Plato: Meno. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

Jacob Klein: A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

Usually, inquiring Socrates asks the questions. Not so, on this occasion, initially. A wealthy young aristocrat from Thessaly, Meno, wants to know if aretē (excellence, virtue) can be taught. If not, does it come into being by practice? Or by nature, at birth? Or in some other way? An aristocrat might prefer to suppose that excellence comes by nature, as an inherent, inherited birthright to rule. But Meno isn’t an ordinary aristocrat.

These questions open Meno to a salvo of characteristic Socratic irony. “Meno, it used to be that Thessalians were well-reputed among the Greeks” (70a); in fact, Greeks generally regarded them as disorderly and licentious. They “were admired both for horsemanship and for wealth” (70a); that is, the substance of their good name consisting of a type of physical virtuosity and of money. “Now,” however, “it seems to me, they are to be admired for wisdom [sophia] also” because Thessaly is the home of the rhetoricians and sophists (‘wise’ men), Gorgias being the man “responsible for this happening” (70a-b). Gorgias was a Sicilian, student of his fellow countryman, Empedocles, the poet-philosopher, a materialist who nonetheless taught that human souls are reincarnated. Socrates recalls that “When [Empedocles] came to the city, he captivated the foremost men among the Aleuadai”—the Thessalian ruling class, including Meno’s lover, Aristippus—proof that Gorgias’ rhetorical art worked, at least insofar as it permitted rhetorician-sophists to get paid for changing the character of regimes (70b). Gorgias taught Thessalians the habit or custom Meno may expect Socrates to exhibit: “answering both fearlessly and magnificently whenever anyone asks you anything, as is fitting for those who know” (70b-c). (Then again, it may be that he expects to ‘show Socrates up,’ to establish the superiority of his own art of rhetoric over Socratic philosophizing.) Rhetorician Gorgias always has the answer, presenting himself as a man of ready knowledge (epistēmē). Any Greek, any Hellene, “who wants to question him about whatever one might wish to ask, and there is no one whom he does not answer” (70c-71a). Gorgias is a democrat, or at least one who aims at instructing, and perhaps influencing, anyone and everyone, democrats and oligarchs alike. This leaves open another question, however: Was Gorgias’ answer the right answer? Aside from the art of rhetoric, what does a rhetorician know? How wise is a sophist? 

And what of Meno’s name? Is it good? Klein observes, with his own touch of irony, that “Meno” resembles the Greek mnêmê, which means “mind,” and “we note that in the name ‘Meno’ the sequence of those two letters is somewhat deranged” (45). “Gorgias might well know what aretê is, while Meno might merely know what Gorgias said it is” (45)

Alas, here in Athens, Socrates explains, “the opposite condition prevails”; “it’s as if some sort of drought of wisdom has come about, and there seems to be a danger that wisdom has left these parts for yours” (71a). I, poor Socrates, don’t know if excellence can be taught and I don’t even know what it is. I blame myself for my ignorance. It will transpire that Athenians do assume that they know what excellence is, and how it can be taught, a circumstance that puts Socrates at odds with many citizens who assume that they are virtuous. For the moment, however, Socrates positions himself as just one of his fellow Athenians.

But Socrates, Meno asks, didn’t you meet Gorgias here in Athens? (That is, did you not learn how to have answers to such questions ready to hand?) Yes, but “I’m not a very good rememberer,” the philosopher who forgets nothing replies; “remind me,” and since, Meno, “you know what he used to say” and tell me what excellence is (71c). Gorgias’ student’s strength rejoices in the challenge. A man’s excellence, he replies, consists in “the ability to carry on the affair of the city and while carrying them on to do well by his friends and harm to his enemies and to take care that he not suffer any such thing himself” (71e). By contrast, a woman’s excellence consists in managing private business, managing the household, in keeping the things stored there safe, and in obeying her man. Boys, girls, freemen, slaves likewise have their excellences, as befits their condition. “According to each activity and each time of life to each task relative to each task for each of us there is an excellence, and in the same way I suppose, Socrates, there is also a vice” [kakia]” (72a). As it happened, young Meno would later become a leader of Greek mercenaries in an expedition launched by Cyrus the Younger against his brother, the King of Persia, Artaxerxes II. Xenophon, who went on that expedition, regarded him as treacherous and grasping—indeed “excellent” in managing public business after his own fashion, helping an ever-shifting constellation of friends and harming enemies who once were friends, all while keeping himself safe, at least for a while. Artaxerxes won the war, captured Meno, and eventually had him executed. In the event, the manly virtue of helping friends and harming enemies (both of them shifting categories) could not prevent Meno from being harmed in turn.

Rhetoricians would rule ‘the many’; rhetoricians thrive in democratic regimes like Athens, not only among Thessalian oligarchs. Socrates replies that he had sought one definition of excellence and instead received from Meno a “swarm” of excellences—a ‘many,’ a democratic mob of them (72a). But do bees differ from one another? No, they’re all bees, Meno admits. Then excellences must have something in common, too, something that makes them excellences, just a swarm of bees has something in common, namely, the species, ‘bee,’ the eidos, the idea, the definition. Moreover, health, size, and strength are the same in a man and a woman, are they not? True, men manage public business, women private, but it isn’t possible to rule anything well without phronēsis, practical wisdom, dikaisounē, justice. “Then all human beings are good in the same way,” Socrates urges (73c). Meno might have noticed, as Klein does, that Socrates has composed human goodness of two excellences, not one (Klein, 52), and that will require Socrates to refine his own definition, later. Meanwhile, Socrates asks (now appealing to Meno’s memory of his teacher’s teaching, not to Meno, who has proven himself unequal to the task), what does Gorgias say excellence is? It is “to be able to rule over human beings,” Meno replies (73c), exposing the nerve of Gorgias’ rhetoric, which deploys words at the service of decidedly material, Empedoclean, ambition; words are substitutes for force, the ultimate in ruling materially, but ruling in a cleverer way than force does. 

But if excellence is the ability to rule human beings, how could children and slaves rule, since they too have excellence, according to Meno? Alternatively, if excellence is not the ability to rule, should children and slaves not be able to rule? Socrates’ listeners (if not Meno himself) and Plato’s readers see that the attempt to rule with words, with logoi, opens the rhetorician to the authority of logic, of logos, to the principle of non-contradiction.  To rule with excellence, would one not then need to rule justly? And are there not excellences other than justice, such as courage, moderation, wisdom, and high-mindedness? Meno agrees, but Socrates then observes that we are back to many excellences, “but the one which exists throughout all of these we are not able to find out” (74a). What is excellence itself?

There is a still more preliminary question to consider. Reasoned or logical speech requires a definition of definition itself. Socrates therefore steers the dialogue into a consideration of “figures”—i.e., “shaped surfaces” such as round, straight, and the like (74b). He goes further, saying (as Meno sees) that “figure [schêma] always accompanies color” (75c). That is, a surface always has some color or colors on it; as Klein puts it, “we become aware of surfaces of whatever shape only by seeing color” (59). Meno calls this silly, since Socrates hasn’t defined color. Socrates has thus induced Meno to imitate Socrates, to demand a definition, to turn the tables; like a rhetorician-sophist, he picks up techniques in order to win. He wants to use words, not to define them.

Socrates begins his reply by distinguishing himself from sophists, those “wise men, with a bent for strife and contention” (75c-d), not a desire to arrive at the truth—exercising an art rhetoricians may well include in their repertoire of ruling abilities. Friends don’t do that, a point that recalls Meno’s claim that excellence entails helping one’s friends. Socrates knows how to win arguments by encirclement, rather as a general does, but it is encirclement by means of logic, the “more gentle and more dialectical way of answering” (75d), which wins arguments by disposing of falsehoods, exposing contradictions, illogic. Old Socrates may prove a better general, of this sort, than Meno will prove to be, of the more ordinary sort.

Every thing has a boundary, Socrates observes, “like those things in geometry”; “figure is the limit of a solid” (76a); it defines the solid. Yes, but I still want to know what color is, Meno insists, since you brought it up. Oh, Meno, you are hybristes—assertive, prideful. “You pose troublesome problems for an old man to answer, but you yourself are unwilling to recollect and say whatever Gorgias says virtue is” (76a-b)—this, on the ironic ‘assumption’ that Meno must have been kidding when he said the wise Gorgias called excellence the ability to rule men, when that definition is utterly inadequate and therefore could not possibly have been Gorgias’ opinion. In another attempt at tough-minded realism, Meno chooses to bargain: I’ll tell you the definition you want as soon as you tell me the definition I want. Socrates is up to the challenge. “Even someone who is blindfolded would know, Meno, from conversing with you that you are handsome and still have lovers” (76b). That is, Meno’s words alone reveal what he is, his ‘definition.’ It might be that Meno’s ‘looks,’ whether seen or inferred from his speech, are one source of his hybris. “Why, indeed?” befuddled Meno asks. “Because,” Socrates ripostes, springing the trap (he does have ready answers, at least to some questions), “you do nothing but impose commands in your arguments, the very thing that spoiled people do, so as to tyrannize as long as they are in their prime” (76b). The demand to be told, to be given the answer in the way a beauty expects gifts, suggests that Meno doesn’t want to work for what he wants. Like physically beautiful people, Gorgian rhetoricians get what they want without working. “It is likely that you’ve noticed about me,” Socrates flirts, as “that I have a weakness for beautiful people” (76c). In other dialogues, Socrates does indeed seek beauty, if not physical beauty, and his auditors learn from handsome Alcibiades that the old fellow is quite capable—excellent, even—of resisting physical beauty. Words, which rhetoricians and sophists take to be deceptive, agents of manipulation, can be made to reveal the inner man, his soul beneath the beautiful surface, if they are used ‘dialectically,’ in a procedure of question-and-answer in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction. But Meno’s boundaries amount to things he’s been told, a horizon consisting of mere memories, “the all-pervasive and habitually accepted opinions of mankind” (Klein, 72). Meno has a beautiful surface but an impoverished interior, which he seeks to fill with gifts, attractive opinions, to be acquired with little or no effort by him.

And then, with mockery cloaked lightly by courtly deference, “Do you want me to answer in the style of Gorgias, by which you might be as much as possible, able to follow?” (76c). Socrates then gives a none-too-definitive Empedoclean definition of color, decorating it with a Pindar quote and thereby winning Meno’s laughing affirmation of its excellence. Socrates suggests that Meno approves “perhaps because [the definition] was said in accordance with the way in which you have been habituated” (76d); that is, because it is familiar, a matter of memory, not the kind of knowledge achieved by thinking, by intellectual effort. “Because it is a tragic answer,” one consonant with impressive theatrics, rhetorical declamation, Socrates remarks, driving the nail into the coffin of Meno’s compliance, “it satisfies you more than the one about figure” I had given before, in prose. “But it is not better, son of Alexidemos”—fathers hand down ‘poeticized’ stories to sons— but I “am persuaded that the other [definition] is better”; I, Socrates, use words to inquire into custom, not to reaffirm it or to turn it for my own purposes with some form of rhetoric (76e). And you might agree with me, if you were not obliged to go off before the Mysteries, as you said yesterday; you have only to stay and be initiated in my philosophic ‘mysteries.’ Socrates invites Meno to abstain from traditional religious practices and instead become an initiate to Socrates’ reasoning prose, logos. Meno consents.

Very well then, how about that definition of excellence you owe me? Meno recurs to a poetic quotation, still preferring to remember what someone else said, rather than thinking for himself: excellence is “both to rejoice and to be capable in beautiful things,” to long for them and get hold of them (77b). Socrates immediately rephrases this: “Do you mean that he who desires beautiful things is someone who desires good things?” (77b). Of course, beautiful Meno readily says. This implies “that there are some people who desire bad things, and others who desire good things?” (77b-c). In distinguishing the “beautiful” from the “good,” Socrates suggests that one who is beautiful, accustomed to receiving gifts from lovers, might or might not be good. Some people desire what is bad, thinking it good; others know that something is bad but still desire it. For his part, Meno observes that some people “believe the bad things benefit,” while others “recognize that they injure” (77d), which Socrates explains as wanting the good but mistaking the bad for the good, a mistake that makes one “miserable” and thus “ill-fated” (78a). Eros or desire is universal, but “according to your argument,” as Socrates generously ascribes it, excellence is “a power of providing good things for oneself” (78c). 

What are the good things? Health, wealth (especially gold and silver), public honor and appointments, Meno says. Here we learn that Meno is the “ancestral guest-friend of the Great King” of Persia, whom he will seemingly betray by joining Cyrus’ expedition, before betraying the Greeks (78d). Health, wealth, public honor and appointments are the good things Meno wants and wants more of. But what if one acquires these things unjustly? Socrates asks. You need to “add to this getting” some “piece of excellence,” “or else it will not be excellence, even though it were a thoroughgoing provision of the good things” (78e). The mere “power of providing good things for oneself” does not define excellence. But if one needs to “add” such excellences as moderation and justice to the soul in order to make its strivings virtuous, you, Meno, are yet again breaking excellence into “pieces,” failing to tell me what it is. “Pieces” are the result of analysis, but before you analyze you must know what it is that you are analyzing, the outline or border of it. We have reached an aporia, an impasse in the argument, what English philosophers often call a “puzzle.” We need to start over.

Meno resists. He does not lack spiritedness, but he directs it toward resisting reason, not toward following it to a conclusion. “You seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations so that I come to be full of perplexity [aporia]“ (80a), he complains. Socrates, you remind me of a stingray, whose touch makes one numb, numb in soul and in mouth; I can neither think nor speak. I am usually quite eloquent, having “made a great many speeches about virtue, and before many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway”; yet now “I’m altogether unable to say what it is” (80b). Unlike Gorgias, the traveling rhetorician, you, Socrates, should never “sail away or emigrate from here,” because as a foreigner you’d be arrested as a wizard (80b). “You are prudent” not to do so (80b). Socrates refuses to be brought to an aporia by Meno’s rhetorical imagery. You are only comparing me to the ugly, soul-numbing, speech-numbing stingray because, like “all beautiful people,” you “delight in having images” made of you,” as it “pays them” to have that done for them (80c). You say you are perplexed, but (unlike the supposedly wise Gorgias, one may recall), I am the one “unprovided” with answers and “perplexed” (80c) “Nevertheless, I am willing to look with you and seek together for whatever [excellence] is” (80d). Meno finally sees an opening, one that Socrates himself has provided. If answers to the question, ‘What is excellence?’ are inadequate when they consist of multiple examples instead of one general definition, and if, moreover, you profess to know only what you do not know, how will you seek the knowledge you desire? And even if “you should happen upon it how will you know it is that which you did not know?” (80d). You are no better than a sophist, yourself.

Socrates might reply that his interlocutor was the one who asked about excellence in the first place, and justice requires that he give a coherent definition of his own term. But Socrates is more immediately concerned with Meno himself, not his dodgy speeches. Meno’s argument implies “that it is not possible for a human being to seek either what he knows or what he does not know,” since “he could not seek for what he knows because he knows it and there’s no need of any seeking for this sort of person; nor could he seek for what he does not know, because then he does not know what he is seeking” (80e).  Meno is intellectually lazy, preferring to memorize and speak without bothering to know what he is talking about. But he imposes his own sort of aporia upon the argument, leaving Socrates to figure a way out of it, this time.

Unsurprisingly, Socrates is up to the challenge. Since Meno cares most, or at least professes to care most, about what pious authorities—poets, priests, and priestesses—tell him, Socrates will reason with him within the limits of pious opinion. Very well, then, what do the religious authorities, with their mastery of pious convention, say? Socrates cites priests and priestesses, whose “concern” it is “to be able to give an account [logos] about those things they have taken in hand” (81a). Excellence, virtue, is ‘their’ primary topic, their field of expertise. Can they, or such “divine poets” as Pindar, give such a logos, even as Meno admittedly cannot? (81b). They do indeed offer an account, which is the doctrine of reincarnation. “They declare the human soul to be immortal, and that at one time it comes to an end, which they indeed call dying, and again, at another time, it comes into being, but is never destroyed” (81b).  For this reason, one should “live through one’s life as piously as possible” (81b). To this wholesome moral teaching they add an intellectual dimension. “Inasmuch as the soul is immortal and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and in the house of Hades, there is nothing which it has not learned, therefore “nothing wondrous about its also being able to recollect about excellence and about other things, which it already knew before” (81c).”Nothing wondrous”: Socrates gives Meno a sort of ‘revelation,’ a foundational religious belief, but in order to induce him to inquire further, to be “courageous” and untiring in learning (81d). There may be a problem with this priest-and-poet story: it gives an entirely ‘experiential’ account of virtue, an account or logos that leaves no place for logos as reason, no way to verify what the soul has seen on earth and in Hades by enabling it to find contradictions among the phenomena it has seen, if there are contradictions.

And how did souls begin to learn? There must have been a time when the soul had no store of memories, when it was young. The account may be an ‘infinite regress.’ Also, the account omits the heavens, as the soul never looks above the earth. That is not where Socrates takes the argument, however, because he is still interested in seeing what might be done with Meno’s soul, if only to exhibit its true nature to the onlookers.

Be this as it may, Socrates has channeled a religious “account” or myth into an invitation to philosophic inquiry. “All nature is akin,” on earth and in Hades, Socrates has said. (81c-d). Nature is a whole, a ‘one’ that consists of ‘many,’ many parts but all connected. This is an inquiry into nature by natural means, reducing the “memory” derived from reincarnation to one thing—to not accepting what you suppose you’ve learned from religious and poetic authorities and instead inquiring ‘on your own,’ or perhaps with the assistance of reasoning friends. If Meno were to accept the invitation, he would move away from rhetoric and sophistry.

To which Meno can only say, ‘What?’ How did remembering suddenly become learning? Ah, you “clever rogue,” Meno, you are trying to catch me in a contradiction (82a). But I can prove to you that learning is remembrance. Lend me one of your slaves, and “I’ll be able to exhibit things for you” (82b). After all, if nature is a whole, and all human nature is one, surely even a slave boy will be able to tell us something about that nature. Socrates then brings geometry back, recalling his definition of definition as a boundary line. He begins the conversation with a simple geometrical problem, drawing four squares within a square. If each square has a side of one foot, then two times two equals an ‘area’ of four square feet, as the boy readily answers when asked. See? I haven’t taught him anything. He got the answer out of himself and is therefore “remembering,” which indeed it is, if one accepts Socrates’ definition of remembering as seeking and learning. He then gives the boy a harder problem, showing that even a slave boy can learn that he knows that he does not know. This aporia, this numbness, about which Meno has complained, is an improvement in the soul of the boy. He now “does not think that he knows” (84b). In this bit of improvisational comedy, Socrates tacitly invites Meno to remember that the same has happened to him, but to see that it is good. Being stunned into a condition of aporia is not harmful, as Socrates-the-stingray is held to be, playfully by Meno and soon, with deadly seriousness by Socrates fellow citizens in Athens. Socrates, philosophic inquiry, is in danger not only if the philosopher travels abroad but just as much if he stays in his own polis. Philosophy is at risk in any polis. People don’t like to have their habits, their customary way of life, their regime questioned. But at least when it comes to the condition of an individual soul, not knowing it doesn’t know is the harmful thing.

By continued questioning, Socrates has brought the boy the answer to the more complex problem. The boy has gone from mistaken opinion to “true opinions,” showing Socrates, and all the gathered witnesses, that “there are true opinions about the things which he does not know” (85c). Since no one taught him—Socrates has “only been asking questions”—he got the “knowledge out of himself,” from Memory 2.0 (85d). You, Meno, know that your slave boy has never been taught any of this, so my claim must be true, perhaps a “true opinion.” “True opinion” is a formula that begs the question of how one arrives at the truth. One way not to arrive at it is to become indignant or embarrassed when your opinion is proven wrong, as Meno inclines to do. In Klein’s words, “to submit oneself to refutation without feeling angry and feeling disgraced is the first and indispensable step in the process of ‘giving birth’ to something true, that is to say, in the process of learning” (105). When Meno goes so far as to admit that he knows that he doesn’t know something (“You seem to speak well, Socrates, I don’t know how.”) (86b), Socrates immediately concurs, while avoiding hybris by confessing that “I would not assert myself altogether confidently on behalf of my argument” (86b) while averring that “I would surely battle, so far as I am able, both in word and in deed,” in “supposing one ought to see  what one does not know we would be able, more able to be brave and less lazy than if we supposed that which we do not know we are neither capable of discovering nor ought to seek” (86b-c)—a firm, implied rebuke of Meno, but one without the stingray’s sting, since Socrates has allowed Meno to see how beneficial aporia can be, without wounding the young man’s considerable pride, by making the slave-boy the example, not Meno himself. As Klein remarks, this “brings back the theme of excellence” (183). It is “the peculiar aretē of Socrates himself” to undertake this fight (183). [1]

Meno remains persistent in one way: he still wants to know if excellence can be taught, or if it comes to men by nature or in some other way. His memory for the things he wants is strong, even as it contradicts his assent to the learning-is-memory theory; he stubbornly wants to be told but is far from firm in his willingness to ‘remember’ in the sense of thinking. He has not really ‘remembered’ Socrates’ lesson. “His answers are not his answers, his judgments,” Klein observes, but merely reproduce opinions of others,” and “his questions are not really questions, since they do not stem from any desire to know” (188). Like some of the figures geometers draw, his soul has no depth, “no ‘inside'” (189). He is “a clever man totally incapable of learning,” perpetually stuck in amathia, ignorance because so weak in the distinctively human excellence (199). It has nothing of “the character of what is called in technical geometrical language a ‘solid” (190).  But the soul and the polis both must be studied in this third dimension, “in depth” (191). [2]

No less persistent, Socrates ‘re-minds’ him: “Yet, Meno, if I were ruling not only myself, but you too”—rather as you are the master of the slave boy, who, unlike you, is willing to make the effort to learn—we “would not first look at whether excellence is something teachable or not teachable before we first sought what it itself is” (86d). Socrates suggests that Meno makes no attempt to master himself because he wants to be “free” (86d). Freedom, for Meno, is giving speeches and taking actions that will boost him into positions of ruling authority and the honor most men give to it, whether by consent or not. Like ‘the many’ as later described by Aristotle, he defines freedom badly, as ‘doing as one likes,’ and what he likes is to rule others by speeches, not so much to rule himself by reason. Socrates pretends to yield, at last, even as he eventually pretended to yield to the Athenian democracy’s jury—that is, yielding with a qualification. “Relax your rule a little bit for me,” Meno, by granting me a working hypothesis, even as geometricians propose when they offer a proof (86e). Without waiting for Meno’s consent, Socrates presses on: We don’t know what excellence is or even what it resembles, so let us posit that virtue is “some sort of thing among those things that have regard to the soul” (87b). Are such things teachable or not teachable? Socrates has not defined excellence, but he has defined the problem, drawing a boundary around it, the soul (which he does not define). Is excellence like or unlike knowledge, which is teachable? If so, it can be taught. (It is also true that falsehoods could also be taught, inasmuch as what Klein calls Meno’s “innumerable accepted opinions” (211) are indeed taught in the polis.) 

“If there is something good, and it is something separated from knowledge, it may be that excellence would not be some sort of knowledge; but if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, then we would be might in suspecting what we suspected, that it is some kind of knowledge” (87d). This recalls Socrates’ claim, and Meno’s concession, that eros ought to seek what is really good, that excellence is the ability to acquire what is genuinely good. If by virtue we are good, and all good things are beneficial, helpful, then virtue must be helpful. Conversely, bad things are harmful. By beneficial, Socrates means “whatever right usage directs,” by harmful, not so (88a). But who or what leads a soul to the good? Taking, then, the long list of virtues Meno has already identified, the thing they all have in common is phronêsis, practical wisdom or prudence. For example, courage is boldness, but with prudence. Without prudence, it will be not beneficial but harmful.” The same goes for the other things Meno admits to be good, such as health, strength, beauty, and wealth. All the things undertaken and endured by the soul when directed by prudence come to an end in happiness, but when controlled by thoughtlessness in the opposite?” (88c). If so, then excellence consists not, or not simply in knowledge, epistêmē, but phronêsis. Prudence is what guides the soul and its characteristics toward a good purpose, a right telos. The same goes for things external to the soul. Wealth and political office too are good if used prudently. As Klein writes, “all that the soul attempts or endures, when led by wise judgment (phronêsis) ends in happiness (eis eudamonian), when misled by lack of judgment (aphrosynē), in the opposite (eis toūnantion), in misery” (214). Excellence is the “exercise of wise judgment” (214). Plato’s reader recalls that near the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates lamented the lack of wisdom, of practical wisdom or wise judgment, in Athens, pretending it had all gone to Thessaly, thanks to Gorgias.

No one is born prudent. If men were good by nature—that is, at birth—then we could, and should guard them on the Acropolis, “setting our seal of them much more than we do with gold, so that no one could corrupt them, and that when they should come of age, they could become useful to their cities” (89b); readers will recall that Meno covets gold, but the lesser kind. Since men are not good by nature, then they must somehow gain their excellence by “learning.” Meno agrees, but mistakenly, saying that “if excellence is knowledge, it is teachable” (89c). He has mistaken knowledge for prudence; he has heard from Socrates what he wants to hear, revealing the answer he wanted to hear from Socrates when he first asked the question. We have learned something—about Meno. His wishes are the fathers of his thoughts; he does not master himself, if right mastery is rule of reason over the desires for external good misconceived as whatever one may want. Rhetoricians and sophists encourage such assumptions, finding them lucrative.

Which turns out to be Socrates’ next point. “If anything whatever is teachable, and not only excellence, are there not necessarily also teachers and learners of it?” (89d). Gorgias’ prize student replies, “Does it seem to you that there are no teachers of virtue?” (89e). I can find none, Socrates confesses, leaving Meno to ponder the implication, with regard to his own supposed knowledge. And indeed to the status of knowledge itself, which only finds right use when guided by wise judgment. Needless to say, Meno does not so ponder. And neither do the ‘guardians’ or rulers of Athens, who listen more attentively to the itinerant rhetorician Gorgias than to its philosophic native son, Socrates.

At this point, Anytos sits beside them. Meno is his guest-friend, a status that was itself a longstanding custom among the Greeks. It is “fitting” to give him a share in the inquiry, Socrates announces: he has a wealthy and prudent father, whose wealth came not by fortune but by that very prudence and effort; his father has a good name generally in the polis, is “an orderly and well-mannered man” who “brought up our man here well, and educating him well, as the majority of the Athenians judge; they elect him, at any rate, to the highest offices” (90b). We understand that the arts, from medicine to shoemaking, can be learned, but what about excellence? Anytos quickly establishes his adherence to the gods of the polis, swearing “by Zeus” (90e). He seems to be a man who orients himself to the gods of his political community.

Can one learn the excellences from the sophists? “By Heracles, watch what you’re saying, Socrates”: the sophists “are the debasement and corruption of those who associate with them,” Anytos bluntly asserts in front of his guest friend, who may have some sympathy for such teachers (91c). It transpires that Anytos has no actual experience of sophists; he ‘knows’ they are bad, has an opinion (whether right or wrong) that they are. Stay away from them, he recommends, and learn excellence simply by consulting “any Athenian gentleman,” who will know all you need to know about the beautiful and the good (92e).

Socrates is less than impressed. How did the well-bred gentlemen learn excellence? Was it fortune? No, they “learned from those who were gentlemen before them,” or, Socrates, “don’t you think there have been many good men in this city?” (93a). No mean rhetorician himself, Anytos wants to win the argument by maneuvering Socrates into a choice between insulting the Athenian aristoi or conceding the point. Socrates replies with ironic measure, that “there are good men in politics here” (leaving aside their gentlemanliness), “but have they also been good teachers of this excellence of theirs?” (93a). Have they known “how to hand over to another the virtue in which they were good, or whether this is not something able to be handed over or to be received by any human being from another” (93b).  The reader is left to recall that Anytos’ argument suffers from the same flaw as the reincarnation myth: infinite regress, but Socrates keeps things on a simpler level. Was the great Athenian statesman Themistocles a good man? “The best of all,” Anytos affirms (93c). Was he a good teacher of his own excellence? Anytos supposes so. Except that he wasn’t, Socrates is bold to say. His son, Cleophantos, was taught to be a good horseman—a skill, an art—but he did not learn excellence of character. Many of the most prominent gentlemen of Athens have similarly failed. Indeed, Anytos’ father was such a good man, who gave his son a good education, quite evidently to little effect. Anytos falls into an angry silence, after warning Socrates to watch his mouth. He will later become one of Socrates’ accusers at trial, rhetorically successful in winning a vote of ‘guilty’ from the jury. Klein comments, “Anytus’ anger is rooted in his firm reliance on the prevailing opinion (doxa) concerning the respectability or unworthiness of people, that is to say in his firm reliance on the good or ill repute of those people” (239). Like Meno, his soul is filled with the shadows on the wall of the cave, the Athenian polis, and so he too is a man of amathia, in this respect similar not only to Meno but to Athens itself, “where it is easy to do evil to people, or, for that matter, to do them good, as he himself says,” menacingly (239). The people of Athens have put their regime at risk precisely by assuming, with the foreign sophists and rhetoricians, that excellence is readily taught, passed down either from fathers to sons or from sophistical rhetoricians to rulers who are indeed ‘sophisticated.’ Anytos doesn’t like those foreigners, but in this respect, he thinks just like them.

Meno takes up the argument, observing that his teacher, Gorgias, does not claim to teach excellence of character, and so (he implies) is exempt from the criticism Socrates has leveled at the Athenian gentlemen-politicians. Gorgias the rhetorician claims to teach an art, the art of speaking well, but he laughs at Sophists, who claim to teach virtue, denying that virtue can be taught. Socrates cites another kind of artist, the poet Theognis, whose name sounds like ‘knower of God,’ who contradicts himself on the topic. But “could you declare that people who are so confused about any subject,” Socrates asks, “are, in any authoritative sense, teachers of it?” (96b). “No, by Zeus,” Meno swears, unwittingly raising the question of whether the gods themselves teach excellence. He has finally been brought to wonder, however: “I really wonder, Socrates, whether perhaps there are no good men, or what could be the way of generation for good men to come to be?” (96d). 

In his answer, Socrates initially directs Meno to look not ‘up’ to the gods but ‘in,’ to his own nature. “Above all, we should apply our minds to our very selves,” undertake self-knowledge. and thereby to see “that has escaped us that it is not only when knowledge is directing that human beings act rightly and well in their affair” (96e). Since “right opinion” is as good a guide as knowledge (the man who knew how to get to the city of Larissa would get you there no better than the one who had the right opinion of how to get there), a guide who has walked every step of the way will do no better than the man of right opinion derived by perusing an accurate map (97b). The problem is that “true opinions” tend not to last; “they are not willing to stay put, but run away out of the human soul,” unless someone should bind them with causes by reasoning” (97a).  “This is why knowledge is worth more than right opinion, and, by its binding, knowledge differs from and excels right opinion” (98a). If I know the reason for something, it becomes more than a mere impression on the mind, an impression that will fade. In this, Socrates is surprisingly certain; he knows that he knows this, he says. 

It is nonetheless the case that the rightness of an opinion “presupposes the existence of truth which only epistêmē—or phronêsis—can reach” (Klein 250). Those eminent “political men,” the ones Anytus esteems, use right opinion “to straighten out their poleis,” but “they do not know what they say,” having failed to reason their way to the content of their speeches, their rhetoric (99b-c). (Is Gorgias any different? one might ask.) Like the oracle chanters and prophets and poets and artists, politicians are not rational or knowledgeable. They are radically dependent upon the Other, or others. If Anytos will be unhappy with such dependency, as Meno cautions, Socrates avers, “That doesn’t matter to me” (99e). We’ll have a talk with him, later. Socrates concludes on this note of piety: “But now, if we in this whole account both searched rightly and were speaking rightly, excellence would be neither by nature, nor something teachable, but has come by divine dispensation without intelligence in those to whom it might come, unless there should be that sort of man among the political men who could also make someone else politic” (99e-100a). That is, he now turns Meno to right, allegedly divinely inspired, pious right opinion, having shown that he is unlikely to philosophize.

But (once again) we still need to know “what excellence, itself in itself, is” (100b). That is, we will need to know whether the gods are actually dispensing excellence in two ways: are they really the origin of it? and is what they give us real excellence? 

But “now it is time for me to go” (100b), Socrates announces, with abrupt prudence. In this, Socrates imitates the action of Anytos, but with the opposite effect. No reader is likely to regret Anytos’ departure from the conversation, but many readers may want to hear more from Socrates. As for Meno, Socrates tasks him with an action. Martial your rhetorical art and “persuade your guest-friend Anytos here too about those very same things that you yourself have been persuaded so that he may be more gentle; for if you do persuade him, you will also confer upon the Athenians a benefit” (100b-c). In the event, Meno was unable to persuade Anytos of any such thing. Either his persuasive skill, learned at the feet of Gorgias, lacked the power Meno supposed it had, or he didn’t make much of an effort. And so, Athens lost Socrates.

Plato’s readers have not necessarily lost him, however. Klein concludes, “we, the readers and witnesses of the dialogue, have to continue the search for human excellence on our own” (256). In doing so, one needs to be mindful of the inclination of most fellow-citizens, individually and collectively, to resist thinking.

Notes

1. At this point in the dialogue, Klein interrupts his commentary with an illuminating discussion of memory and cognition as presented in other Platonic dialogues in which they figure: the Republic, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Philebus, and the Theaetetus. The Republic features the image of the “divided line” which mark four “states of the soul” (112). The line divides the intelligible, which consists of two kinds of thought, opinions and the cognized, from the visible, which consists of two kinds of visible objects, the images or surfaces of things and the “originals” of those images. The images depend upon the originals, as opinions depend, or should be made to depend, upon the cognized. Typically, we can distinguish the images of things from the visible thing themselves; Plato calls “this faculty of ours, to see images as images” eikasia (114). “We see ‘through’ an image, as it were, its trustworthy original,” an act that bring pistis or trust to our soul (114). The prisoners in the Cave manifest eikasia when they turn their heads away from the shadows of the idols and look toward the cave’s opening, toward the sunlight. On the level of thought, doxa or opinion parallels the images, dianoia or thought parallels eikasia. Thinking or reasoning governed by the principle of non-contradiction enables human beings both to make discriminations and to draw connections among the objects of thought, as seen in arithmetic, inasmuch as “in the act of counting we both separate and combine the things we count” (117). “To begin thinking means—in any conceivable case and for any conceivable purpose—to begin searching for some clarity about the matter we are dealing with” (118). The kind of eikasia exhibited in thinking, leading to noesis or insight, understanding, “could be rightly called dianoetic eikasia” (119). “It is thus that our dianoia makes the visible things depend on their intelligible originals” and it is thus that our opinions can be improved in the ‘light’ of the things we tentatively cognize—tentatively, because “the power to clarify fully the suppositions of our dianoia may not be given to mortal men” (122). On the level of dianoetic eikasia, the human soul is ‘turned around’ or converted, “mark[ing] the beginning of a new life,” the philosophic life, “tolerable only to a few” (124). Meno is not among them; he prefers not to undertake the arduous “action of learning” (172). In the Phaedo, the dialogue presenting Socrates’ last hours before his execution, “recollection” means the rational ability to relate one thing to another, as when one relates images, “the apparently equal visible things,” to “an intelligible ‘original'” (129). Here, the claim of immortality for the human soul, the ‘reincarnation’ theme seen in the Meno, comes to be seen as a continuation of the distinctively human excellence, “the effort of dianoia” in following logos or reason through subsequent generations of thinkers (149). Those who continue Socrates’ quest ‘reincarnate,’ immortalize, Socrates. “The process of ‘recollecting’ would mean nothing but the very process of learning guided by Socrates’ prescriptions” (150). This process itself is ‘immortal’ in the sense that learning “is in no way concerned with any past moment of time but is uniquely interested in the content of the knowledge to be acquired” (150). Then, in the Phaedrus, Socrates shows that “human souls, unlike those of the gods, are not quite able to see all the truth”; their knowledge must “always be tainted with ignorance” and therefore “no man can be wise” but at best only a philosopher, a lover of wisdom (151). In this process of dianoetic eikasia memory has three aspects: it retains “our immediate experience, which is based on our outer and inner sensing”; it stores knowledge; and, in the incompleteness of that knowledge, it is “the source of our desires” for more knowledge and indeed for wisdom (156). Finally, the Theaetetus explores how human beings make mistakes, form mistaken opinions, by failing to “apply our thinking in earnest” and with sufficient logos (162). Still, a certain zetetic caution or skepticism is necessary, as insight into “the highest order of things” can never be fully conveyed by “the fragmenting medium of speech,” which “is not quite capable of coping with ‘wholeness'” (168). This is why efforts to tell people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—which is what Meno wants Socrates to do and what rhetoricians like Gorgias claim to do—are vain. A philosopher can only go so far as to tell myths better than the ones on offer from rhetoricians, better because more nearly in line with the moments of noesis they have experienced. Those myths are intended less to convey the whole truth than to “initiate an effort in the soul of men and to beget action,” as it is “in action that human excellence and its opposite reveal themselves” (171). This is what Socrates’ “myth of recollection” is for, and it conveys what Socrates does in word and deed, what he avers that he “fights” for.
2. Thus, in the Meno, “the myth of recollection” has “fulfilled its function, not that it had any effect on Meno, but it has helped us to understand Meno’s soul” (209). This leads Klein to another valuable excursus, this time into the Republic and the Timaeus. In the Republic, the education of the guardians consists first of plane geometry, then the science of numbers followed by study of “solids,” of depth, and finally of heights and motion—astronomy. This education “binds the theme of the ‘solid to the theme of the polis” (192), one feature of Socrates’ ‘ideal’ polis or ‘city in speech,’ in logos. Genuine guardians guard the polis against one-dimensionality, against allowing the regime, the politeia of the polis, from “los[ing] its ‘depth,'” abandoning its telos or purpose, which is to seek justice. In the Timaeus, Plato addresses the question of three dimensionality more extensively. To understand the cosmos, one cannot look only to the “Father,” the model of all that is, “accessible only to intellect and thought” (193), or to the “Mother,” the receptacle or indeterminate space or “room” in which all change occurs (194), but also to their “offspring,” the “visible world around us, the domain of everything we sense” (194), including human beings, who however consist not only of visible bodies but of physically invisible souls, as does all of the cosmos. “The stretching of the Soul across the Whole, which stretching amounts to the very constitution of the Universe as a ‘whole,’ is achieved by means of numbers and rations of numbers,” which we study in arithmetic, logic, and harmonics (195-196). Here again one uncovers depth, ‘solidity’ of bodies and of souls, of the Whole and of Soul. The limitation of human knowledge may be seen in the fact that intellect perceives surfaces, geometric shapes, ‘definitions.’ Intellect can, however, perceive that bodies and souls have depth, are three dimensional; a soul has “capacity,” the ability to learn, “which is its capacity to grow on proper nourishment” (199). Intellect can ‘infer’ what the soul is, on the inside. Meno has cut himself off from that self-knowledge, preferring to fill himself with mere opinions. “Socrates and Meno counter-mage each other, Socrates putting the effort of learning above everything else, Meno never relenting in his unwillingness to make that effort, an unwillingness compensated by his readiness to rely on his memory” (201). While Meno’s outside, his body, is beautiful, his inside, his soul is “ugly”; while Socrates’ outside is ugly, his inside, his soul, is beautiful, as Alcibiades recognizes, in the Symposium.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

This review was originally published in Perspectives on Political Science. Volume 53, Number 2 (2024). Republished with permission.

In The Prince, Machiavelli adjures his reader not to attempt to understand things in terms of Platonic ideas or Aristotelian substances—in terms of what things are—but in the surer, more visible, terms of what their effects are. This evidently comports with his Heraclitan claim that nothing stable exists, that change is the only constant. To put it another way, “Machiavelli’s effectual truth is opposed to the truth according to nature” (3) This is a philosophic claim and Mansfield shows that Machiavelli is indeed a philosopher, unrecognized as such by most academic philosophers today—moreover, a philosopher whose influence has endured, not only among the philosophers who succeeded him but in the way our world now works. The effectual truth of Machiavelli is that he not only understood the modern world but created it. In keeping with such creativity, “Machiavelli appears to have invented the word effectual” (3). He was able to do so by giving his philosophic successors, preeminently Montesquieu (another philosopher unrecognized as such) the scope to exercise their own formidable capacities of invention or creation, while remaining within the line of thought Machiavelli forged. Mansfield opposes the assumption of most scholars, who take Machiavelli and his writings to have products of their time and place, the Italian Renaissance. Against these historicists, Mansfield assets that “modernity had a founding rather than an emergence, a founding by a philosopher, the philosopher being Machiavelli, who was a philosopher” (4).

These are large claims. Mansfield vindicates them in seven chapters, seven being the number of days in which, the Bible testifies, God created the world. The character of the world, and the character of creation, loom large in Mansfield’s interpretation of what Machiavelli calls his “enterprise.” Unlike God, Machiavelli could not effectively create a world in seven days, or even in his own lifetime. He needed the effectual truth to be instantiated by succeeding thinkers and doers, philosophers and political men.

They would do so by obeying what Machiavelli says is necessity. “Necessity pays no regard to the complete nature of a virtue that is distinct from accidental circumstances” (6). Necessity requires thinkers and doers alike to cultivate the classical or Christian moral virtues that complete or ‘save’ human beings according to their nature but to cultivate virtù, which empowers men to master the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune, using them as weapons against their rivals. [1] “Using” is exactly the right word, as Machiavellians do not have honesty or dishonesty, fidelity or infidelity, charity or miserliness; they use them in order to rule. Although Machiavelli does not hold up Bacon’s project, the modern scientific project of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, he “anticipates” it “more or less clearly” (6). Scientific “facts,” etymologically related to “effectual” things, by necessity tell you what to do, but also enable men of virtù to manipulate them. Human nature itself is malleable. “The ‘is’ of necessity leads to the ‘ought’ of necessity” (8). That is, the lure of the conquest of fortune and of nature will keep subsequent philosophers and doers more or less in line, not despite but because of their own grand ambitions, ambitions fired by the experience of reading Machiavelli, whose overarching ambition they perpetuate and perfect.

Although Machiavelli famously or notoriously deprecates imagined principalities, such as Plato’s ideal republic or Augustine’s City of God, imagination itself remains, albeit redirected from “imagined things ‘above’ this world” to future things within it (12). Imagination must be “disciplined by fear and advantage in this world, fear of failure and perception of the main chance afforded by the effectual truth” (12). (“Strange but true, the word ‘effectual’ made its way into the king James version of the Bible in 1611,” about a century after Machiavelli passed on to his reward.”) (12). Thus disciplined, imagination enables one to conceive of an impresa, that is, an enterprise or a campaign in a war which, like Christianity, is a spiritual war primarily, one that may entail physical wars. Imagination and deed can now be brought together. “Borrowing their unification from Christianity, and transforming the sovereignty of God into the government of necessity,” Machiavelli “had to show that what Christianity did through revelation as opposed to philosophy, he would do through philosophy alone” (15). That is, God’s providence, acknowledged in the formidable, prayerful, “Thy will be done,” gives way to the combination of natural necessity and human virtù; the effectual truth of necessity now dominated by the effective thought, speech, and actions of Machiavellians. This Machiavelli has done, as seen in the continued existence of the modernity he founded. “By substituting necessity for the good, and effectual truth for the imaginary truth, Machiavelli has made a fundamental change in the relation of philosophy to politics” (20). In this, he is, despite his many successors, uno solo, a man alone (29). Machiavelli’s perspective on political science is that politics as Aristotle understands it, as ruling and being ruled in turn, should not and cannot really exist, that the ultimate relation is that of one ruler over the ruled, of masterly or perhaps parental rule, rule for the good of the master or for the good of the master and his subjects or ‘children’—their good now defined in terms of virtù, not virtue. The Christian as child of God gives way to the prince as child of Machiavelli, ruling children of his own.

Machiavelli, then, is the prophet of the modern world because he is a king or prince of the modern world; he created it by discovering and asserting “the fundamental principle that builds and maintains the modern world” to this day (32). He has been ‘saved’ not by God but by himself, having achieved “a life beyond life” by his own efforts, with no divine assistance. As for the soul, Machiavelli hints that it does not exist, either. Instead of souls, human beings have “humors”; the few seek dominance, the many seek to resist domination. Whereas Aristotle sought to reconcile the few and the many via his “mixed regime,” consisting of a harmonious agreement between the two factions, Machiavelli lauds the two factions. Both seek to acquire, in defiance of classical moderation and the Biblical injunction against greed. They must acquire because they fear one another, and so need to provide for themselves against one another. To found and maintain a sound political regime, men must be brought back to that primal fear of one another, and of fortune. Their very disharmony brings life to republics, animated not by agreement but mutual hatred. Animosity inspires virtù. “The goal of virtù,” the goal of the prince, whether spiritual or political, is the power and the glory, world without end (47). “The prudence of a prince can put his form on the material of his principality” (55), and Machiavelli’s principality is the modern world he foresees/imagines, rules (‘in spirit’) and creates, by the grace of fear and acquisitiveness, well-used.

But are they well used? “To make a judgment on the success of Machiavelli’s enterprise one must be aware of the alternative to it in the classical tradition” (70). For an account of that tradition, Mansfield turns to the one who upheld it against Machiavelli, Leo Strauss. Yet Strauss used one aspect of Machiavellianism against Machiavelli even as Machiavelli used one aspect of Christianity against God. He effected a line of philosophic captains, called ‘Straussians,’ of whom Mansfield himself has been rumored to number. And indeed, Mansfield acknowledges that in his book, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss identifies Machiavelli as a philosopher and as the founder of modernity, judgments Mansfield has affirmed. Strauss further identifies the Bible as book that “sets for the demands of morality and religion in their purest and most intransigent form,” a formula that “appears to leave open the possibility that philosophy, whether classical or Machiavellian, might find a reasonable substitute that does not attempt an impossible purity, that does not seek to remove the taint of unreason arising from every human being’s (including every philosopher’s) necessary concern with his own body” (78). Machiavellian philosophy, by contrast, opposes both the Bible, “which says that man needs God, and the classical tradition, which says that he needs nature” (78).

Machiavelli thus partakes of some of the nobility of philosophy, the province or principality of only a few persons in any generation. He “teaches evil,” as Strauss wrote, in the sense that he undermines all antecedent forms of morality; accordingly, he makes the young his principal audience, not the old men brought up under those forms. Machiavelli does not, however, undermine morality simply, for the many who do not philosophize cannot be ruled very long unless convinced that what they are commanded to do is right. Machiavelli’s new morality will consist of orderly pursuit of acquisition by the many and resistance to princes who interfere with that orderly acquisition. He arranges things so that the great ambitions of the few will seem less blameworthy to the many, now with their own more modest ambitions.

As for Strauss, by juxtaposing Machiavelli to the Bible and to classical philosophy, he shows that the Great Tradition, seen in the Great Books, deploys a sort of Machiavellian device against any unthinking appropriation of Machiavellianism. Rather like the conflict between the few and the many in a republic, in which their opposition gives each a degree of liberty even as each side acknowledges the necessity of guarding itself against the other, so do the Great Books sustain the liberty of thought necessary to philosophizing by its train of authors who contradict one another. Ancients and moderns, reason and revelation confront one another, forcing those who attend to them to think. “Strauss has no enterprise aiming at conquering the world” but he does intend “to contribute towards the recovery of the permanent problems” (85 n.26). 

During the course of this chapter, Mansfield notes that Machiavelli lacks any sense of the tragic. In tragedy, we are invited to admire the hero while weeping at the consequences, the effectual truth, of his flaw. Like morality itself, the tragic hero demands to be taken seriously. Comedy inclines to deflate such claims, to laugh at flaws, to ridicule failure. Mansfield’s following chapter, central to the book, concerns Machiavelli’s comedy, Mandragola. “The Mandragola makes for a good introduction to Machiavelli” (95). If so, why does Mansfield place it fourth in a sequence of seven chapters? The placement is a spur to wonder, the beginning point of philosophizing. The chapter itself partakes of comedy and one might be pardoned for thinking it even more entertaining than the play itself. Although rather smutty, “the play is about morality, not about eros” (96). Machiavelli portrays a childless couple, a wife who cannot conceive a child because her husband is impotent or sterile. She needs a stud, a lusty lover, to inseminate her. The wife’s name, Lucrezia, recalls ancient Rome’s Lucretia, whose rape “occasioned the founding of a republic” (97) when outrage over the crime inspired people to raise against the tyrant who committed the crime. In his Discourse on Livy, however, Machiavelli treats “these affairs” in a manner “altogether distant from the chaste spirit of republicanism” in ancient Rome (98), the chastity that makes erotic longing more intense both in the classical world and in the Christian world of knights in shining armor. In the Mandragola, the seduction, rather than the rape, of Lucrezia is treated with a spirit equally distant from ancient republicanism. It is a play about keeping up the appearance of morality, depicting an intricate conspiracy in which all the players—wife, husband, lover, priest, matchmaker/pander—effectively collaborate to get what they want, betraying “every ordinary human trust” while never letting on that trust has been betrayed (101). Everyone acts out of considered necessity, including the necessity to pretend that morality and the trust that morality generates, the trust that holds republics together, has remained as inviolate, as chaste, as Lucrezia is persuaded, and persuades herself, to be. The priest/fox/sophist persuades her, and in doing so demonstrates that Christianity, or at least Christian priests, might be adapted, used, for Machiavellian ends, as indeed they were in many of the modern states founded by Machiavellian princes, who subordinated the church to the state in still another example of acquisition. In all, “Men need to believe in order to trust one another, and to trust one another in order to work together, and to work together in order to survive” (113). Morality is necessary, even if it is necessary to invent a new morality. Lucrezia’s impregnation is a parody of Mary impregnation by the Holy Spirit, whom Machiavelli thereby suggest was neither holy nor a spirit. The new morality of virtuosity aims at the mastery of Fortuna, to which topic Mansfield turns in the final three chapters.

He begins by contrasting Machiavelli with his contemporary ‘civic humanists,’ with whom he is often lumped by careless scholars. The matter is philosophically important: to borrow Socrates’ image, does Machiavelli ascend from the cave that represents the conventional opinions of his time and place, including the conventional academic opinions, or does he not? Is such an ascent even possible? Mansfield maintains that it is and proves it by contrasting Machiavelli’s thought with that of “the hero of ‘civic humanism,'” Leonardo Bruni, a serious man of formidable learning (127). The great historian Jacob Burckhardt errs in as it were folding Machiavellian thought into the Renaissance, in effect making the Renaissance somewhat ‘Machiavellian’; other, lesser, scholars even more carelessly fold Machiavelli into Renaissance humanism, making him seem more or less the same as Bruni and Petrarch. Mansfield has a high old time needling the likes of Hans Baron, J.G.A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner, who take this position; it would be a mistake to assume that his own comedy ends with the chapter on the Mandragola. One such person, he writes, “seized on civic humanism and used it for all it was worth, and more” (13)). Another invokes Aristotle’s thought, as “beamed through the ontology of Martin Heidegger” (131). Admirers of the civic humanists “in fact” (as Machiavelli might say) “would not want to live in the polis if it meant doing without clean underwear—which it does” (132) While having his fun, Mansfield also gets down to business, remarking that while Bruni’s Laudato Florentinae Urbis “remains very much within the Aristotelian tradition” of epideictic rhetoric, praising Florence as Rome’s worthy successor in order to inspire it to live up to the praise, Machiavelli intends to set Florence and the rest of Italy and indeed the world generally on a course that will depart both from ancient and Catholic-Christian Rome. Most pointedly in terms of political science, Bruni looks to the classical idea of the regime as the central concern of that science. But “whereas Bruni, following Plato, considers the site [of the city] as a place for a regime, Machiavelli considers it so as to bring out the necessities that override the choice of regimes” (139). Machiavelli’s ‘geopolitics’ puts emphasis on the ‘geo’ as a means of spurring princes to conquer it. The earth is not God-given, only a pile of clay susceptible to remodeling by hands wielded by men of virtù. The regime question, which depends upon the answer to the question, ‘What is justice?’ takes second fiddle, at most. “The political is essentially tyrannical; no one who rules acts for the common good”; “effectually politics is acquisitive tyranny” (141). This notwithstanding, and speaking for himself, Mansfield is far from dismissing men like Bruni: “It seems to me that on the whole the humanists understood politics better than we do”—for starters, they took Aristotle seriously—and “possibly even better than Machiavelli” (146). The same cannot be said for their enthusiastic admirers of the past half-century.

It might even be that one could fault Machiavelli’s approach to the conquest of fortune from within the framework of his effectual truth. For such a critique, Mansfield turns to Montesquieu and his magisterial The Spirit of the Laws, a work in which the philosopher (whose philosophic status, like Machiavelli’s, is equally denied by academic philosophers today) makes a show of rejecting “Machiavellianism” while tacitly showing how its effectual truth can be made more effective. Again following Strauss, who demonstrates the importance of the central passages of certain kind of books but also the importance of the longest chapter within them, Mansfield devotes by far his longest chapter to Montesquieu not only because Montesquieu wrote an unusually long book himself but because he wrote an unusually subtle and important one. In writing about this chapter, one can only skim the surface, although it may be that the surface of a thing tells one something about what lies beneath.

“Through Montesquieu’s relationship with Machiavelli, one may find the key to the argument of this marvelous work as a whole” (151). While “draw[ing] the foundation of his work from Machiavelli’s critique of the ancients and of Christianity, summed up in his notion of effectual truth,” Montesquieu “corrects the influence of Machiavelli, known as Machiavellianism, because it maintains rather than removes the error it was meant to criticize” (151). By emphasizing the rule of “one alone,” the rule of a prince of the (modern) state or the rule of a prince of thought, Machiavelli is despotic, all-too-despotic. He is, one might even venture to say, insufficiently comical; he does not apply his characteristic ‘reductionism’ to the pretensions of loners. Montesquieu’s “disapproval of despotism” is “the spring behind his most characteristic political teaching, the constitutionalism of separation of powers and of checks and balances that is to ensure the power of ‘one alone’ does not prevail” (151). “Montesquieu departs from the orders of Machiavelli in replacing the shock of encountering the world”—the use of a spectacular act of cruelty to leave the people satisfied and stupefied—with “the impression (producing the ‘opinion’) of comfort and trust we know as ‘security'” (155). For him, necessity remains both a sobering reality and a thing to be mastered, but it is not as harsh. To be sure, Plato’s Laws, in which the argument might be said to circle back around to the argument of his Republic is (in Montesquieu’s phrase) “not suitable today” (157), and perhaps never—partaking, as it does, too much of an illiberal despotism. But so does Machiavelli’s republicanism, on display in the Discourses. Similarly, the Biblical God, preeminently “One Alone,” rules with an iron fist. But there is a way of ruling, and of acquiring the things that men want, that isn’t despotic. Commerce is “a topic of extreme importance to Montesquieu” because “commerce softens the harsh mores of the ancient republic and enables regimes to devote themselves to peace rather than incessant war” (159). Commerce requires the rule of law bolstered by an independent judiciary, neither conducive to despotism. Commerce replaces the passion despotism instantiates with mild “interest,” guided by a “sense of dispassionate calculation” (160, 161)—the ‘modern’ substitute for classical phronēsis. More precisely, it emerges from the Machiavellian passion of acquisition, tempering it without transforming it into a classical, much less a Christian, virtue. “Machiavelli is correct that the passions govern mankind, but he did not understand how they can work to cure their own vicious effects” (162). He may not have tried very hard to inquire into the possibility.

But what, exactly, does Montesquieu mean by the spirit of the laws? Machiavelli relegates law to the status of a mere product of force smartly or stupidly used. Montesquieu takes law much more seriously, although he too attends to the “spirit” that animates a given set of laws. While laws are formed and executed by spirited men, they also form “the general spirit, the mores and the manners of a nation,” Montesquieu insists (164). The modern philosophers writing in the centuries between Machiavelli and Montesquieu imagined a ‘state of nature’ whose necessities drove men to form the civil societies that framed laws for themselves, but “Montesquieu does not adopt the liberal state of nature” (165). Like Hobbes and Locke, he does want to “enlighten men by drawing from them their prejudices,” which they used the state-of-nature doctrine to do so, but he will do so by “relying on [men’s] flexibility, not on a fixed nature found by consulting the state of nature,” rejecting “the simplification of politics in the liberal state of nature previously set forth because it substitutes a theory for careful reasoning and thus abstraction for awareness” (166).

Far from rejecting the materialism of the moderns, Montesquieu “compares the government as well as the soul to the mechanism of a watch that has a spring that makes it work, distinct from other parts” (166) A “spring” of the soul obviously is not “spirit” in the Christian sense, resembling rather Machiavelli’s term, animo, which contrasts with anima, the Latin word for the Greek psyche, seen, for example, in the title given to Aristotle’s book on the subject. For Montesquieu, the effectual truth of the spirit of the laws is equally “as human as the mechanism of a watch” (167)—man-made. But the effectual truth of Machiavelli and Hobbes denies scope for human liberty, having yielded absolute monarchy or princeliness in European political practice. A more subtle and measured account of human action is, to borrow their own term, necessary. In the numerology deployed by both Machiavelli and Montesquieu, the number seventeen denotes nature. Sure enough, seventeen relations form the components of “what is called THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS,” as Montesquieu fairly shouts to his readers. These include the main physical characteristics of the country, “to which the laws are related,” “the relations of the laws, both civil and political, to one another” (170) That is, for Montesquieu nature isn’t something to be understood as a whole, as a cosmos, let alone a cosmos created by God, but as a set of things, human nature being “the various encounters humans have with nature,” things “isolated in separate kinds, each responsible as the cause of human responses in their positive laws” (170). This could not be farther from a distinction without a difference with respect to its implications for political science. By ‘complexifying’ nature and the relationship of human beings to it, Montesquieu denies the possibility of effectively conquering it by the virtù of ‘one alone.’ Princeliness of philosophers and political men alike must stand aside, giving “room for choice” and balance among this “large number of specific necessities” (170). Not the “friendly companion,” the cosmos, the “home for man” posited by the classical philosophers nor the “enemy to be mastered” posted by the moderns, nature gives man space to be “neither passive nor aggressive but reactive in a spirit of self-defense against necessity, shown in human laws rather than in Machiavellian virtù, hence moderately” (170).Montesquieu downgrades necessity to “the ‘spirit’ that moves men to act, distinct from the reason or end toward which one moves,” as propounded by classical political science, while making the constitutional mechanisms of separation and balance of powers more consistent with if not identical to the Lucretian nature of things and the Machiavellian way of the world (171).

In Montesquieu, classification of forms of government follows neither Aristotle’s regime theory nor Machiavelli’s classification of states into principalities and republics, although he is closer to Machiavelli. He divides the rule of the one into monarchy, whose “spring” is honor—a false honor philosophically but “useful to the public” because it combines obedience to the will of the prince with obedience of both prince and people to the laws (173). It is therefore “moderate” in Montesquieu’s own, un-Aristotelian way, one “compatible with” the “materialism of effectual truth” (174). Despotism, whose “spring” is fear, is the rule of the one without the rule of law, much less useful to the people for that reason. When the people themselves ruled in the ancient republics, the “spring” of government was virtue, later “epitomized in the monks devoting themselves to the virtue of the Christian republic” (177). Such austerity amounts to still another form of despotism, a despotism of the many; “the virtue of the ancients runs into despotism and destroys itself,” as indeed it did in Rome, its republicanism giving way to Caesarism, its Caesarism to Christianity (178). Mansfield notes that all three of these political forms, including monotheistic Christianity, exemplify the rule of “one alone”; Christian and modern political thought and practice bear down hard on human liberty. “The practice of the ancient republics of relying on virtue leaves them in the situation of having to decide whether to excuse or punish its absence, which is either too weak or too strong” (180). This is precisely the situation of governments under the dominion of Christianity (itself “the effectual truth of Socratic philosophy” [188]): whether “to follow the New Testament and forgive or the Old Testament and punish severely” (186). Machiavelli’s critique is sound but his cure no better; modern states, Montesquieu famously writes, themselves need to be cured of their Machiavellianism.

The cure is a new republic, one constructed to avoid the despotism inherent in the old republics. Its “spirit” is “negativity, enshrined in the separation of powers, and its most characteristic end, the opinion of each person that his liberty is secure” (195). This republic derives not from the state of nature, which “the fearful one alone” escapes by contracting with similarly fearful ‘ones’ (196). It derives instead from the experience, the spirit, of England, in which Montesquieu discovers “the individual,” the one “we know today in a civil society of political liberty” (196). Montesquieu calls England “the only nation in the world whose constitution has political liberty for its direct purpose” (196). Borrowing the notion of “power” from Hobbes, Montesquieu shows that England separates and distributes it into the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches of government. In the power of negation inherent in each, ‘between the slats,’ as the saying goes, the English citizen-individual enjoys the opinion of his own liberty. No philosopher designed this regime and no priest or set of priests rules it. Nor do the people, who register their opinions politically by the device of representation. The liberty of the people is best characterized not as full security but negatively, as a sense of inquietude; they rule themselves not by strict reason, as philosopher-kings might do, but by a sort of reasonableness. One thinks of Locke’s formula, the reasonableness of Christianity. They exercise reasonableness in civil society by practicing liberty of commerce; the few philosophers living in such regimes will practice commerce in what would later become known as the marketplace of ideas, practicing the study of what our contemporary academics now call the topic of ‘comparative regimes,’ a practice at which Montesquieu himself was no slouch. Incidentally, in his liberal—now in the sense of generous, hospitable—spirit does Montesquieu not seem reminiscent of a great man who lived between himself and Machiavelli, another man now seldom classified as a philosopher, Michel de Montaigne?

For both citizens and philosophers, “nature is not man’s enemy, as with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the human spirit of liberty thrives in the cold [climate] that forces reactive industriousness upon us” (202). Lazy priests come out of the hot climates of the East and the South; they have no just place in the bracing winds of the North, since such men preach that industry is punishment for sin. At the same time, the ambition to conquer nature stoked by the philosophers of modern science resembles “in its rigid universality” the “religions it replaced,” tending toward “a universal doctrine of rigid destiny”—a not-so-divine form of providence (205). Belief in that doctrine accounts for the principal weakness of the English, their tendency to commit suicide, despairing of the very liberty they should enjoy. Such Baconianism must be cured, being a form of Machiavellianism—itself the one wrongful piece of Machiavelli’s thought. “A free constitution needs a free self” (207). A free self secures its preservation but also maintains the liberty that secures its pleasure and happiness.

Similarly, in philosophizing one needs the liberty to think for oneself. Hence the exoteric character of philosophic writing, ancient and modern, and the esoteric character of philosophic thought. “It is never enough for readers to be told what is there in the text, for they will never be convinced by someone else’s discoveries. One must make them for oneself; that is why they are hidden.” (209). One cannot discover a secret concealed by a writer without exercising reason, thought governed by the principle of noncontradiction, first enunciated by Socrates. In this, Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Aristotle, and Plato concur, and their disagreements also invite their readers to and then require their readers to exercise reason. Mansfield demonstrates that such inquiry can find things, that “one should not lose heart” in observing the contradictions of great men or the varieties of “spirit” seen in the world (209).

Mansfield characterizes “the three central books of The Spirit of the Laws” (Books 15-17) as a consideration of civil and political liberty against slavery, which at core is a consideration of how to “save” liberalism “from the slavery to philosophy it has inherited from Machiavelli” (210). If the modern state Machiavelli invented is large and centralized, and therefore inclined to tyranny, its very size (deemed necessary for effective self-defense and acquisition) enables its civil society to be distinguished from its government in a way that the small, centralized ancient polis could never be. In commending this distinction, Montesquieu extends and complicates the liberalism of John Locke. Locke finds political liberty in the social contract which men have made to emerge from the state of nature, a condition of “perfect freedom” nonetheless “within the bound of the law of nature” (210). But this oversimplifies nature, as Mansfield has shown, making it too much a thing of necessity, too ‘Machiavellian,’ impinging upon the liberty Locke esteems. To save political liberty from philosophers’ overly necessitarian conception of the nature of things, Montesquieu introduces the topic of “women,” who symbolize philosophers, and their relation to “men,” who symbolize politics. Women-philosophers are fickle of spirit and indiscreet, gossipy, as may readily be seen in such examples as Machiavelli and Socrates. But this is admissible in a modern republic, preferable to the enslavement of women seen in in the ‘Oriental despotism’ of, for example, Persia (where, the eunuchs, by the way, in Montesquieu’s hands symbolize “the priests of in the Church”) (212). Women-philosophers should enjoy the liberty republicanism affords them, but legislators should reign them in a bit by “giv[ing] effect to their natural modesty or shame”—in the case of philosophers, “the shame of their original imperfection, their ignorance” (212). (For Montesquieu, one might suppose, not a certain kind of knowledge but ignorance is the original sin.) That is, Enlightenment philosophes should rethink their project—set a “damper on “their ambition and turn it to moderation,” become more ‘politic’ (213). Philosophy is the highest form of commerce; ergo, its practitioners should take care to become ‘economical’ in their bearing. It is true that modern commerce, now far more wide-ranging and precisely aimed than its counterpart in earlier epochs—thanks to the compass, an instrument of modern science—cannot “produce voyages that compare with ‘the charms of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid‘” (221), and the money that serves as the instrument of commerce lends itself to the establishment of “the impersonal state rather than Machiavelli’s stato,” and even “excludes a personal God as well” (222). It may be, Mansfield suggests, that Montesquieu contemplates a time when the wisdom of the ancients might “come in handy” (223), unironically, not in the Baconian spirit. If modernity “is not permanent, it may be wise not to obliterate previous sects, as new sects like to do” (223).

Consequently, “Montesquieu is careful to set himself at some distance from Machiavelli’s,” and the Enlightenment philosophe Pierre Bayle’s, “hostility to Christianity” (224). Christianity’s gentleness sets it apart from despotism, even if its monotheism tracks too closely to ‘one alone.’ (One might even suggest that its trinitarianism resembles the wholesome separation of powers.) Machiavelli’s conspiracy against the soul, which the Christian God would save for Himself and for its own good, and his liberation of the desire to acquire in the name of harsh necessity, will not simply be abandoned but it will be tempered. Montesquieu “softens the harshness of modern subordination to necessity—no extreme measures!—and calls it moderation” (228). (One recalls Nietzsche’s indignant counter-thrust: this is mediocrity that is but called moderation—to which Montesquieu might reply, ‘Just so, and consider the effective truth of your stricture, in the centuries since you wrote it.’)

Montesquieu’s political philosophy retains natural right among the several sorts of law. It is no longer “the dominant principle of all principles as with Plato’s idea of the good or Aristotle’s archē,” but it survives as knowledge of “how the order of laws must relate to the things of nature being enacted upon and in not causing confusion among the plural principles that should govern men” (228), a prophylaxis the principle of non-contradiction has the power to effect. Nor does human reason need “to conquer nature,” with the earlier moderns; “instead, it can come to terms with nature as the ‘order of things.'” (228). As for natural law, as distinguished from natural right, “natural sentiments” replace them both, in anticipation of Adam Smith, that eminent philosopher of commerce (229). Human law now “takes a path that could be understood as natural and in this way to replace natural law” (236). In all of this, Montesquieu carefully distances politics from philosophy, married by the Church and not divorced by Machiavelli. Looking ahead to future excesses, Montesquieu would reject any religion of humanity as a return to simplisme. Political philosophy is good, so long as it restrains itself from becoming all too political; Christianity is also good, so long as it restrains itself from becoming all too political. This is to say that Montesquieu “legislates not as a founder, all at once, like his predecessors the ancients and the early moderns, but in his way, ‘little by little,’ through history” (237). “He will be a rare prince of moderation and discretion” (237). If the spirit of the laws “is its reason,” reason is seen in the variety of laws, adapting itself circumstances in the in the variety of places for the varieties of people, as the peoples move through time (238). Reasoning that ‘abstracts from’ the various natural and conventional, and natural-conventional, things has the effect of despotism in philosophy and in the state—that is, in theory and in practice. Within that modern state, Machiavelli’s inclination to erase the forms of aristocracy, of nobility (along with the sense of the good and of the noble), foments despotism, as Tocqueville would warn, a century later. The modern state needs a civil society with groups of men organized to resist the despotic inclinations of ambitious ‘executives.’ Among these, the philosophers should thrive, so long as they do no more than inherit the quest of wisdom from one another and do not seek to rule as if they have achieved comprehensive wisdom, even and especially about the effectual truth of things, which becomes visible in time but is hard to see ahead of time. In light of this teaching, Montesquieu may be said to have issued a firm warning to the Enlightenment philosophes he inspired.

Mansfield concludes his study with that very Tocqueville and his “startling Machiavellianism” (247). He, too, “feared that philosophy had become dogmatic and was giving bad advice to society as well as to other philosophers,” concluding “that the best way to oppose a bad philosophy was to show it bad effects rather than to argue openly against its mistaken premises” (249). But perhaps going beyond Montesquieu’s correction of Old Nick, Tocqueville opposes materialism with praise of spirituality as a way of moderating the effects of civil-social egalitarianism. In civil society itself, he moderates egalitarianism not by opposing democracy with by-now-weakened aristocrats (who might at best serve as benevolent ‘guides’ of democracy), but with civic associations consistent with democracy but resistant to its excesses. The risk Tocqueville sees is that with Machiavelli’s “destruction of gentlemanly honor the principle of egalitarian democracy is given entrance, later to develop into the spiritless sort of democratic republicanism Machiavelli did not want,” a form of government wherein “the princely element of mastery becomes the centralized administration” the Tocqueville calls “the science of despotism” (251). For “if risk can be contained by rational control, there is little or no need for virtue—or even of Machiavellian virtù—and rigorous necessity can be led by degrees to security and comfort, leaving honor and glory behind” (251). “Instead of giving aristocracy new life, Machiavelli had destroyed it with his formula of ferocity and cunning, lion and fox,” thereby inadvertently founding “modern democracy” (255). Now, it should be observed that Tocqueville doesn’t quite say that, saying rather that modern democracy evolved in rather the manner Montesquieu might expect, beginning not with Machiavelli but Christianity. Further, Christianity revealed what the ancient philosophers had reasoned out for and among themselves, that human beings are all equal in the sense of being all of the same natural species. It is this that enables Tocqueville to combine, as Mansfield so well puts it, “democracy, Christianity, and ancient nobility in a whole”—although “democratic overall,” to be sure (256). In this sense, “From Machiavelli…Tocqueville has learned how to reacquire the world” (258).

Note

1. Strictly speaking, of course, Christian virtues do not save Christians souls; God does. Christian virtues are perfections of the soul made possible by the indwelling of God in the soul of the Christian, whose soul has been converted, turned around toward God thanks to the unmerited grace of God.