The Platonic Political Art: A Study of Critical Reason and Democracy By John R. Wallach. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. 468p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper

Aristide Tessitore

American Political Science Review, 2002, vol. 96, issue 3, 628-629

Abstract: Not only is the practice of a genuinely Platonic political art compatible with a commitment to democracy, but, according to John Wallach's ambitious book, it furnishes a needed critical resource that can help tap the unfulfilled potential of democracy at the present time. Wallach's unconventional thesis emerges from his critical historicism, a method that attempts to carve a mean between the relatively ahistorical readings of Popper, Strauss, Arendt, Derrida, and Rorty (among others) and the radically historicist readings more typical of classicists and ancient historians (pp. 21–23). Whereas the latter tend to subordinate Plato to the historical and political forces of his time, the widely disparate interpretations of the former cohort view him as either “authoritarian” or radically “self-mocking.” In either case, Plato is portrayed as an antagonist to the freedom and equality of democratic life. To release the Platonic political art from the grip of these influential but debilitating interpretations, Wallach seeks to navigate between the ahistorical elevation of theory (logos) and the historicist subordination of theory to practice (ergon), focusing instead on the dissonance of the logos/ergon relation itself.

Date: 2002
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