Indeed, he now speaks as if his chief concern in life were for "dis
tinction" (as he puts it), as a courageous, just, and thus pious man. He
makes this overriding concern for his reputation especially clear at the
end of this long section, which concludes his defense speech as a whole.
He again conjures up someone questioning from the audience, this
time moved by indignation because Socrates is not begging for mercy.
Socrates replies:
"Why,
then, will I do none of these things? Not because
I am stubborn, men of Athens, nor because I dishonor you. ·whether I
am daring with regard to death or not is another story"; but "as to
rep
utation,
mine and yours and the whole city's, to me it does not seem to
be noble for me to do any of these things." For "I am old and have this
name,
and whether it is true or false, it is reputed at least that Socrates is
distinguished
from the many human beings in some way. If, then, those
of you who are reputed to be distinguished, whether in wisdom or cour
age or any other virtue at all, will act in this way, it would be shameful"
(34e-35d, our emphasis). Socrates then ends with a ringing affirmation
of his pious faith in the gods (35d).
The picture of himself that Socrates paints, in this part of the speech,
stands in striking contrast to the picture he gave in the first part of his
speech, through the Delphic oracle story. There, we recall, he portrayed
himself as a radical moral skeptic, who spends his life proving before
crowds (which include many young people) that neither he nor any of
the political, religious, and craftsmen authorities of society know any
0
thing "noble and good." Now, Socrates speaks as one who knows for sure
what is noble and good: What is noble and good is imitating the tra
ditional hero Achilles, in being obedient to one's lawful commanders
(28d-29a). Socrates now gives a new and different account of what he
has been showing in his refutations. His purpose, he now says, has been
to make these people feel "ashamed" because they care for money, and
reputation, and honor, rather than or prior to prudence and truth and
how one's soul will be the best possible (29d-e). He now says that in his
conversations he tests people, not for knowledge but for virtue. And his
test works; he now says that he has the knowledge that allows him to tell
who has virtue of soul and who does not have it (29d-3oa). He then
goes on to make the following astonishing claim, directly contradict
ing the Delphic oracle story: "I go around and
do nothing but
persuade
you, both younger and older, not to care for bodies and money before,
nor as vehemently as, how your soul ,vill be the best possible. I say: 'Not
from money does virtue come, but from virtue comes money and all
of the other good things for man beings both privately and publicly."'

Classical Political Philosophy
And "if," Socrates adds, "someone asserts that what I say is other than
this, he speaks nonsense" (3ob-c, our emphasis).
As
part of this new
portrait, Socrates limns himself in the famous "gadfly" image, through
which he proclaims his philosophizing to be a divine mission to wake up
the city, which is like a sleepy horse - to wake it
not
to moral skepticism
but to concern for virtue as the good of the soul, and hence the source
of money, safety, and fame.
• Further contradicting the Delphic oracle story, Socrates now-claims
that he never examined anyone in
public,
or before audiences, but always
in private and discretely: "going to each of you
privately,
as a father or
an older brother might do, persuading you to care for virtue" (31 b, our
emphasis). He now says that he did not ever "dare" to speak up in pub
lic: "It might seem to be strange that I do go around counseling these
things and being a busybody
in private,
but that in
public
I do not dare to
go up before your multitude to counsel the city" (31 c, our emphasis). In
the Delphic oracle story, we recall, he repeatedly stressed how
public
his
refutational activity
was,
carried out before "many" ( 2 1 d, 2 1 e; see also
22b, 23a) includingmanyyoungpeople (23c).
Now, within this new and different portrait, there is a subtle, rather
comic paradox, which points us once again to Socrates' playfulness.
Socrates first proclaims himself an imitator of Achilles - and.he quotes
the famous lines that vividly remind us that Achilles won glory by dying
young,
in battle, fighting to avenge his friend. But why, if Socrates mod
eled his life on the heroic Achilles, is he still alive, as a very old man?
How did this Socrates, as a hero, manage to live so long? Well, Socrates
explains, he had a special "daimonic voice" that always ordered him to
avoid public actions that would endanger his own life. Even as he paints
himself so heroically, Socrates rather comically lets alert listeners see
something quite different just beneath the surface. He led a cautious,
private, retired life as much as he could: "Do you suppose, then, that I
would have survived so many years if I had been publicly active and had
acted in a manner worthy of a good man, coming to the aid of the just
things and, as one ought, regarding this as most important? Far from it,
men of Athens; nor would any other human being" (32e). He does pro
ceed to tell of how he refused to do iajustice, and by this refusal risked
his life, both under the oligarchy (when the oligarchs tried to force him
to help them with their oppression) and similarly under the democracy
(when he
was
required by law to preside at a famous trial of admirals and
resisted the populace's demand for illegal proceedings). So Socrates did
behave justly, in the sense that he refused, even at risk of his life, to do

Plato's
Apology of Socrates
31
injustice or act
unlawfully. But
he was not active
in public
or in politics
(because, he says, his private god told him not to be). He does finally
admit that he has had an impact on the young, but only after insisting
that he was never anyone's teacher, and therefore that he has no responc
sibility for whether any of his listeners has become just or unjust (33a-b).
Yet he goes on, at 33d-34a, to give a rather long list of prominent young
men who have been
deeply
influenced by him.
The massive question that confronts us is: How are we to put this new
account - of Socrates as gadfly, privately preaching and promoting tra
ditional civic virtue - together with the previous account, the Delphic
oracle story of Socrates as public spreader of radical moral skepticism?
As
we have seen in detail, the two accounts are sharply contradictory, in a
number of fundamental ways. Which account is true? Or are both false?
Are both partial truths? Are they each a kind of comic exaggeration of
one side of Socrates' life - which was in truth complex and had in fact
two sides, or even many sides? vVhat is Socrates' rhetorical strategy? v\That
is he trying to accomplish by telling two such different and contradictory
stories in the same speech?
It has become evident that Plato is having his Socrates speak on dif
ferent levels to different people. The defense speech as a whole leaves
many listeners and readers thinking of Socrates more in terms of the last
account- as the heroic gadfly exhorting and waking the city up to manly
civic justice. But the speech provokes more thoughtful and questioning
listeners and readers to wonder how in the world this fits with the ear
lier Delphic oracle story's much more radical picture of Socrates' moral
skepticism.
We must look
to other
Platonic dialogues
to see what
the Platonic
Socrates was like,
as portrayed
in those dialogues,
and then
to compare
those other dialogues
with the
two very different
stories
Plato has his
Socrates give here in the
Apology,
when on trial, in his one and only pub
lic speech. But if, or as soon as, we do turn to the other dialogues, such
as the
&public,
the mystery deepens. For in none of the other thirty-two
Platonic dialogues showing Socrates do we ever see Socrates behaving in
either
of the two ways he portrays himself as behaving in this sole public
speech of his. Against the depiction in the Delphic oracle story, Plato's
Socrates only very rarely cross-examines statesmen or poets, and never
any craftsmen. He does not cross-examine anyone before large audi
ences - except poor Meletus in the
AjJology.
As we will see in the opening
pages of the
&public,
Socrates
does
carry out
private
cross-examinations
and refutations, which leave people aware that they do not know what

32
Cl,assical Political Philosophy
they thought they knew - especially about justice. He
does
question,
radically, the wisdom of Homer and the goodness of the heroes and
heroic virtues Homer depicts. He
does
question the wisdom of political
leaders and the educational system of the city. But he does this in very
small groups, behind dosed doors, often with sophists and with youths
attracted to sophists (with whom Socrates never indicates he speaks in
the
Apology).
On the other hand, Plato also does not show Socrates to be
the gadfly: Socrates is not a private preacher of or exhorter to virtue -
though by his questions, Socrates does evince a deep concern to under
stand virtue, and especially justice, and promote in young interlocutors a
similar deep concern. He does try to get young people to think seriously,
critically, about virtue, and especially justice - to begin to understand the
different aspects of justice and the tensions between those aspects. He
does always evince great respect for justice, combined with puzzlement
about how all its aspects fit together.
Begimiing
to Piece Out the Puzzle
If we step back to take a reflective, synoptic view of the defense speech as
a whole, we can make some progress toward an understanding of what
Plato wants to teach by proceeding along the following lines .. -
In the last and longest part of his speech, Socrates indicates that
republican and family life demand five specific virtues of character -
which Socrates evokes and promotes in this part of the speech. First,
civic life needs manly courage, including readiness to die in battle for
one's republic. Second, civic life needs moderation - as habitual control
over one's appetites and subordination of the love of money and luxury
to the love of public service. And so, in the third place, civic life needs
justice - meaning primarily obedience to law and to one's lawful rulers,
along with willingness to forgo or to sacrifice one's personal interests for
the common good. Fourth, civic life needs prudence or practical judg
ment, rooted in long practical experience in politics and in heartfelt
attachment to one's civil society. Fifth and finally, civic life needs piety,
as faith in gods who support and sanction the other virtues by promis
ing some kind of immortality after death, and divine judgment leading
to rewards and punishments. (In his last words in this dialogue, speak
ing to those who voted to acquit him, Socrates gives a vivid picture of a
hoped-for afterlife.) Socrates realizes that these essential civic virtues are
not mainly brought about by critical thought and doubt and question
ing and argument. Education in civic virtue depends, first and foremost,

Plato's
Apology of Soc_rates 33
on cultivating a sense of shame or a concern for reputation, a respect
for the opinions of one's fellow citizens and a desire to be respected by
them. It depends in the second place on a reverence for tradition and
for shared traditional heroes - a sense of a past to be lived up to, and a
sense of responsibility to pass that tradition down to future generations.
This means, in the third place, that ci,ic education needs to be centered
on the enchanting beauty of poetry and the arts, which can inspire, in
the hearL~ of citizens, the passionate attachments and concern for the
common good that are central to a healthy republic. This importance
of civic poetry, and music, and fine arts, indicates that the civic virtues
need to be rooted in the emotions more than in reason. The forming of
the heart, of the passions, is what constitutes a vigorous
civic
education,
which must be contrasted with, and even opposed to, a
philosophic
educa
tion rooted in radical questioning and doubt and opening the mind to
awareness of ignorance.
Socrates discovered, in and through his own life, by his own experi
ence, and not merely as a matter of speculation, that the life of political
philosophy is not simply or unqualifiedly good for most humans. While
his own inquiry into the divine, through engaging citizens in the dialec
tical examination of their moral and political opinions, permitted him to
conclude that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being
such as himself, he at the same time discovered the danger and potential
destructiveness for most people of philosophic doubt and skepticism,
especially about the divine. This, we may say, is the massive reason why
he masks his own activity in various conventionally pious disguises -first
as service to the Delphic oracle, and then, more completely, by deliv
ering the last long part of his speech, in which he claims to show the
perfect compatibility between his life and the heroic ideals of Homer's
Achilles, and of traditional Athens. Socrates discovered that the life of
radical inquiry is in severe tension with the requirements of a healthy
republican society. Republican government and the family life that is
its cornerstone require dedication, trust, commitment, patriotism, even
love, among the fellow members of the community. A healthy repub
lic requires an exclusive and to some extent intimate mutual care that
is not skeptical, or tentative, or provisional, or exploratory, but instead
solid and deeply set in the soul, in the emotions. One can also put the
key point this way: Socrates discovered a bifurcation in human nature.
Human beings are not simply, and certainly not primarily, philosophic
beings. They are first and foremost political beings, social beings, family
beings. Humans are in great measure fulfilled, emotionally and mentally,

34
Cl,assical Political Philosophy
by participating in collective self-government, in the life devoted to the
civic virtues that are essential to a strong republican society - and these
are passionate, emotional virtues. The bonds or foundations of political
society are only in small part rational, and they are
not
rooted in criti
cal thought. Those bonds are mainly faith, passion, and emotion, which
are educated through habit and custom and artistic imagination. But
humans are also, and even more deeply, rational thinking beings, whose
truest fulfillment is that of maximal self~consciousness, requiring full lib
eration and development of the mind; this requires a relentless question
ing and doubt of all society's basic moral and religious opinions. This is
the dilemma of human existence that Socrates tries to convey through
his strangely contradictory speech: the inescapable tension between, on
one hand, the political nature of humans - the requirements of a truly
self-governing, fraternal republican political society - and, on the other
hand, a higher, purer, intellectual nature and need for clarity, even in
uncertainty.
Socrates, and his student Plato, responded to this fundamental tension
or dilemma in human existence by developing a new philosophic rhe
toric, or a new kind of communication. Since genuine philosophy's rad
ical questioning is destructive of the spiritual foundations of any healthy
republican society, that questioning must be kept under a veil, by which
the political philosopher makes himself seem to be much more in con
formity with tradition than he ever really is. The massive lesson Plato's
Socrates teaches in the
Apology
is that the philosopher must learn to hide
and to mute the skeptical core of his life of questioning, in order to pro
tect the city from the corrosive effects of intransigent and radical philo
sophic questioning and doubting - and in order to protect himself, and
his fellow philosophers or potential philosophers, from the city's inevita
ble, naturally defensive, and indignant punishment or persecution. The
philosopher will recognize that the city as a whole can never be made
philosophic. Civil society can be only
somewhat
elevated and enlightened,
made
somewhat
more thoughtful, induced to have
some
respect for a
dis
guised
version of the philosopher (and only thus can a healthy repub
lic be induced to tolerate philosophy). Socrates' whole posture implies
that to try
to
enlighten the city, in the sense of exposing it directly to
philosophic skepticism, is profoundly mistaken. To try to base citizen
ship and statesmanship on skeptical philosophy would destroy the essen
tial moral foundations of the city and, in addition, would make people
less thoughtful, less serious, less caring for the truth about their souls
and their fulfillment. Such an attempt at philosophic enlightenment of

Plato's
Apology of So~rates
35
society as a whole would debunk the rather fragile directedness of the
city toward civic virtue, and would allow the ever-present and blinding
concern for physical security, comfort, and money or material goods to
swamp social existence.
We here take note of the momentous fact that today's American
and European society and culture is based on a profoundly different
attempt to solve the problem made so vivid in Plato's
Apology of Socrates.
When we turn in later chapters to Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke,
and Montesquieu, we will study the diverse philosophic originators and
sources of our distinctly "modern'' conceptions of both the nature of the
philosophic life and the nature of a healthy political society. Socrates
would likely say that this modern philosophic outlook, on which our con
temporary society is based, is not a solution but instead a contortion of
both the philosophic life and healthy republican civic life; Socrates would
probably contend that our type of republic entails a lowering and a nar
rowing of both civic life and the life of the mind.
As
we get further into
the writings of the modern political philosophers, we will have to begin
to judge for ourselves this titanic debate between the "ancients" and the
"modems." But first we will explore more fully the classical Socratic posi
tion, as elaborated by Plato and Aristotle. To begin with, we will examine
the first book of Plato's
&public,
with its vivid portrait of what Socrates
was like characteristically- as a dialectician, exploring with specific indi
viduals the nature of justice, when he was not on trial and forced to orate
defensively before a vast crowd.

2
Plato's
Republic,
Book One*
Plato's longest and most famous Socratic dialogue consists in an
uninterrupted narration by Socrates, to persons unidentified, of remark
able events and conversation that took place the previous night. Socrates
begins by relating that he and a companion named Glaucon "went down,
yesterday, to the Piraeus" - and it is there, in the port of Athens, that the
entire subsequent dialogue is set, mostly inside the home of a resident
alien named Cephalus. No other Platonic work is placed in this setting,
with its specific atmosphere. The port is situated eight miles from the city
of Athens and is a site appropriate for discussion involving radical civic
and religious thought experimentation. Like most busy ports, it is rife
with foreigners and alien ways, and even strange new gods. Indeed, this
last is what Socrates says drew him there: He went to "pray to, and out
of a wish to observe the festival of," a goddess whose festival was being
introduced "for the first time." Socrates' piety comes to sight as attracted
by "novel divinities" (recall the formal criminal charges lodged against
him: Apology 24b-c).
Having prayed and observed, the pair headed back to the city:
Socrates makes it clear that they did not intend to visit old Cephalus and
his family. But they were compelled to wait, first by the command and
hand of a slave, sent by Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, and then by
a jovial little gang led by Polemarchus. At the start of the Platonic dia
logue on justice and the best regime we are lightheartedly reminded of
the austere truth that society is controlled chiefly by force (including
enslavement), and
by
the strength of numbers, especially the numbers
of the younger males.
* We recommend
the translation
by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968). Our
quotations, referring to the text by standard Stephanus pagination, are from this edition,
with minor emendations.

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She looked at him with penetration, amusement, and a little
scepticism.
'She is very handsome; do you wish her to forget you?' she said with
a smile. 'I am sure you must have told her you will go and see her
again.'
Othmar was annoyed to feel himself a little embarrassed.
'I told her I would see her again some time, but I did not say
whether this year or next.'
His wife laughed.
'I was sure you did! Well, then, you can go and see her at once, and
take her some present from me.'
'If you will allow me to say so, I think a present will only painfully
emphasise the difference of cast between you and her.'
'You have des aperçus très fins sometimes! That is a very delicate
one, and perhaps correct, though a little pedantic. Well, go and see
her, and say anything in my name that you think will smooth her
ruffled feathers and restore her peace. I think we should have
another Desclée in her; but perhaps you are right, that it will be
better to let her marry her ship-builder. Wait; you may take her this
book from me. That cannot offend her.'
She took off her table a volume of the 'Légendes des Siècles,' an
édition de luxe, illustrated by great artists, bound by Marius Michel,
illustrated by Hédouin, and published by Dentu, and in the flyleaf of
it she wrote, 'From Nadège Fedorevna Platoff, Countess Othmar.'
Then she gave it to her husband.
'I am certainly not going there to-day, nor for many days,' he said as
he took it.
She smiled as she glanced at him.
'Are you sure you are not? Well, take it when you do go.'
'I shall go, if at all, only as your ambassador.'

'That is rather prudishly and puritanically put. Why should you not
say honestly that the girl is very pretty, and that you like to look at
her! I assure you it will not distress me.'
'I could not hope that it would,' said Othmar rather bitterly, as Paul
of Lemberg entered the room.
There were times when the serene indifference to his actions which
his wife displayed found him ungrateful; times when he almost
wished for the warmth of interest which the impatience of jealousy
would have shown. Jealousy is an odious thing, a ridiculous, an
intolerable, a foolish and fretful and fierce passion, which is as
wearing to the sufferer from it as to those who create it; and yet,
unless a woman be jealous of him, a man is always angrily certain
that she is indifferent to him. Jealousy is a flattery and a homage to
him, even whilst it is an irritation and an annoyance: it assures him
that he is loved even whilst it wears and whittles his own love away.
But jealousy was a thing at once foolish and fond, humiliating and
humble, which was altogether impossible to the serenity and the
security of the proud self-appreciation in which his wife passed her
existence.
In a week's time she had forgotten that she had ever seen Damaris
Bérarde; but in a year's time Othmar did not forget that he had done
so.
A few days later Loris Loswa was ushered into their presence; he
had the sullen perturbed expression of a child baulked in its wish, or
deprived of some toy.
'Loswa looks as if he had had an adventure,' she said as he entered.
'He is one of the few people to whom these things still happen.'
'I have been both shot at and nearly drowned, Madame,' replied
Loswa. 'But that would not matter much if it were not that I have
had also the greatest of disappointments.'
'Disappointment and assassination together are certainly too much
in the same day for one person. Tell me your story.'

'I have been to Bonaventure,' said Loswa, and paused. He looked
distressed and annoyed, and had lost that airy nonchalance and that
provoking air of conscious seductiveness which so greatly irritated
his comrades of the ateliers who had not his success either in art or
in society.
'To Bonaventure, of course,' said his hostess, as she glanced at
Othmar with a smile. 'Everyone is going to Bonaventure; it will very
soon see as many picnics as the Ile Ste. Marguerite.'
'Not if the tourists be received as I have been,' said Loswa, in whose
tone there was an irritated regret which was not hidden by the
lightness of his manner. 'Jean Bérarde is a madman. I took a little
sailing-boat from Villefranche this morning, and bade them take me
to the island. When we reached there, I left the boatmen on the
beach and climbed the passerelle as usual, but I had not got halfway
up the cliff before a bullet whistled past me, and I was warned that
if I stirred a step farther I should be shot like a dog. I could not see
who spoke, but the voice came from above. I replied that I was Loris
Loswa, a painter from Paris, and that I merely wished to be
permitted to finish a sketch which I had taken there a few days
earlier. I presume that this was the worst thing that I could have
said, for I received a second bullet, which this time passed through
the crown of my hat. The person who fired was still invisible
amongst the olives above. At the same moment some hands
clutched my ankles so suddenly and forcibly that I lost my footing
and fell headlong down the ladder through the brushwood to the
beach. I was stunned for a few minutes, and when I realised where
I was, the man Raphael, mindful, I suppose, of the napoleons he
had had, begged my pardon for having made me descend in such a
summary mode, but said that, had he not done so, Jean Bérarde
would have killed me. Raphael was in a great tremor himself, and
urged me to go away on the instant, adding that "le vieux," as he
called him, was resolute to shoot all trespassers without regard to
rank or right, and had put a notice up to that effect on the rocks.
"But it is against the law," I said to him. "Eh, monsieur!" said
Raphael; "he is the law to himself here, and he is mad, quite mad—

un fou furieux—since the little one came back from your friends. He
has sent her away, heaven only knows where, and not a soul will be
let to set foot on the island." "Sent her away?" I cried to him. "But I
have not finished her portrait." The wretch did not care. "What does
that matter?" he said. "What matters is that the one bit of gaiety
and goodness in the place is gone. My children are crying for
Damaris all the day long." I used bad words about his children; what
did they matter to me? And I asked him how the old brute had
learned that his granddaughter had been out that night: had he
come home earlier than she? "Yes," said Raphael, "he did come
home an hour before her, but he need not ever have known
anything, for we would, all of us, have kept her little secret; even old
Catherine would never have told of her. But Damaris was always
headstrong, and in some things foolish, poor child; and she would
have it that it was cowardly and wrong not to tell Bérarde herself;
and so, do what we would, she would go straight in and tell him;
and he—he had not had a good day's trade, and he had heard of a
debtor who had drowned himself, and left no goods worth a
centime, and so he was in the vilest of humours that evening; and
when she related to him what she had done, he up with his big elm
staff and struck her down, and my wife and I thought she was dead;
and old Catherine was cursing, and the children were screaming,
and the dogs howling. Such a scene! such a scene! However, she
was not injured, and in the evening he took her away by himself in
the open boat, and what he did with her nobody knows. He made
Catherine pack all her clothes in a great bundle, and so I do not
think that he killed her. I suppose he took her to the mainland, to
some convent perhaps, though he does not love them. I dare say he
would have made away with Catherine too, only he wants her to
cook his dinner, and he knows there is nobody else who can manage
the bees." That was all that I could make Raphael say; he was in a
great state of terror, and urged me to go away at once. He said the
old man might come down on to the beach for aught he knew. As
Damaris was gone, there was little to be gained by remaining, so I
left the island. In returning we encountered a white squall; the boat
capsized, we clung to her for half an hour, when we were picked up

by a yawl which was going to Villefranche. That is all my story; I
have been bruised and soaked, but all that would not matter if I
could only finish my picture. But where is Damaris?'
'It is really an adventure,' said Nadine, 'and you have told it
dramatically. As for your picture, you deserve not to complete it, for
you neglected her disgracefully when she was here.'
'I hope this old tyrant has not hurt her; but a ruffian who fires at one
from his olive-trees as if one were a fox or a stoat——'
'Of course he will not hurt her; he will either keep her in a convent
to punish her, or, as he does not love convents, marry her at once to
her boat-builder.'
Othmar did not say anything; he had heard Loswa's narrative with
regret.
'Poor, brave little soul!' he thought; 'and it was I who told her that it
was her duty not to conceal what she had done.'
'A caprice may cost something sometimes you see, Madame,' said
Béthune with a smile to his hostess.
'She may become a second Desclée yet,' said Nadine. 'Her
grandfather will not be wise if he drive her to desperation. I am
sorry he struck her: it was brutal.'
'Perhaps we hurt her quite as much,' said Othmar, which were the
first words he had spoken on the subject.
His wife smiled.
'I know that is your idée fixe. I do not agree with you. If she marry
the shipwright she will now do it with her eyes open. It is always
well to know what one is about.'
'You have made it impossible for her to marry the shipwright.'
'I really do not see why. Perhaps you mean your compliments or
Paul's music.'

'Paul's music, and other things. You showed her the world as
Mephistopheles showed Faust youth in a mirror.'
'Faust was, after all, Mephistopheles' debtor.'
'About that there may be two opinions.'
'After all, she would not have been punished if she had not spoken.'
'You must admire that at least. Courage is the only quality which you
respect.'
'I admire it, but it was not wise.'
'What heroic thing ever is?'
He went away, leaving her presence with some irritation and some
discontent. He knew that he had only said what was best for
Damaris when he had counselled her to have no concealment from
her grandfather; but the idea of the child's having suffered through
his advice, the thought of her taken from her sunny happy life
amongst her orange-groves and honey-scented air, and all the gay
fresh freedom of her seas, into some strange and unknown place—
perhaps into some forced and joyless union—hurt him with almost a
personal pain.
The wild rose had paid dearly for its one day in the hothouse.
'Why could not Nadège let her alone?' he thought angrily as he
looked across the shining sea to the gold of the far distance, where
westward the island which had sheltered the happy childhood of
Damaris lay unseen.

CHAPTER XVI.
A few days later they left the coast for Amyôt and Paris. There was
no record left of their visit to Bonaventure save the rough sketch
which Loris Loswa had made, and from which he still meant some
time, when he should have leisure, to create a great picture. One
day Othmar bought the sketch of him at one of those exaggerated
prices which Loswa could command for any trifle which he had
touched.
When his wife saw it hanging in his room in Paris she laughed.
'You are determined,' she said, 'that I shall not forget my Desclée
manquée.'
'I do not think you were kind to her,' said Othmar.
'I did not intend to be unkind, certainly. She gave me an impression
of force, of talent, of a future: the sketch suggests that. But no
doubt she has married the shipwright by this time. Little girls begin
by dreaming of Réné and Némorin, but they end in making the pot
au feu for Jacques Bonhomme.'
'I do not think she will ever marry the boat-builder. I told you that
we made it impossible for her.'
'I know you did; but then you have always des billevesées
romanesques. The steward at St. Pharamond could tell you what has
become of her.'
'I have inquired. She has not returned to the island; her grandfather
never speaks of her, and no one knows anything at all about her.'
Nadine smiled.
'Ah! you have inquired already? I thought she impressed you very
much.'

'Not at all,' said Othmar irritably, as he glanced at the sketch on
which the sunshine was falling. 'But I was sorry that any caprice of
yours should have cost anyone so dear.'
'Is that all? And you are sure she has not married her cousin?'
'They say not. He is still living at St. Tropez.'
'Then she must be shut up in some convent.'
'Or dead.'
'Oh no, my dear, she had too much life in her to die. Besides, her
grandfather would have made her death known. I am sure she will
live and have a history, probably such a history as Madame Tallien's
or as Madame Favart's. She carries it in her countenance.'
'Five fathoms of blue water were perhaps the better fate,' said
Othmar.
'You are very poetic,' said his wife with her unkindest smile. 'I always
thought you had a touch of genius yourself, only it never took
speech or shape. You are a Dante born dumb.'
'Then you should pity me indeed,' said Othmar, with irritation.
He kept the sketch hanging in the room which he most often used at
his house in Paris. It served to retain in his memory that night upon
the sea when he had seen the figure of Damaris disappear in the
moonlight, amidst the silver of the olive-trees, while the fragrance of
the orange-scented air and the breath of the sweet-smelling
narcissus were wafted to him from the island pastures out over the
starlit waters.
'You will end in falling in love with that picture,' said his wife to him
with much amusement. He was angered at the suggestion. His
regret for Damaris was wholly impersonal.
'We did her a cruel kindness,' he thought sometimes when he
glanced at it. 'Wherever she be, and whatever she live to become,
she will always carry a thorn in her heart, because she will always
have the sentiment that she might have been something which she

is not. It is the saddest idea that can pursue anyone through life.
Perhaps she will marry the boat-builder and have a dozen children,
but that will not prevent her sometimes, when she sees a fine
sunset, or sits in the moonlight on the shore waiting for the sloop to
come in, from being haunted by the thought that if things had gone
otherwise she might have been in the great world. And then, just for
that passing moment, while the ghost of that "might have been" is
with her, she will hate the man who comes home in the sloop, and
will not even care for the children who are shouting on the beach.'

CHAPTER XVII.
They were again at Amyôt in the golden August weather, when no
place pleased its mistress better than the cool and stately palace set
upon its shining waters and stone piles, with the deep forests of
France drawn in an impenetrable screen of verdure around its
majestic gardens. She had a constant succession of guests, and a
kaleidoscopic infinitude of pastimes. Great singers came down and
warbled by moonlight to replace the nightingales grown mute; great
actors came down also and played on the stage which had been
built and ornamented by Primaticcio; every kind of ingenuity in
novelty and diversion was exercised for her by cunning intelligences
and brilliant wits. The weeks of Amyôt were likely to become as
celebrated in social history as the grandes nuits de Sceaux; everyone
invited to them received the highest brevet of fashion that the world
could give. Other people were immensely pleased and amused at
Amyôt and at her other houses: she alone was not. Her intelligence
asked too much; the whole world was dull and finite for her.
She had known the greatest triumphs, the highest heights of
passion, the most voluptuous ecstasies, the most brilliant of
successes, and they had all seemed to her rather tame, quickly
exhausted. Faustina appeared to her as absurd, and commanded her
sympathies as little, as Penelope.
Life's little round is all too short for satisfaction in it; it is so soon
over; it is so crowded and so transient; to have children who may do
less ill or do less well than we, to pursue aims or ambitions which
have no novelty in them and little wisdom, to love, to cease to love;
to dream and die; this is the whole of it, and the sweetest of all
things in it are its childhood which is ignorant that it is happy, and its
passion which is no sooner made happy than it pales and falls.

'If only life were like a play!' she thought. 'Any dramatist knows that
in his last act his movement must be accelerated, and his incidents
accumulated, till they culminate in a climax. But in life, on the
contrary, everything waxes slower and slower, everything grows
duller and duller, incidents become very scarce, and there is no
dénouement at all—unless we call the priests with their holy oil, and
the journey to the churchyard behind the mourning-coaches, a
dénouement. But it cannot be called a climax: the going out of a
spent lamp is not a climax.'
Her lamp was far from spent; and yet a sense of the dullness of life,
generally, often came to her. She had everything she had ever
wished for, and yet it left her with a vague sentiment of
dissatisfaction.
'I wonder if he is really contented,' she thought sometimes
doubtfully of Othmar. It seemed to her quite impossible he should
be. Why should he be when she was not! And yet there was no one
she would have liked better or so well.
The sameness of human nature irritated her. Surveying history, it
seemed to her that character, like events, must have been much
more varied in other times than hers; say in the Fronde, in the
Crusades, in the time of the Italian Republics, even in the days of
the Consulate, when all Europe was drunk with war like wine.
Nowadays people are always saying the same thing; entertainments
resemble each other like peas; wherever the world gathers it takes
its own monotony and tedium with it, and repeats itself with the dull
perseverance of a cuckoo-clock.
She endeavoured to infuse some originality into her own society and
her own pleasures; but she did not consider that she succeeded.
People were too dull. Why was it? Nobody was dull in Charles the
Second's time, or in the days of Louis Quinze, or of Henri Quatre. At
Amyôt, if anywhere, she succeeded, but, though her invitations to
the house parties there were passionately coveted, and everyone
else was so exceedingly delighted with them, the utmost she could

ever say was that she had not been too greatly bored. Modern
existence was not dramatic enough to please her.
'And yet if it be ever dramatic you say it is melodramatic, and ridicule
it as vieux jeu,' said Othmar to her once.
'No doubt I do; one is not happily obliged to be consistent,' she
replied. 'We are too intellectual or too indifferent nowadays to have
a Guise slaughtered in our antechamber, or an Orloff assassinated by
our bedside, but the consequence is that life is dull. It is a journey in
a wagon lit, one is half asleep all the time; it has no longer the
picturesque incidents of a journey on horseback across moor and
mountain, with the chance of meeting Malatesta or the Balafré en
route.'
'Yet men have died for you!'
'Oh, my dear! they never did it with any picturesqueness at all! What
picturesqueness can there be? A man falls in a duel; he is put in a
cab with a doctor! A man kills himself with a revolver; there is again
a doctor, and also, probably, a policeman!'
'Which does not prevent the emotions which lead to those incidents
from being as genuine as they used to be.'
'I know that is your theory. It is not mine. The passions are
nowadays all crusted with conventionality, like life. Look at ourselves,
as I have said to you before.'
'Well? What of ourselves?'
'You and I think ourselves very original, but in reality we are the
servants of conventionality. I told you so last winter. When we were
free and had the world before us, we could think of nothing more
original than to marry each other like Annette and Lubin, like John
and Mary. We had no imagination. We thought we should do all sorts
of fine things, but we have not done them. We have merely just
dropped back into the routine of the world like all other people.'
'I do not see what else we could have done,' replied Othmar,
somewhat feebly as he was aware.

'What a conventional reply!' she said impatiently. 'That is just what I
am saying. Neither of us had imagination, or perhaps courage,
enough to strike out any new path, though we thought we were so
much above other people. Both you and I have enough of originality
to be dissatisfied with the world as it is, but we have not originality
enough to create another one. People who have the perception
which belongs to the poetic temperament, as you and I have,
without its creative power, are greatly to be pitied. Both you and I
have something of poetry—something of heroism—in us, but it never
comes to anything. We remain in the world, and conform to it.'
'I would lead any life you suggested—out of the world if you
pleased.'
'Ah, but I do not please,' she said, with a little sigh. 'That is just the
mischief. You remember when we went to your Dalmatian castle the
first year; the solitude was enchanting, the loneliness of the sea and
the shore was exquisite, the mountains seemed drawn behind us like
a curtain, shutting out all noise and commonness and only enclosing
our own dreams; but after a little time you looked at me, I looked at
you, and we both tried to hide from each other that we yawned. One
morning when there was a rough wind on the sea and the first snow
on the hills, I said to you, "What if we go to Paris?" and you were
relieved beyond expression, only you would not say so. Now, if we
had been poets—really poets, you and I—we should never have
quitted Zama for Paris. We should have let the whole world go.'
Othmar did not well know what to reply, because he was conscious
of a certain truth in her words.
'I am not a poet, you have often told me so,' he said with some
bitterness. 'The atmosphere I was born in was too thick and yellow
with gold for the Parnassian bees to fly to my cradle. The supreme
privilege of the poet is an imperishable youth, and I do not think
that I was ever young; they did not let me be so.'
'You were so for a little while when you first loved me,' she said with
a smile; 'that is why I wonder we had not more imagination at that

time. Anybody could live the life we live now. It shows what a
stifling, cramping thing the world is; we who used to meditate on
every possible idealic and idyllic kind of existence have found that
there is nothing for us to do but to open our houses, surround
ourselves with a crowd, spend quantities of money in all
commonplace fashions, and be hated by envy and envied by
stupidity. Do you remember our sunlit kingdom in Persia that we
were to have gone to together? Well, we are as far off it as though
we were not together.'
'Do you mean then,' said Othmar impatiently, 'that you think our life
together a mistake?'
'No, not quite that; because we are more intelligent than most
people, only we have been unable to rise above the commonplace;
unable to keep our iron at a white heat. Our existence looks very
brilliant, no doubt, to those outside it, but in real truth there is a
poverty of invention about it which makes me feel ashamed of my
own want of originality.'
She laughed a little; her old laugh, which always chilled the hearts of
men.
She had always foreseen the termination of their pilgrimage of joy in
that mortuary chapel of lifeless bones and motionless dust to which
the lovers' path through the roses and raptures was so sure to lead.
But he, man like, had been so certain that the roses would never
fade, that the raptures would never diminish!
Othmar was sensible that he had in some manner failed to fulfil her
expectations, and the sense of such a fact stings the self-love of the
least vain and least selfish of men. Her life possessed all that any
woman could in her uttermost exactness require. All the perfect self-
indulgence and continual pageantry of life which an immense
fortune can command were always hers; her children by him were
beautiful and of great promise, physical and mental; her world still
obeyed her slightest sign, and her slightest whim was gratified; men
still found the most fatal sorcery in her careless glance, and society

offered to her all that it possessed. If this sense of disappointment,
of disillusion, of dissatisfaction were really with her, it could only be
so because he himself, as the companion of her life, failed to realise
what she had expected in him—was unhappy enough to weary her,
as all others before him had done.
A vainer man would have laid the blame on her, and have arrived,
through vanity, at the perception that it was her temperament and
not his character which was at fault. But all the flattery which every
rich and powerful man daily receives had failed to make Othmar
vain. His self-esteem was very modest in its proportions, and he
attributed the fact of his wife's apparent indifference to him humbly
enough to his own demerits.
'I have not the talent of amusing her,' he thought. 'I have been
always too grave—have taken life too sadly to be the companion of a
woman of her wit. I have never done anything of which she can be
very proud with that sort of pride which would be the sweetest
flattery to her; the years slip away with me and bring me no
occasion, at least no capability, of the kind of distinction which she
would appreciate. I cannot be a Skobeleff or a Gortschakoff; I
cannot make that renown which might arrest her fancy and please
her amour propre; she has loved me possibly as much as she can
love, but as she finds that I am made of the common clay of
ordinary humanity, I become not much more to her than all those
dead men whom she has tired of and forgotten.'
But whilst his reason told him this, his heart yearned to disbelieve it,
and his pride refused a meek submission to it. There was something
in her fugitive, delicately disdainful, capriciously insecure, which was
certain to sustain the passion of man, because it constantly
stimulated it; her concessions were made to his desires not her own;
she never shared his weakness even whilst she was indulgent to it.
'I have absolutely never known yet whether you have ever loved
me!' he said to her once, and she replied, with her little indulgent,
mysterious smile:

'How should you know what I do not know myself?'
It was a part, and no small part, of the ascendency she had over
him; it stimulated his affections, because it perpetually stinted them;
it made satiety impossible with her.
Yet all which excited his passions and secured the continuance of
her influence over him, left him more and more conscious of a void
at his heart which she would never fill, because a nature cannot
bestow more than it possesses. All the intellectual charm she had for
him had a certain coldness in it; her incorrigible irony, her inveterate
analysis, her natural attitude of observation and of mockery before
the foibles and follies and affections of mankind, enchanting as they
were, were without warmth as they were without pity. It was the
brilliant play of electric light on polished steel. Sometimes, with the
wayward inconsistency of human wishes, he would have preferred
the glow from some simple fire of the hearth.
There were times when the feeling which met his own left his heart
cold. He had never wholly ceased to feel that he was always in a
measure outside her life. He would have been ashamed to confess
to her many youthful weaknesses, many romantic impulses which
often moved him; there were many lover-like follies which would
have been natural and sweet to him, which he had early learned to
control and dismiss, unyielded to because he was afraid of that slight
ironical smile, and that contemptuous little word with which she had
the power to arrest the quick tide of any impetuous emotion.
The excesses of passion and the force of emotion always seemed to
her slightly absurd; she had yielded to both for his sake more than
she had ever thought to do; but her intelligence always held reign
over her with much greater dominance than her feelings ever
obtained. There were moments when he felt as if he asked her for
bread, and she gave him a stone; a most polished stone of magical
charm, of exquisite transparency, of occult power, but still a stone,
when he merely wished for the plain sweet bread of simple
sympathy.

Once, in riding alone through the forests of Amyôt, his horse put its
foot in a rabbit's hole and threw him. He was unhurt, and rose and
remounted. But he thought as he rode onward: 'If I had been
disfigured, crippled, made an invalid for life, how would she have
regarded me?'
With pity, no doubt, but probably with aversion; certainly with
indifference. She would have brought her exquisite grace, her cool
nonchalant smile, her delicate fragrant presence to his bedside, and
would have come there every day, no doubt, and have been careful
that he should want for nothing; but would there have been the
blinding tears of a passionate sorrow in her eyes, would her cheek
have grown hollow and her hair white with long vigil, would her
whole world have been found within the four walls of his sick room?
He thought not.
He sighed as he rode through the green glades of the great woods
where she had held her Court of Love.
Of love no one could speak with such science and surety as she. She
had known it in all its phases, studied it in all its madness, accepted
it in all its sacrifices; on no theme would her silver speech be more
eloquent; and love had been given to her as the widest of all her
kingdoms. But had she really known it ever? Had not that which her
own breast had harboured always been the mere impulse of
curiosity, the mere exercise of power, the mere chillness of analysis
such as that with which the physiologist gazes on the bared nerves
of the living organism? After all, why had men cared so much for
her? Only because she had been as unmoved as the moon. Men are
children; they long for what they cannot clasp. He himself had only
loved her so long, despite the chilling and dulling effect of marriage,
because he had always felt that he possessed so little real hold upon
her that any day she might take it into her fancy to leave him, not
out of unkindness but out of ennui.
Sometimes he thought with a curious compassion of Napraxine. He
thought of him now, and for a moment his own heart grew hard

against her as he rode through the beautiful summer world of his
woods; hard as had grown the hearts of men who, dying for her
sake, had felt that they had given their life for a smile, for a jest, for
a chimera, for a caprice—given it away unthanked.
But then, when he entered his house again and saw her, he forgave
her and loved her; he cared more still for one touch of her cool
white hand, the favour of one careless smile cast to him, than he
cared for the whole world of women—women who would willingly
have seen him forget his allegiance to her, and have consoled him
for all her defects.
'Otho is uxorious, like Belisarius, like Bismarck,' said Friedrich
Othmar, with an unpleasant smile. 'And alas! he is neither a great
soldier nor a great statesman, to make the weakness respected
either by the world or by his wife.'
Othmar had overheard the speech, and it had made him irritated,
and afraid lest he ever looked absurd.
'Yet,' he thought bitterly, 'if she were still the wife of Napraxine, no
one would ever see anything singular in any weakness or madness
that I might commit for her!'
Between his uncle and himself few intimate words ever passed. After
the death of Yseulte a tacit understanding had been come to
between them that neither should ever name those causes, whether
great or small, which she had had for pain and jealous sorrow in her
brief life's space. It was a subject on which they could never have
touched without a breach irrevocable and eternal in their friendship.
Friedrich Othmar visited at their houses, caressed their children,
preserved all outward amity with both of them, and devoted all the
energies of his last years and of his immense experience to the
interests of the house which he had honoured, served, and loved so
long, but with neither his nephew nor his nephew's wife did he ever
pass the limits of a conventional and courteous intercourse, which
had neither affection in it nor any exchange of confidence.

Once or twice the worldly-wise and harsh old man did a thing which
a few years before, in anyone else, he would have regarded as the
most flimsy and foolish of sentimentalities. He took the little Xenia
with him into the gardens of St. Pharamond, and made her gather
with her own small hands a quantity of violets; then he led her to
the tomb of Yseulte, and bade her lay them on it. She had been
buried there, though a sepulchre sculptured by Mercier had been
raised to her memory at Amyôt.
'Why are you not her child?' he said to her. 'Why are you not? She
would have loved you better than your own mother can.'
The child scattered her violets, then came and leaned her arms upon
his knee and looked up at him with serious eyes.
'You are crying!' she said, touching softly two great tears which had
fallen on his cheeks. Then she added gravely: 'I thought you were
too old!'
'I too should have thought so,' said Friedrich Othmar bitterly. 'It is a
sign that my end is near.'
And he envied those credulous, unintellectual, happy imbeciles who
could believe that that 'end' was only the opening of the portals of a
wider, fairer, greater life; he whose reason told him that for his own
strong keen brain and multiform knowledge and accumulated
wisdom and fierce love of life, as for the youthful limbs and the fair
soul and the pure body of the dead girl there, that end was only the
'end' of all things: cruel corruption, hideous putridity, blank
nothingness, eternal silence.
'What is the use of it all? What is the use?' he said to the startled
child, as he took her hand and led her from the tomb. What was the
use of any life or any death? What had been the use of Yseulte's?
One day he found before her mausoleum at Amyôt the most
mondaine of women: Blanche Princesse de Laon, who, in her
childish days, had been Blanchette de Vannes.
'You, too, remember her?' he said in surprise.

Blanche de Laon replied roughly:
'I loved her;—tout le monde est bête une fois!'
She stood before the marble sepulchre where Mercier had made the
angels of Pity and of Youth weeping. She was not twenty years of
age, but she knew the world like her glove. She was cruel, cold,
avaricious, sensual, steeped in frivolity and intrigue as in a bath of
wine, but underneath all that there was one little spot of memory, of
regret, of tenderness in her nature; as far as she had been capable
of affection she had loved Yseulte.
'Tiens!' she said, as she stood beside the sepulchre. 'Do you think it
has succeeded—your nephew's last marriage?'
'I believe so,' replied Friedrich Othmar with surprise. 'Yes, certainly, I
should say so; they seem quite in accord; he is devoted to her still.'
'Tiens!' she said again, and she struck the marble of the tomb
sharply with the long ivory stick of her sun umbrella. 'I watch them
like a cat a mouse. I will be even with her still; the first time there is
a little crack in what you call their happiness, I shall be there—and I
will widen it. Have you seen the drivers of Monte Carlo make an
open wound in their horses' flank on purpose? Well, this is how they
do it. A fly settles and leaves a little piece of braised skin, the men
rub that little place with sand, it widens and widens, they rub in
more sand, the sun and the flies do the rest.'
Then she struck her ivory stick once more on the marble parapet of
the great tomb.
'She died for them! She was so foolish always. But there was
something great in it. We are not great like that. If he only
remembered, I would forgive him for her sake. But he never
remembers. He does not care. A dog might be buried instead of her.'
'You cannot be sure of that.'
'Bah! I am perfectly sure. He has never even understood that she
did die for him. He thought it was an accident!'

'Hush!' said Friedrich Othmar harshly, but with great emotion. 'She
wished that he should think it so; what right have you or have I or
has anyone in the wide world to betray her last secret if we guess it?
It has gone to the grave with her, like her dead children.'
'I betray it no more than you!' she replied with asperity. 'I have given
no hint of it to any living soul; when Toinon said it was a suicide I
struck her, I made her hold her peace. I was a child then, and all
these years since I have never said a word; but you, you know; you
know as well as I.'
'It was not a suicide, it was a heroism. If there were a God, a great
God, He would have honoured it.'
'But there are only priests!' said Blanchette, with her bitterest smile.
They turned away together from the mausoleum, where the marble
figure of Yseulte seemed to lie in the peace of a dreamless sleep
beneath the shadowing wings of the two angels. Gates of metal
scroll-work let in the sunlight to this house of death; there was no
darkness in it, no terror, no melancholy; white doves flew around its
roof, and white roses blossomed at its portals.
'Madame la Princesse de Laon,' said Friedrich Othmar gravely, as
they passed across the turf, 'whenever the fly begins that little
wound in the skin that you talked of, forbear to widen it for the sake
of your cousin who sleeps there; do not make her sacrifice wholly
useless. What is done is done. We cannot bring her back to life, and
if we could she would not be happy in it. There are souls too delicate
and too spiritual for earth. Hers was so.'
Blanche de Laon gave him no promise. She walked on over the
smooth sward through the labyrinths of blossom, and crossed the
gardens where her courtiers met her, with outcries of welcome and
of homage.
She was at the supreme height of coquetry and triumph and fashion.
She was not beautiful in feature, but she was dazzling fair, had a
marvellously perfect figure, une crânerie inouie, and the advantage
and fascination conferred by an absolute indifference to all laws,

hesitations and principles. She was hard as her own diamonds,
plundered her lovers with a greed and ruthlessness which rivalled
any cocotte's, kept her splendid position by sheer force of audacity
as high above the world as though she were the most pure of
women, and before she had completed her twenty-first year knew all
that was to be known of the refinements of vice, the exaggerations
of self-indulgence, and the eccentricities of unbridled levity. She had
supreme scorn for her sister Toinon, who had espoused the Duc de
Yprès, a hunting-noble of the Ardennes, and who spent most of her
time in the provinces chasing wolves, bears, and wild deer, and
could give the death-blow with her knife to an old tusked monarch
of the woods or a king-stag of eleven points, as surely as any
huntsman in French Flanders or the Luxembourg.
The Princesse de Laon came as a guest to Amyôt with most
summers or autumns. She knew that her host disliked her, and
would willingly, had it been possible, never have seen her face; she
knew that his wife disliked her scarcely less, but that knowledge
increased her whim to be often at their houses, and she never gave
them any possible pretext to break with or to slight her. Her name
was included, as a matter of course, in their first series of guests
every season, and usually she was accompanied by Laon himself; a
man of small brains and admirable manners, who adored her, and
would no more have dared resent the liberties she took with his
honour than he would have dared to enter her presence uninvited.
'J'ai étudié vos moyens de punir votre meute,' she said once to the
châtelaine of Amyôt, with a malice equal to her own. 'Et je les ai
imités; tant bien que mal!'
She was the only person in whom Nadine had ever found her equal
in high-bred insolence, in merciless raillery, in unsparing allusions,
couched in the subtilties of drawing-room banter or of drawing-room
compliment. Blanche de Laon was the only one who could fence with
those slender foils of her own, which could strike so surely and
wound so profoundly. Blanche de Laon, outwardly her devoted
admirer and friend, was the sole living being who could irritate her,

could annoy her, and could make her feel that Time, to use the
words of Madame de Grignan, robbed her every day of something
which she would never recover and could ill afford to lose.
Before this insolent youth of Blanchette she, who had been Nadège
Napraxine, felt almost old.
She was not old; she was still at the height of her own powers to
charm. She proved it every day that she drove through the streets,
every night that she passed down a ball-room. Still Blanchette,
twelve years younger than she, reigning in her own world, repeating
her own triumphs, awarding the cotillion to her own lovers, made a
certain sense of coming age approach her. Age was not at her elbow
yet, but she saw his shadow in the doorway. She forgot that
approaching shadow at every other time, but Blanchette had the
power to point it out to her in a thousand ways imperceptible to all
spectators. Hundreds of other young beauties grew up and entered
her society, and met her daily and nightly, and she never thought
once about them, except when she wanted them for a costume
quadrille at her ball in Paris or tableaux vivants at Amyôt. But
Blanchette forced her to think of her; forced her to see in her a rival,
perhaps an equal, in those kingdoms where she was wont to reign
alone. Blanchette, when she let her myosotis-coloured eyes gaze at
her, said to her with cruel pertinacity and candour:
'You are a beautiful woman still, but you owe something to art now;
you will have to owe more and more every year; you would not dare
be seen at sunrise after the cotillion now; soon you will dance the
cotillions no longer, but your daughter will dance them instead of
you. How will you like it? You have too much esprit to be Cleopatra.
You will not give and take love philtres at forty. You will have too
much wit. But when your empire passes you will be wretched.'
All this the blue keen eyes of Blanche de Laon alone of all women
said to her, anticipating the years that were to come, asking in irony
—

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The Key Texts Of Political Philosophy An Introduction Thomas L Pangle

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