I. F. Stone: The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 31, 1988.

Athenian democrats sentenced the philosopher Socrates to death, charging that he did “injustice by corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other beings that are new.” The case provides an object lesson in the perils of direct democracy, a lesson understood by the American Founders. In The Federalist, James Madison defends the long terms the Constitution sets down for United States senators by evoking Socrates’ trial and its aftermath: “What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had not contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might have escaped the indelible approach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.”

I. F. Stone has opposed American commercial republicanism throughout his long career as a journalist. He has wished for “a liberating synthesis of Marx and Jefferson”—a line recalling Andrè Malraux’s observation, “the only life of the café schools was the rationalizing of irreconcilables.” While the example of Socrates’ trial would not much faze a truly doctrinaire advocate of direct democracy, many egalitarians are intellectuals first, democrats second, and the sight of a philosopher in the dock makes them nervous. “It shook my Jeffersonian faith in the common man,” Stone concedes.

Stone sets out not so much to vindicate the ancient Athenians of their embarrassing proto-‘McCarthyism’ as to explain them, to show why Socrates should bear much of the blame for his sentence. In so doing, he produces a book of remarkable interest; he writes as if an Athenian democrat had somehow lived through the modern ‘Enlightenment,’ learning a lot but gaining no wisdom.

Stone very sensibly goes back to “the original documents themselves”—the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, the writings of Greek historians. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know how to read them. He reads philosophic dialogues as if they were indeed documents, evidence to be introduced at court. He searches them for incriminating and exonerating evidence, missing the complex ironies at play in these very literary compositions. Stone’s as-it-were democratic literal-mindedness stumbles repeatedly in its chase after the elusive Socratic prey.

For example, he mistakenly says that Plato’s Republic and Laws feature “the first sketches of what we now call totalitarian societies,” overlooking how Plato undercuts such visions by showing them to be impossible in practice and undesirable in theory. Stone imagines that Socrates waxes reverential over kings, when in fact Socrates shows little reverence for anyone.

Stone contradictorily claims that Socrates “feared change,” constructing an epistemology of static ‘forms’ or ideas as “a way to escape it,” but also used sarcasm to “undermine the polis, defame the men upon whom it depended, and alienate the youth.” Echoing a previous book by the philosopher Karl Popper, Stone contends that “Socrates is revered as a nonconformist but few realize that he was a reel against the open society and an admirer of the closed.” The truth is more complex. Ancient Athens was hardly an “open society” in the modern, ‘liberal’ sense of the term; after all, there were “gods of the city”—an established religion—with the attendant laws against blasphemy. Socrates raised questions about all forms of political life, not only democracy, and about political life as such. He also recognized the necessity of political life. (Stone can’t figure out why Socrates shows respect for the laws of Athens when conversing with Crito.)  Stone sees that the (even more) closed society of Sparta could never tolerate a Socrates. He fails to credit Socrates for seeing this, too.

Socrates distinguishes sharply between theory and practice. Stone does not. Thus he takes with complete seriousness, Socrates’ proposal to exile all non-philosophers over the age of ten. Stone defines Platonic ‘ideas’ as blueprints for action—precisely what they are not. He rejects Socratic epistemology, then convicts Socrates of cherishing notions that only make sense without that epistemology.

Stone thinks it would have been easy for Socrates to win acquittal, had Socrates wanted to. This may be right. But Stone charges that “Socrates wanted to die” in part because his survival would have been “a victory for the democratic principles he scorned.” This is silly. Socrates did not take democracy that seriously. He took no regime that seriously.

Stone believes the relation of philosophy to democracy fundamentally unproblematic. In this he is ‘Enlightenment’s’ child. Socrates thinks differently. If philosophy requires an ascent from the cave of mere opinion, a rational examination of whatever opinions prevail in the polis, then any political order poses a threat to the philosophic life. At the same time, some political orders, regimes, protect the philosophers themselves from the hostility of non-philosophers. This tension is permanent, so long as philosophy endures. Each political order poses its own kinds of problems to the philosophic quest, and it is up to philosophers to identify those problems and live in such a manner that enables them to introduce that quest to young potential philosophers.

A “liberating synthesis of Marx and Jefferson” cannot liberate anyone for philosophy. It might not liberate many for political life, either. It is up to political philosophers to point this out to sincere men animated by the passion for justice, men like I. F. Stone.

2017 Note:

Since this review appeared, controversy has boiled over whether I. F. Stone really had been a “sincere man animated by the passion for justice” or was in fact a Soviet agent. He was unquestionably a ‘fellow-traveler,’ a sympathizer, especially during the years of the Popular Front in the mid-to-late 1930—the years prior to the infamous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939—and a demi-Marxist to the end of his life. As the inquiry now stands, no rock-solid evidence of espionage or of Kremlin-directed propaganda efforts has surfaced, though suspicions remain.

William E. Connolly: Politics and Ambiguity. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 19, 1988.

Politicians muster certitude, so the country can act. Thinkers question more convincingly than they answer. This difference makes politicians and thinkers natural enemies, so to speak.

Modern political philosophers have attempted to end this conflict, usually by some form of the ‘Enlightenment’ strategy: Make politics rational, and make rationality certain, typically through deductive and inductive thought based on sense perception—a.k.a. the ‘scientific method; then town will consort more amiably with gown. This works only insofar as politicians and other citizens actually become rational—that is, to a limited extent. Push the scheme too hard, and tyranny will follow as surely as the Terror followed the French Revolution of 1789.

Professor William E. Connolly will cause no terror, great or small. He is a ‘postmodernist,’ not an ‘Enlightenment’ man. In the 1960s, when the ‘Enlightenment’ project began to suffer from bureaucratic sclerosis, the ‘New Left’ opposed the ‘New Deal’ and ‘Great Society’ projects with a form of romantic anti-rationalist communalism. This failed. The more clever ‘New Left’ operatives then migrated into the bureaucracies themselves, especially the academic bureaucracies. Armed with the anti-‘Enlightenment’ doctrines of ‘postmodernism,’ they have attempted to turn the West away from rationalism from within the entrails of the bureaucratic beast. Connolly would weaken if not dismantle the modern bureaucratic state the ‘postmodern’ way, by giving the ambiguities of thought “institutional expression.” It’s not clear whether he can do so without either making dogma so ambiguous that the ‘postmodern’ enterprise itself becomes ineffectual, or making ambiguity dogmatic, and therefore unambiguous.

He begins with an insight of Tocqueville’s: In seeking to make life more free, modern democracy “draws a larger portion of life into the fold of thematized norms,” exerting pressure on the individual to conform, or else to give up his freedom. The tyranny of the majority, sometimes wielded by a bureaucracy that takes on a life of its own, replaces the tyranny of the usual one-man or several-man gangs. Connolly looks for ways to check the all-pervasiveness of this democracy, without doing away with democracy, and without the now-fashionable retreat into “localism” or small-scale communitarianism—”a symptom of retreat and despair on the left” today, nothing more than “the ‘beautiful soul'” (much-derided by Hegel) “in radical disguise.”

Connolly fails to discover—or, as he would say, construct—any solution as workable as the American regime itself. A carefully articulated commercial-republican constitutionalism does most of what Connolly wants to do. Unremittingly leftist, he cannot bring himself to admit this. Instead, he claims that contemporary ‘tax revolts’ are nothing more than ‘disciplinary techniques’ of the established order. He imagines that, in America, “neither major [political] party today speaks to the deep anxieties Americans feel about thermonuclear war,” although obviously both do, each in its own way. He wants to “tame the growth imperative” driving America’s economy by reducing consumption (that would do it), and to form a third party to pressure and/or replace the Democrats by “speaking to the civic disaffection generated during the period of hegemony by welfare liberalism.” The latter task has been undertaken already, with modest success—by the Republicans. As for Connolly’s other projects, they are implausible, especially as counters to increasing state power.

Connolly notes that in premodern times, and in parts of the world untouched by modernity even today, yearly festivals are staged whose purpose is temporarily to invert the established social order. Kings become lackeys, and lackeys rule for a day. Connolly likes the idea. It is a said measure of his irremediable academicism that he would attempt to achieve this end by the tamer and far less enjoyable method of institutionalizing it—allowing “slack” in our public machinery, “space” for the toleration of eccentric and dissenting voices. This differs hardly at all from standard liberal tolerance. It is rather less coherent than liberal tolerance.

That, Connolly might argue, is precisely the point. Coherence is the very death of tolerance. Freedom needs incoherence to thrive, and, for what it is worth, Connolly theoretical efforts are indeed quite incoherent. In his treatment of civic morality, he dismisses God and natural law as self-destructing notions irrelevant to the modern era. In their place he offers question-begging rhetoric about “treating individuals with the respect due them” and such tautologous admonitions as, “the life we share in common requires commonalities of action.”

Epistemology interests him more. Dissatisfied with the traditional conception of language as a reflection of reality, and almost equally displeased with subjectivism, he avails himself (as is consistent with his love of ambiguity) not with one new theory but two. First there is Charles Taylor’s “expressivism,” which secularizes the medieval concept of anagogical thought: The world conceived as a book written (and here is the modern twist) not by a Creator-God but by itself, including us. How this differs from Hegelianism, which Connolly elsewhere calls a “heroic failure,” never comes clear.

To supplement “expressivism,” Connolly commends “genealogical” theory, the Nietzschean insistence that all respectable ‘constructs’ be negated and overcome. Connolly hopes for a democratized Nietzscheanism, a Nietzscheanism ‘from below.’ “The genealogist publicizes subordinate discourses and phenomena—for example, the thoughts and actions of women and ethnic minorities—”to loosen the hold that the most basic unities of our day exercise over official discourses.” He admits that “genealogy” itself is as closed as the ‘constructs’ it attacks, in the sense that it denies in advance the possibility that the ‘constructs’ may not be constructs at all, but discoveries. He nonetheless finds “genealogy” useful in freeing thought “from the tyranny of assumptions.” More than anything else, his vision of our future society resembles a freshman philosophy class.

There is a problem with such contentless freedom. It cannot account for itself, either genealogically or teleologically. If it tied to do so, it would fall into either objectivism or subjectivism all over again. It moreover (perhaps therefore) can have no practical political effect; in politics, as they say, you can’t beat something with nothing.

The dialogue between Hegel and Nietzsche makes sense in philosophy, indeed in political philosophy. As political philosophy in defense of democracy, however, it makes no sense at all. Neither Hegel nor Nietzsche was a democrat. Egalitarianism left them cold. Neither grafts onto the tree of civil liberty. Both would see that a ‘politics of ambiguity’ could never bring itself to rule.