Will Morrisey

Regime Changes in Local Government: Democracy in America?

October 23, 2024 by Will Morrisey

Everett Kimball: State and Municipal Government in the United States. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1922.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume I, Part 1, Chapter 5. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000.

In the United States, Tocqueville remarks, the people are the rulers, and it is local government that gives Americans the political experience to make their rule reasonable—unlike the circumstances of France after its revolution, where a centralized state under a monarchic regime had foreclosed such experience, leading to catastrophe when the people attempted to rule. Even more fundamentally, local government matters because it embodies political life itself. “The township is the sole association that is so much in nature that everywhere men are gathered a township forms by itself—so much so, that the township “appears to issue directly from the hands of God.” With Aristotle, Tocqueville regards human beings as political by nature.

Nevertheless, freedom in a township is “rare and fragile.” The township is coarse, not entirely civilized, less based on reason than on experience. It “develops almost secretly in the bosom of a half-barbaric society.” It may well begin as a regime not of the people but of a chieftain, or of a warrior-oligarchy. Still, it is “in the township that the force of free peoples resides,” since township institutions “are to freedom what primary schools are to science,” schools of “political education.” It is small enough (in America, usually about 2,000 in population) for the people to rule it directly, thereby “habituat[ing] them to making use” of freedom,” to cultivate “the spirit of freedom.” True, the people are “the source of social powers” everywhere; even in an empire ruled by a tyrant, they might rise up and overthrow their tormentor. “But nowhere do they exercise their power more immediately,” nowhere else are they “a master.”

New England townships exemplify this direct rule by the people. No municipal council, no elected representatives, legislate for the township; the people do, in the annual town meeting. The representatives or “selectmen” elected at the meeting administer the laws without enjoying any authority to set policy or to impose taxes. They are personally responsible to the people for their conduct in office. A township may have fewer than twenty selectmen, including parish commissioners (who make expenditures for worship services), a constable, a clerk, a cashier or treasurer, an overseer of the poor, and a road inspector. None of these men receives a salary, only commissions. Residents obey them because they are necessary and useful to the maintenance of the township—matters involving personal injury or the need for cooperation—but they otherwise rule themselves in the many matters concerning only themselves. In New England, “political life was born in the very bosom of the townships; one could almost say that each of them at its origin was an independent nation”—rather like the poleis or ‘city-states’ of antiquity. And they remain independent in relation to the states, except when the need for cooperation arises; to meet such needs, the state can require townships to collect taxes for its legitimate purposes. That is, the township’s relation to the states parallels the individual’s relation to the township. “It acts, it is true, in a circle that it cannot leave, but its movements within [that circle] are free.” It is “a free and strong corporation that one is a part of and that is worth his trouble to seek to direct”; it conduces to political rule. Americans are citizens, not subjects of the state.

Under the British Empire, the American colonies partook not of aristocratic freedom—full political life for the few—but of what Tocqueville calls bourgeois and democratic freedom. The people exercised the right to vote, including the right to vote for or against the taxes they paid; the authority to impose responsibility on those who governed them; individual freedom; the right to be policed by persons selected by the residents; the right to trial by a jury of their peers. To borrow the title of James Monroe’s book, the people were the sovereigns. [1] From 1650 on, townships were organized before the counties, counties before the colonies (the eventual states), and colonies-states before the Union. Unlike the colonial governments, they were always democratic and republican. But the people are far from unruly democrats. The existence of locally ruled parishes shows how the people transmit moral principles from one generation to the next. “In America, it is religion that leads to enlightenment, it is the observance of divine laws that guides man to freedom.” The eminent New England clergyman, Cotton Mather, defined freedom as Aristotle did, not as doing as one likes but in doing what is just and good. The spirit of religion comports with the spirit of individual and political freedom, with “Heaven in the other world and well-being and freedom in this one.” Political life in America is a “field left by the Creator to the efforts of intelligence.”

As a result, with the American Revolution, “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people came out of the township and took hold of the government” of the states and the federal government. And the sovereign people were well thus prepared for self-government at the state and federal levels.

Writing more than eighty years after Tocqueville, looking back over the Civil War and the subsequent Constitutional amendments (especially the Fourteenth), the municipal reform movement, and Progressivism, Smith College political historian Everett Kimball describes municipal institutions as they were in New England and throughout the country in the early years of the regime and as politicians altered them in subsequent decades. Evidently in light of those events, unlike Tocqueville, he regards the states as “all-important in determining the powers and responsibilities of the smaller units of local government”; the right of popular sovereignty has shifted its locus to the state and national populations. Perhaps as a result of this partial centralization of government, “all constitutions have grown longer” and professionalized civil service has partly replaced government by political party appointees. (In 1890s New York City, he shudders, not only did Tammany Hall receive substantial monetary contributions from business corporations but it established “regular tariffs” for “saloons, gambling-houses, and houses of ill-fame. Pickpockets actually “paid for the privilege of operating unmolested in certain localities”—an arrangement, one suspects, that may prevail to this day in languorous New Orleans.) The United States has seen a “changed spirit” of the laws. “Rightly or wrongly, the demand has been made upon the state that greater and increasing care should be given for the public safety, the health of the community, the poor, and the defective, as well as for the conservation of the public resources and improvement of public comfort and well-being.” [2] Institutionally, this has led states to establish “a constantly increasing number of new boards and commissions.” Operating under “a changed conception of the function of government,” officials staffing these new ruling offices “perform the multitudinous functions which the modern state undertakes,” along with substantially more numerous (and almost always unelected) administrators within the several departments of the executive branch. State government functions now include law enforcement, education, public charity, prisons, public health, agriculture, labor law, and corporate law (“the regulation of industrial relations and the whole law of labor is a modern development,” superseding “the doctrine of noninterference” that prevailed for most of the nineteenth century). “The most striking and alarming feature of state finance is the rapid increase of state expenditures.” At the time Kimball wrote, revenues for these efforts came primarily from property taxes, but states were also taxing income, inheritances, and corporate profits.

How have county and municipal governments adapted themselves, and how have they been adapted by the states, given the accumulation of ruling authority within the state and federal governments? Kimball begins his history of local government in the United States with the Saxon shire. With the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon settlement in Wessex and the subsequent spread of Anglo-Saxon rule throughout England, shires were governed by royally appointed “shire reeves” or sheriffs, complete with courts, pervaded the country. The counties (which “grew out of the shire”) “retained a large degree of administrative control” of the royal subjects, thanks to 20 to 60 “justices of the peace” who tried civil but not criminal cases and oversaw roads, bridges, county property, and levied taxes. The counties wielded no legislative powers, however. As Tocqueville saw in America, parishes served as parallel ruling institutions, eventually (when Henry VIII established the Anglican Church against Rome), assuming “care of the poor” but also recruiting armed men for the crown, thus illustrating the Machiavellian-statist propensities of the Tudor dynasty. Parish officials were elected by local landholders, and while in England such local control of local government declined with state centralization in the seventeenth century, in the American colonies it remained as before.

In those colonies, county governments settled into three patterns corresponding to the three geographical regions. In the South, freeholders elected delegates to the general colonial assembly, which “took no part directly in the management of the affairs of the county,” which was administered by a lord lieutenant, a sheriff, and justices of the peace, as in England. “In theory and practice the government of the counties was undemocratic and oligarchical,” since the courts “became almost self-perpetuating corporations” and the judges “suggested to the [royal] governor the candidates for lord lieutenant, sheriff, and their fellow justices.” Such regimes made sense in the absence of large towns and the consequent inconsequence of a middle class; “the plantations were large and scattered, and each planter on his estate assumed many of the duties which were ordinarily performed by agents of local government.” That is, plantation oligarchs resembled, and often thought of themselves as the equivalents of, feudal lords. The parishes “had few duties other than ecclesiastical and were overshadowed in local administration by the powers of the county.” In New England, by contrast, towns rather than counties predominated, governed by the people in the meetings Tocqueville admired and administered by the selectmen, constables, and town clerks Tocqueville describes, a few decades after Americans won their independence. Kimball observes a similar civic effect, as well, deeming discussions at the meetings of his own time to be “have great educative value in self-government,” with participants exhibiting “great native shrewdness and often considerable skill in debate.” For their part, the Middle Colonies saw “a mixed system of local government,” with “the towns [being] more important than the parishes in the South” and enjoying “a considerable degree of autonomy.” Kimball focuses on New York, where elected county boards of town supervisors consisting of one freeholder elected from each town in the county “supervis[ed] the levy and assessment of the local taxes for country purposes.” The county elected the colonial legislators. The Middle Colonies also saw the formation of boroughs “chartered by the colonial governor as the crown’s representative.” The borough’s charter “prescribed the form of government”—typically consisting of a mayor appointed by the governor, borough councilmen elected by the freeholders, and aldermen appointed by the councilmen, all meeting in a borough council. In New Jersey to this time, many local municipalities are called ‘boroughs’ and are governed by borough councils.

“The colonists were fairly well satisfied with their system of local government; they had as much control over their affairs as did the people of England, and in New England it was even greater…. Consequently, after the Declaration of Independence and the formation of the state governments, few changes were made in these institutions.” As Americans pushed westward to the Mississippi, they took their local government institutions with them, “following the parallels of latitude”: settlers in the Northwest Territory (including Abraham Lincoln’s and Stephen Douglas’s Illinois) saw democracy in the form of town meetings; Indiana and Ohio “adopted the mixed form of local government”; Kentucky and Tennessee “took over the Virginia system of country government.” However, event in the ‘middle’ and southerly territories and states, “the principle of popular election was emphasized, and the governments were far more democratic,” with “the choice of the local officials” firmly placed “in the hands of the whole people rather than in those of the taxpayers.” The regional factions that eventuated in civil war may be seen in these local regime differences of northeastern, middle, southern, and western states, with the latter providing the military and political ‘tipping point’ during the war and the decade prior to the war.

Although by Kimball’s 1920s, “centralizing tendencies are everywhere seen,” with “state control or supervision [making] great headway,” a substantial degree of decentralization remains, more so “than [in] any other country.” Urbanization concentrates populations, leading to levels of disease and poverty difficult for cities to address by themselves; corruption also sparks demands for outside assistance from higher authorities. “In the South the presence of large negro populations has led the state authorities to exercise closer supervision and greater control in the interests of efficient administration of law and justice.”

Within each state, the county remains “the largest district for local administration.” Counties are established by the states “and may be erected without the consent of the inhabitants”; they are in effect agents of the state, local but not locally controlled. Their primary duties are judicial, but they also have the power to tax, and they bear responsibility for organizing and supervising elections. Although they do have elected boards of directors, their legislative functions “are rather closely restricted” by state statute. Outside of the northeastern states, they often run poorhouses, although state institutions are beginning to replace those. When it comes to law enforcement, “the sheriff is an agent of the state” but enjoys substantial scope of action, a power Kimball deplores. “In criminal cases the sheriff as keeper of the county jail has custody of the prisoners confined there and guards and delivers prisoners sentenced to other institutions.” He is aided by the county coroner, “the oldest of all elective country officers.” His duties “involve technical knowledge of two sorts: he needs to be both a lawyer and a physician, able to make a correct diagnosis weigh evidence, and preside over his jury.” Since “a man of these abilities is seldom chosen, and coroners’ inquests have traditionally been subjects of derision,” the state of Massachusetts has instituted a system of medical examiners; they report the cause of death to county prosecutors when they detect signs of foul play. In the South, counties are divided into school districts and precincts; the latter elect members of the county board. That is, Southern counties “have wider functions than those in New England,” taking up some of the responsibilities municipalities undertake elsewhere. This is due to the more dispersed populations in the South and also to “the presence of the negro population, which is generally debarred from the privileges of taking part in government,” a circumstance which “prevents the development of the active local governments found in the North.”

Moving to the municipalities, Kimball defines villages or boroughs as “small, compactly built districts possessing charters of incorporation” established by a popular vote and recognized either by the county court, the county board, or the township supervisor. Some of these are actual municipalities, independent of township. Boroughs are governed by elected councils, which pass ordinances within the confines set down by state statutes, construct and maintain roads and public works, funded by property taxes. American cities are much bigger municipal corporations; they nonetheless “derive all [their] powers” from the state. Although many of the early cities were associated with forts, which protected them from hostile Amerindians and any European imperial holdings nearby, most “have been founded and developed as the result of trade or industry,” facilitated by such transportation routes as seas, rivers, and lakes. “The growth of cities is a modern phenomenon,” especially in the United States, “where the rapid growth of cities has surpassed that in all other counties.” Between 1880 and 1920, urban populations here had more than tripled (thanks mostly to migration and to improved sanitary conditions), now accounting for more than half the national population. Most urban residents live in the smaller cities, those with populations less than 25,000. Most of those who have moved into the cities are unskilled workers looking for jobs, especially in factories. European, Asian, and African-American migrants have “complicated” governance of the cities. “Reformers have frequently found it impossible to gain the combined support of different groups of foreign-born citizens because of their unwillingness to unite with other nationalities and their fear that some cherished custom might be interfered with by a political change.” In addition to overcrowding and the hazards of factory work, “the general wear and tear of urban life tend[s] to increase the death rate,” although this has been more than counterbalanced by in-migration. And while crime rates in the cities exceed those in rural areas, so do charitable and humanitarian efforts. Thus, “the cities present the most violent contrasts; in them extremes meet.” All this costs money: government expenditures have “more than doubled between 1903 and 1919,” the last period for which Kimball could obtain statistics.

Municipal government has changed substantially since English settlers arrived. The first boroughs in the colonies were established in Maine in the 1640s. Then and subsequently, the charters were granted by governors, not by popularly elected assemblies. Mayors were also appointed by the colonial governor and councils were self-perpetuating, not elected by popular vote. Boroughs were judicial, not so much administrative organizations; indeed, “few of the modern municipal functions were performed.” They did govern markets and streets, water supply almost never, inasmuch as most water came from wells. “There were no public schools in any of the boroughs, no parks, no libraries, no administration of charitable relief,” and, accordingly, no taxes, revenues being “derived mostly from fines, licenses, and fees for the markets, ferries, and docks.”

“The establishment of independence of the United States brought about significant changes in municipal government,” as charters were now granted by state legislatures and charters were amended to guarantee governance by councils elected by the people. By the 1790s, “the influence of the national Constitution was clearly felt, and the forms of national government were bodily transferred to the cities.” These forms included separation of legislative and executive powers and, in Baltimore, a bicameral city legislature. Cities were small, with only thirteen having more than 8,000 residents; the urban population made up only about five percent of the U. S. population. The next thirty years—the years of Tocqueville—saw further democratization of municipal politics, with popular election of mayors, the elimination of property requirements for voting and for serving in office, the development of the spoils system by well-organized political parties. Municipal governments took on functions demanded by their ever-increasing constituencies, including control of the water supply, fire protection, and general power to tax. The two decades after this saw the institution of paid police and firemen, improved care of the streets, and poor relief. Such increased responsibilities diminished local control because “many cities were forced to appeal to the legislature for additional powers in order to perform the functions which were necessary and particularly, to finance these functions.” This reinforced the already existing tendency of state legislatures to regard “the cities as merely subordinate areas of administration and the city charters as mere statutes subject to amendment at any time.” Indeed, “a municipal corporation, like all other corporations is the creation of the legislature of the state,” “entirely subordinate” to the state legislature, owing its legitimacy to a state-granted charter. States also established special commissions or boards appointed by themselves, such as the state park commission in New York city and state police boards in New York, Baltimore, and Chicago. In New York, such commissions “went so far as to control five-sixths of the municipal expenditures.” Within the municipalities, and particularly the cities, government became bigger and more complicated, with new departments, “independent of the municipal council,” whose heads might be chosen by popular vote.

Kimball applauds the commissions because, in his judgment, the political parties that controlled municipal governments under the mayor and council system were inefficient, often corrupt, and unstable inasmuch as they were prey to the vagaries of the election cycle. “The spoils system was pretty thoroughly fastened upon the cities before the beginning of this period” and “the patronage of a large city was a prize which both parties were anxious to obtain.” The civil service reform movement of the nineteenth century’s last three decades derived from this, and from the increased complexity of urban municipal government, which made the professionalization of civil service more attractive. “Certain cities appealed to the legislature for protection against their own government.” More immediately, however, city charters were altered to give mayors more power, particularly the power to appoint. “This opened the door to trading and logrolling, but on the whole it was an advance over the system either of popular election” [of administrative offices] or of state-appointed officers.” At the same time, “state after state passed civil-service laws and established commissions for the supervision of municipal appointments,” appointments obtained by competitive examination. This practice was not instituted in the majority of states by the end of the nineteenth century, however.

Overall, municipal reforms until 1900 “were aimed at special abuses or tendencies, rather than any radical change in the form of government.” On the verge of bankruptcy caused by a disastrous flood, Galveston, Texas introduced the first “commission form of government,” whereby lawmaking and administration were combined in one body, as seen in corporate boards; the reasoning was that a ‘business model’ would be more efficient and honest than a ‘political’ one. (This distinction between ‘business’ or ‘administration’ and ‘politics’ only holds if ‘politics’ means government in accordance with the institution of separated powers. It is sometimes extended to a distinction between ‘administration’ and government by elected representatives, but in America the commissioners that governed cities in Kimball’s time were usually elected officials.) At that time, about 350 cities in the United States, many of them in the Midwest, had adopted this system. In a similar move, about 200 cities had adopted a city manager form of government, again on the grounds that a professional chief executive would be more efficient and honest than an elected one, especially given the need for “vast waterworks and sewage-disposal systems” along with complex transportation networks and increased public charity—all consequences of the sharp increases in population caused by mass immigration. The children of immigrants needed education, beginning with education in English and culminating in job training; this, too, increased the responsibilities of local government while simultaneously interesting state governments in education. Although “no legislature can hope to foresee all the wants of all the cities,” it can “lay down simple and comprehensive rules vesting in administrative authorities the power to apply these rules with such variations as the needs of the cities require.” This “idea of administrative control originated in Europe, and much of the success of municipal government in Prussia is due to the relative absence of legislative control and the prevalence of administrative control.” Kimball applauds: “Although administrative control has not developed to the same extent in this country that it has in England or in Europe, yet the results are generally excellent.” That is, although Kimball isn’t a Progressive ‘all the way down,’ in terms of the practices he recommends he might as well be.

One governmental response to urban size and complexity has been city planning. “Up to about 1910 city planning was of the most casual character”; the first permanent planning commission had only been established in 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut. Such commissions “face many difficulties.” The United States Constitution and the state constitutions limit ‘takings’—government seizure of private property for public purposes. Further, “city planning is expensive; particularly is this true in the reconstruction of streets and the remedying of mistakes made by previous administrations.” Since “streets are the most important portions of the city’s territory and its most valuable property,” “bear[ing] the traffic and business of the city” and covering water, sewers, and gas mains, “the life of the city depends upon” them, inasmuch as “there would be no access to private property, no means of communication, no method of providing light and air for the buildings” without them.” Under contemporary conditions, city planning is both much needed and much vexed. [3]

So is public education. In Massachusetts, it predated independence by more than a century, as the Great and General Court decreed that any township with more than fifty householders must establish an elementary school and that any township with more than a hundred families must establish a grammar school, both kinds to be funded by taxation. But it wasn’t until after the Civil War that the policy became universal, with school boards independent of the overall municipal governments, their members usually chosen in at-large elections. “Experts have no place on the school board,” which should represent ordinary citizens. A school superintendent, analogous to a city manager, selects the teachers with the approval of the board, “frames the course of study,” which is submitted to the school board for criticism and approval, and oversees “the discipline and promotion of the teachers,” again with board approval, which is usually pro forma. Although the superintendent may well “make himself a powerful influence in the community,” he should scrupulously refrain from undertaking “political or partisan action”—again, meaning participation in election campaigns. “The backbone of the school system is the body of teachers,” often “the most permanent of the city employees.” Professionalization of teachers has increased, with many school boards now requiring that job candidates pass qualifying examinations. Some of these are competitive, with only those with the best scores eligible for hiring. “The tenure of the teacher is practically during good behavior, and dismissals are extremely rare.”

Kimball turns to a description of the aforementioned three varieties of municipal government prevalent in the United States: mayor-and-council, commission, and city-manager. The mayor-and-council, generally with a weak mayor and a strong council, was “the English type of government” imported by the colonists. Administrative functions were undertaken by committees of the council, which either oversaw professional administrators or administered departmental affairs directly. “As a rule the American municipal government as evidenced by the city council is not to be condemned so much for its corruption as for its stupidity and inefficiency.” After protests to state legislatures against the spoils system resulted in stronger state ‘oversight’ of city governments, which in turn resulted in what many city residents regarded as overbearing state interference in local affairs, the countervailing movement toward ‘home rule’ did not return full powers to the councils but instead increased the powers of the mayors. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, “the powers of the mayor have steadily grown at the expense of the city council.” At the same time, what amounts to a de facto elective monarchy must itself become overburdened in a large and complex city. Decentralization of powers by dividing the city and its government into wards addresses this problem but causes another: overall city interests may not be served when there is a strong ward system—hence the pejorative term, ‘ward politician.’

This led to the adoption of the mayor-and-commission system in many small and medium-sized cities. Under this system, the mayor is elected by popular vote and therefore is not usually a professional administrator. The mayor wields not only the power of appointment but often the power of veto over ordinances passed by the council. But insofar as a new city charter empowers a commission, the executive powers wielded by the mayor give way to the combined executive and legislative powers of the commission, which consists of three to seven members. Each commission member, elected at-large in nonpartisan fashion, supervises one administrative department. Commissioners are not expected to be experts in the areas ‘their’ departments govern, but they “are expected to be intelligent executives who are able to see that their departments run.” The mayor merely presides over commission meetings, although there is a tendency to enhance his powers, given the need to coordinate the activities of the departments. “Government by commission is a radical departure from the time-honored form of municipal government,” with its separation of powers. This has led to the enactment of such safeguards as initiative, referendum, and recall as democratic controls over what amounts to an elective oligarchy. Given the combination of legislative and administrative powers that characterizes the commission system (the commission is “all-powerful to act for better or for worse”), “it is not unreasonable that an opportunity should be given the voters to correct the errors which perhaps were made at the original election.” Overall, Kimball writes, “the open and undisguised responsibility which each member of the commission bears may frequently prevent the secret and sinister influence which interested parties formerly exerted upon individual councilmen and may cause the commissioners to act for the good of the city rather than at the dictates of a special interest.”

But if the concentration of responsibility for city governance is the goal, why not go still farther, from quasi-oligarchy to quasi-monarchy? This is the point of the city-manager form of municipal government. Under this form, a council or commission sets general policy but “the administrative functions are concentrated in a single executive chosen by the commission [or the council] and designated as the city manager,” who takes over the power of appointing department heads. This rids the city of “the friction and delay which might result from the majority of the commission overruling the action of the commissioner in charge of a special department,” carrying “the form of commission government to its logical conclusion” by providing for “a small policy-determining body and a professional, expert administrator.” Although having no vote in determining policy, “the city manager exercises great influence in his advisory capacity,” inasmuch as he knows the workings of the city better than any other one person. Staunton, Virginia was the first municipality to institute the city-manager system, and “the movement has spread rapidly,” although again “largely confined to the smaller cities.” Kimball regards this as “a logical development of the attempt to place the government of our cities upon a business basis.”

In the United States, then, “the general tendency is toward self-contained administrative departments, which, to a large degree, are beyond the immediate control of the city council,” in contrast with mayor-and-council government but similar to the strong-mayor system. This notwithstanding, “the city council under every form of government should control the policies of the various departments,” especially given its power to set taxes; “it is ridiculous to expect that an elected body endowed with these powers will surrender them entirely to appointive officials.” “The real problem is how this control can best be exercised so that the council shall freely exercise the policy-determining power, and the administrative departments be equally free in carrying out this already determined policy and in conducting their affairs without interference on the part of the council.” Although “theoretically, administration by council committees has much in its favor, practically, it has failed to work satisfactorily in the United States” due to amateurish incompetence in the face of novel governmental complexity. But it remains true that “it is a legitimate function of politics to control both the lawmaking and law-executing bodies of the state or city,” determining “what the law shall be” and keeping “the administrative officers in harmony with the lawmaking officers.” The division of power Kimball endorses, then, is a division not exactly between legislative and executive powers as between legislative and administrative powers; the struggle in the commission and city-manager governments will be between the council, which may want to push administrators into granting special favors to their constituents or friends, and administrators, who may want to seize control of policy, de facto if not de jure. “The city-manager type of government attempts a radical divorce of administration from politics,” a divorce Kimball would sanction, while continuing to worry that the political branch of the government will not exert, or attempt to exert, “improper political influence” over administration. It does not occur to him that corruption might also seep into the administrative branch, or that political and administrative officials might collaborate in order to corrupt the citizens, offering them ‘spoils’ in the form of substantial government ‘programs’—in effect, a new form of vote-buying, one that denatures citizenship and fosters habits of mind conducive not to popular sovereignty but to popular subjection, not very far removed from what Tocqueville called “soft despotism.”

Notes

See James Monroe: The People, the Sovereigns, reviewed on this website under the title, “Monroe’s Understanding of the Sovereignty of the American People” under the category, “American Politics.”
Although sympathetic with reformers, Kimball does not share the Progressives’ historicism, retaining the Founders’ idea of natural rights: “the right of personal security is the right to life which is recognized as the natural right of every man unless his existence has become a menace to the state or unless his life is needed for the protection of the state. This right is the most fundamental one.” “Personal liberty” (including not only “mere freedom of movement” but “freedom of thought, speech, and the right to pursue any lawful calling”) and “the pursuit of happiness” are “moral rights,” not necessarily legal rights. So, for example, “in a state where slavery exists…by law,” legal personal liberty might coexist with it among non-slaves. For Kimball, then, ‘History’ is not the source of right.
For further consideration of city planning and zoning, see “Municipal Planning and Zoning in the United States,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”

Religious Toleration Among the Aristocrats? Chateaubriand’s Thought Experiment

October 16, 2024 by Will Morrisey

François-René de Chateaubriand: The Adventures of the Last Abencerraje. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Publishing, 2011.

Chateaubriand describes the Abencerrajes as a Moorish tribe that ruled the Emirate of Grenada, the last city ruled by Muslims in Spain, reconquered by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, uniting the two Christian Catholic kingdoms, gave the Spaniards the military heft they needed to complete the reconquest of their country, much of which had been taken by Sunni Muslims, beginning in the 700s. The Nasrid dynasty had ruled Grenada since the 1200s but had been weakened by factional struggles by the 1400s, with the Abencerrages facing off against the rival Zegris. After his surrender to the Spaniards, Grenada’s governor, Boabdil (Muhammed XII), departed for north Africa, stopping on Mount Padul, where he could see the Mediterranean and look back on the city and the tents of the Spanish army. As he wept, his mother, the Sultana Aixa, maintained the warrior spirit of Islam: “Thou weepest now like a woman for a kingdom thou wast unable to defend like a man.”

The Abencerrajes settled on the outskirts of Tunis, founding, “within sight of the ruins of Carthage, a colony that can still be distinguished today from the other Moorish colonies of Africa, by the elegance of its moeurs and the temperance of its laws.” So strong was their love of “their former homeland,” the exiled Abencerrajes prayed five times a day, facing not Mecca but Grenada. “Allah was invoked in order that he might render once more to his elect that land of delights,” which no longer “sounded to their cry to arms: ‘Love and Honor.'” Nevertheless, they turned to the practice not of war but of medicine; a “race of warriors, who had once inflicted wounds, now occupied themselves with the art of healing,” an art they had once practiced even during war, “tend[ing] the wounds of the enemy they had conquered.” The study of medicine was “a calling as esteemed among the Arabs as the profession of arms”—both satisfying the aristocratic passion for honor. Of the medicinal herbs they gathered, some relieved “the ills of the body,” some “the sorrows of the soul”; “the Abencerrajes especially valued those that served to calm vain regrets,” those “dispel[ling] those foolish illusions and hopes of happiness forever nascent, forever disappointed.” What religion perpetuated, futilely, medicine palliated. In the Islamic world, piety and philosophy once balanced each other.

Chateaubriand begins his story in 1516, a generation later, with young Aben-Hamet, a descendant of a man who was accused of seducing the Sultana by Ibrahim Benedin, leader of the rival Zegris, in Grenada. He determines to return to Grenada “to satisfy his heart’s desire, and to accomplish a purpose which he hid carefully from his mother,” a purpose Chateaubriand will not reveal quite yet. Under the guise of an herb-gathering Arab physician, he heads for Spain, and although pained by the sight of palm trees planted by his ancestors and by the sight of Moorish ruins, he acknowledges to himself that “since Allah had willed that the Moors of Spain should lose their beautiful homeland,” he “could not help but esteem its somber conquerors.”And the beauty of that homeland has its own influence, as climatologist Montesquieu would expect: “Enchanted skies, a clear and delightful atmosphere, plunge the mind into a secret languor, from which travelers, even mere passers-by, can scarcely defend themselves. It would seem that in this country the tender passions would quickly extinguish the heroic ones, if love, to appear valid, had not the need to be always occupied with glory.” As his guide identifies the great, partly ruined castles, one “where they claim the Abencerraje was surprised with the Sultana Alfaima,” “how cruel it was” to Aben-Hamet “that he must have recourse to strangers to identify the monuments of his ancestors and be told by those indifferent to them the history of his family and friends!” He lodges at a caravanserai which had been built by the Moors but, “too agitated to enjoy even a brief repose,” he wanders the streets, listening to the sound of flutes, playing songs of love, which have replaced the sound of the Arabic trumpet: “the victors rested on the bed of the vanquished.” By daybreak, he is lost.

He then sees a beautiful Spanish girl, accompanied by a duenna, walking toward a monastery for morning Mass. “Recovering from her initial astonishment” at the sight of a Moor in Grenada, guessing that he is lost, “she beckoned to the stranger to approach with the grace and freedom peculiar to the women of that country.” He responds with Arabic eloquence: “Sultana of the flowers, delight to the eyes of man, O Christian slave, more beautiful than the virgins of the mountains of Georgia, thou hast divined it!” Well. “The Moors are renowned for their gallantry,” she replies “with the sweetest of smiles,” but “I am neither a Sultana of the flowers, nor a slave, nor pleased to be commended to Mohammed.” She exhibits Christian charity, guiding him to the caravanserai, then disappearing. With this, Aben-Hamet forgets to gather medicinal flowers, as “the flower he now sought was the beautiful Christian.”

The story will proceed from there, sometimes but if not always predictably. But why does Chateaubriand choose to tell it?

Early in his career, Chateaubriand took upon himself the task of vindicating Christianity in the wake of the Enlightenment. In The Genius of Christianity, published in 1802, he showed that pre-modern, Christian Europe had made substantial advances in science, without the materialism of modern science. Yet, there was another charge the Enlightenment made against Christianity, and against religion generally. Religion had sparked uncompromising wars not only between Christians and Muslims but among Christians themselves. These wars saw priests urging warlike aristocrats to fight heretics. Chateaubriand’s source for his story, Ginis Bérez de Hitas’s Guerras civil de Grenada, would have provided him with a forceful reminder of this. Was religious toleration founded upon a turn to ‘secularization’ and ‘democratization’ (especially rule by the commercial middle classes) not more favorable to real peace than the Religion of Peace—a claim fought over by both Christians and Muslims? Yet had not the Enlightenment issued in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, embarrassments to Enlightenment pacifiers? What Chateaubriand offers might be called a thought experiment, one showing how religious fidelity and aristocracy might overcome the urge to fight, how chivalry might not deserve to die. It is noteworthy that Christopher Columbus was likely present at the conquest of Grenada; he would set sail for what would turn out to be an unknown continent later that year. If Columbus’s voyage might be considered the beginning, or at least the harbinger, of European modernity, inaugurating the ‘Age of Exploration,’ might this hinge between religious and aristocratic feudalism and irreligious and ‘bourgeois’ modernity not strike Chateaubriand as a point of considerable interest?

As the months wear on, the lonely Abencerraje returns to gathering herbs. One day he hears his beloved’s voice singing a Castilian song “which traced the history of the Abencerrajes and the Zegris.” Once again, his greeting is gallant: “I cast at thy feet the heart of Aben-Hamet.” This time, she won’t disappear, as her song was a song in remembrance of him and their encounter. But she doesn’t know that he himself is “the last of the Abencerrajes,” and “a vestige of prudence restrained him” from telling her so, as that news might prove dangerous if related to the rulers: “The Moorish Wars were scarcely over, and the presence of an Abencerraje at that moment might justly inspire fear among the Spaniards.” For his part, he fears not the danger of combat but the danger of separation from Dona Blanca.

Who is she? She descends from Roderigo Diaz de Bivar, the famous El Cid, who conquered Valencia and ruled it in the years before his death in 1099. During a period of exile from the Castilian court, he had fought with the Muslims, and as ruler of Valencia he found support among both Christians and Muslims. Although his line fell into “extreme poverty,” Blanca’s grandfather revived their fortunes, becoming “well known less for his true titles than for the brilliance of his valor”—that is, by means of virtue, of nature, not of convention. Ferdinand made him Duke of Santa Fé as reward for his battlefield prowess. His son, Don Rodrigo, was named for El Cid, who has two children, eighteen-year-old Blanca and her valorous older brother, also Don Rodrigo but called Don Carlos to distinguish him from him from his now elderly father. Don Carlos accompanied Cortez in his expedition to Mexico in 1519—the continuation of European voyages of discovery and conquest; “endur[ing] every danger, he had witnessed all the horrors of that astonishing venture,” witnessing “the fall of the last king of a world till then unknown.” A few years later, he fought among the Spanish forces allied with the House of Hapsburg, defeating the French at the Battle of Pavia, an event that led to the imprisonment of the French king. “The aspects of the new world, the long voyages over as yet unknown seas, the spectacle of revolutions and vicissitudes of fate, had badly shaken the religious and melancholy mind of Don Carlos,” who renounced marriage, giving his possessions to his sister and joining the Order of Calatrava. That is significant because the Order of Calatrava was founded in the twelfth century by warrior aristocrats and Catholic monks who had joined in defending a Spanish fortress; it valorizes the Church-aristocracy alliance of Spanish and indeed of European feudalism.

His sister sings, dances, rides a horse: “Athens would have taken her for Aspasia and Paris for Diane de Poitiers.” “But allied to the charms of a French woman, she had the passion of a Spaniard, and her natural coquetry stole nothing from the steadiness, constancy, force, and elevation of the sentiments of her heart.” When her father rushes to discover what the commotion is, she nonetheless lies, telling him that the Moor “entered the garden to thank me for having shown him the way” to the caravanserai. She has already chosen to leave her father and to cleave to him, which would be an act of Christian if not filial fidelity. That will prove easier to think than to do. Chateaubriand pauses, however, to elaborate on the ethos and the moeurs of the Spanish regime: “The Duke of Santa Fé received the Abencerraje with the grave and yet simple politeness of the Spaniards. There is nothing of a servile manner to be seen in that nation, none of those turns of phrase that denote abjection of thought or degradation of spirit. The language of the great lord and of the peasant is one, greetings, compliments, habits, customs, all are one. Both their trust in and the generosity of that people towards, foreigners are boundless, just as their vengeance is terrible when betrayed. Heroic in their courage, unfailing in their patience, incapable of yielding to evil fortune, they must overcome it or be crushed. They have little of what we call wit, but the exalted passions take the place of that enlightenment that comes from subtlety and abundance of ideas. A Spaniard who spends the day without speaking, who has seen nothing, who cares to see nothing, who has read nothing; studied nothing; compared nothing, still finds in the grandeur of his resolutions the resources required to face the hour of adversity.” That is, in terms of modernity’s democracy, the Spanish were and remain democratic in the uniformity of their moeurs but aristocratic in their moeurs, and so in reality, by their nature as improved by their regime, not by convention, as established by the false nature-philosophy of the Enlightenment philosophes. Spaniards remain outside of the Enlightenment but suffer nothing on account of that, thanks to their grandeur, their greatness, of soul. For Chateaubriand, then, they are models of what other Europeans might be.

At a birthday celebration for her father, Blanca, worried that her beloved might be distracted by the other women, dances a Zambra, “an expressive dance the Spaniards had borrowed from the Moors.” The music and her dance “settled the fate of the last Abencerraje irrevocably: they would have sufficed to disrupt a heart less afflicted than his.” As for Blanca, although “to love an Infidel, a Moor, a foreigner, seemed so strange a thing to her,” she accepted “that malaise like a true woman of Spain,” foreseeing “dangers and sorrows” calmly. “Let Aben-Hamet become a Christian, let him love me, and I will follow him to the ends of the earth.” That, of course, is the dilemma, as for his part Aben-Hamet thinks, “Let Blanca become a Muslim, let her love me, and I will serve her till my dying breath.” “Fixed in their resolutions,” the lovers “only awaited the moment to reveal their feelings to one another.”

He has disclosed this much, that his family originated in Granada. She invites him to walk through the Alhambra, surely a site of interest. They enter at the Gate of Justice, where “all the charms of his homeland, all his regrets, mingled with the glamor of love, seized the heart of the Last Abencerraje,” in this place where “something sensual, religious, and yet warlike” pervaded this “kind of cloister of love, a mysterious retreat in which the Moorish kings tasted all the delights, and forgot all the duties, of life.” He sheds “tears of fidelity, loyalty, and honor” at the sight of King Boabdil’s name inscribed in the mosaics. When she leads him to the Room of the Abencerrajes, Blanca points out their bloodstains, caused by their slaughter as punishment for the seduction of the Sultana. “That is the manner in which they treat men who seduce credulous women in your country,” she observes, doubtless intending this as a cautionary monition. Aben-Hamet responds nobly, swearing “by the blood of these knights, to love thee with the constancy, fidelity, and ardor of an Abencerraje.” He has not yet quite disclosed that he is an Abencerraje, but the religious impasse remains: she would have him to convert; he, her. Having resisted the temptation to forsake religious fidelity for romantic love, they “emerged from that place of danger,” but not before Blanca asks him how he would love her, if he was indeed an Abencerraje. “More than glory and less than honor,” the Moorish aristocrat answers, confirming that his natural virtue overrides conventional opinion. Given both the impasse and their strength of character, they agree never to love anyone else, to wait with patience until one or the other converts. He vows to return every year “to see if thou hast kept faith with me, and whether thou wishest to renounce thy errors,” that is, Christianity.

He does return the following year, bringing with him the gift of a gazelle, “almost as light-footed as thou,” on whose collar “she read with tender gaze her own name.” Both lovers would have known that the gazelle symbolizes the soul and is often depicted as being attacked by a lion symbolizing the passions. This living gazelle has survived the hunt. Having tested each other’s fidelity in love and in religion, “they separated again without succumbing to the passion that drew them to one another.” The next year proves more eventful, and fateful. Having returned “like one of those birds of passage that love brings back to us when it is spring in our climate,” in France, it transpires that Blanca’s brother has also arrived, accompanied by a French prisoner, captured at the Battle of Pavia, whom he has befriended. Perhaps borrowing from the custom of the Abencerrajes, or simply out of Christian charity, Don Carlos, “who witnessed Lautrec’s bravery” on the battlefield, “cared for the young Frenchman’s wounds, and between them formed one of those heroic friendships” in which “esteem and virtue form the foundation.” Aben-Hamet “felt his heart sink,” seeing that Don Carlos intends this man, Thomas de Lautrec, to court Blanca. And Don Carlo “nourished in his heart that hatred against the infidels which he had inherited from El Cid.” Introduced by his sister to the Moor, Don Carlos chivalrously acknowledges him as a man of “noble race and brave”; in the coming war of Spain against Tunisia, “I trust we will see you take the field.” Aristocratic courtesy tempers religious animosity, without abandoning religious animosity. To his grave disappointment, Blanca “made no attempt to hide the secret of her heart” and, having won the love battle before taking the field in any war, Aben-Hamet gracefully takes his leave.

When Don Carlos demands an explanation from his sister, she unhesitatingly declares her love for the Moor: “Nobility, honor, chivalry, are his; I will worship him till my last breath,” and you, brother, should “keep thy vows of knighthood as I will keep my vows of love,” refusing to marry unless he converts to Christianity. When Don Carlos complains that “our family will vanish from the earth,” Blanca ripostes, “It is for thou to revive it.” “Besides, what use are descendants thou wilt never see, and who will lapse from thy virtue? Don Carlos, I feel that we are the last of our race; we are too far out of the common order for our race to flourish after us: the Cid was our ancestor, he will be our posterity.” Spanish aristocrats are the Christian equivalents of the last of the Abencerrajes. Blanca will “worship” her beloved but not at the expense of relinquishing her worship of Christ. And although she worships the man of chivalry, she also suspects that chivalry is dead, at least in her family, knowing that genuine aristocracy, what Chateaubriand’s older contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, called the natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, is no matter of inheritance. Shining in a few generations, it eventually must disappear.

Frustrated by his sister, Don Carlos challenges Aben-Hamet to a duel. Once satisfied that Blanca has not sent him (“she loves thee more than ever,” the knight tells him), the Moor declines the challenge; he is not a knight, and Don Carlos would betray his superior rank if he were to fight him. Don Carlos promptly grants him a knighthood, “gird[ing] him with the very sword that the Abencerraje might well be about to plunge into his chest: such was the former idea of chivalry.” He also offers Aben-Hamet baptism, which the Moor faithfully refuses. In the fight, Don Carlos proves the better swordsman, but Aben-Hamet’s Arabian horse is more agile, his Arab-forged sword stronger. With the Christian at his mercy, the Muslim refuses to kill him. “Thou wert free to kill me, but I have never thought to do you the least injury; I wished only to prove to thee that I was worthy of being thy brother, and to prevent thee from despising me.” The principle of warrior aristocracy, across religious lines, is honor; at the same time, both Christianity and Islam add grace, grace in imitation of God, to honor. That is “the former idea of chivalry.”

Despite Blanca’s efforts, the three men will not reconcile, as Don Carlos continues to “loathe” Aben-Hamet, Lautrec to “envy” him. As for the Muslim, “I esteem Don Carlos, and I pity Lautrec, but I cannot love them.” Blanca can only counsel patience.

Her patience is nearly rewarded. “It came to [Aben-Hamet’s] mind to enter the temple of Blanca’s God, and seek advice from the Lord of Creation.” In “an ancient mosque converted into a church by the faithful,” his heart is “seized by sorrow and religion” in this “temple that was once of his God and his homeland.” “The airy architecture of the Arabs was married to the Gothic, and without losing its elegance had acquired the gravity appropriate to meditation.” Married, indeed, but human beings are not buildings. “Aben-Hamet was about to throw himself headlong onto the marble floor” and give himself to Christ, “when he saw, in the lamplight, an Arabic verse from the Koran, which appeared beneath the half-ruined plaster of the wall. Remorse awoke in his heart, and he hastened to leave the building where he had considered renouncing his loyalty to his religion and country.” Upon leaving the church, he meets Blanca, who worries that, now weakened by passion, she will die if he does not “adopt my faith before the Christian altar.” This moves him to “renounce the error of his religion,” as “the fear of seeing Blanca’s death outweighed all other feelings” in his heart. “After all, he told himself, the God of the Christian may well be the true God,” a “God of noble souls, since He is worshipped by Blanca, Don Carlos and Lautrec.” It seems that love and honor overcome the aristocrat’s religious fidelity. Chateaubriand appears to prepare what indeed would be a ‘Romantic’ conclusion to his tale, one that his sentimental readers would expect and delight in.

But not so. At a gathering arranged by Lautrec, who had also been present in the church, praying for guidance, the three men tell stories of victory: Don Carlos, the conquest of Mexico; Aben-Hamet, the founding of the Ottoman Empire, “newly established on the ruins of Constantinople” (conquest can cut both ways); Lautrec the glories of the French royal court and “the rebirth of the arts from the barbaric womb,” uniting Christian France with ancient Greece. Each man then sings a ballad: the captive Lautrec longing for his homeland; Aben-Hamet longing for the lost Grenada, “lost to an accursed Christian,” but “so it is written” by the will of Allah; Don Carlos of “his illustrious ancestor El Cid,” who “preferred his God, his King, his Ximena, to life itself, and above all: his honor.” Until now, Aben-Hamet had no thought that Don Carlos and Blanca were descendants of El Cid, “whom Christians call the Flower of Battles” while having “a name among us for his cruelty.” This means that Blanca’s grandfather killed Aben-Hamet’s grandfather during the conquest of Grenada. Like Boabdil before him, Aben-Hamet weeps, first confessing that “yesterday, the sight of this French knight at prayer” and the sound of “thy words in the cemetery of the temple, made me resolve to know thy God, and sacrifice my faith for thee.” He had come to Grenada in order to revenge his family for the death of his grandfather. Now, he absolves Blanca of her vows to him and “to fulfill by my eternal absence, and my death, what we both owe to the enmity between our gods, our homelands, and our families.” He forfeits Blanca to the French knight, who chivalrously refuses the offer: “Thou shalt not carry into exile the fatal idea that Lautrec, insensitive to thy virtue, seeks to profit from thy misfortunes.” For his part, Don Carlo tells them both, “I expected nothing less from your illustrious origins.” He then offers to meet Aben-Hamet once again in combat; “If I am vanquished, all my good, once yours, will be faithfully restored to you,” and if you refuse combat, “become a Christian and receive the hand of my sister, which Lautrec has requested on your behalf.”

Although “the temptation was great,” it “was not beyond the self-rule of Aben-Hamet,” not beyond the virtue of his nature. “He could not think without horror of any idea of uniting the blood of the persecutors to that of the persecuted” in “so unholy an alliance,” as his grandfather would have deemed it. “Let Blanca pronounce my fate,” which she does: “Return to the desert!” At this, Aben-Hamet “offered his adoration to Blanca even more than to Heaven,” leaves Grenada and soon undertakes a pilgrimage to Mecca, perhaps to repent of that impious adoration. Blanca will pass “the rest of her days among the ruins of the Alhambra,” the palace of love. “She did not complain; she did not weep; she never spoke of Aben-Hamet: a stranger might have thought her happy,” the sole survivor in her family after her father dies of grief and Don Carlos is killed in a duel.

Chateaubriand breaks in with his own memory. In Tunisia he had been shown, in a cemetery near the ruins of Carthage, where Dido mourned the absence of her lover, Aeneas, a tomb called “The Tomb of the Last of the Abencerraje.” “The rainwater collects at the bottom of this funeral basin and serves, in that hot climate, to quench the thirst of birds of passage,” emblems of lovers. There Chateaubriand leaves his story, but his readers, familiar with Virgil’s epic, know that Aeneas left Dido, not only the queen but the founder of Carthage after fleeing Tyre, which she ruled jointly with her overbearing brother, even as Blanca’s people were the founders of reconquered Grenada. Aeneas left Dido not at her command but at the command of Jupiter, who intended the exile from conquered Troy to become the founder of Rome. Unlike Christian Blanca, pagan Dido cursed Aeneas and all the Trojans, then committed suicide, prefiguring the brutal wars between Carthage and Rome, and their outcome. Rome would conquer Europe, including Spain, providing the political framework within which Christians could evangelize, despite persecution—or because of it, since the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. The Spanish reconquest of Spain, ending in Grenada, reprises both the Roman conquest of Europe and the Christian conquest of Rome.

The religio-political settlement Chateaubriand arranges in The Adventures of the Last of the Abencerrajes thus amounts to a thought experiment vindicating both Christian and Muslim aristocracies while acknowledging their demise. The settlement depends primarily upon the character of aristocracy itself—the genuine aristocracy of virtue, and especially of warrior virtues, not the conventional aristocracy of titled oligarchs. This requires upholding honor by means of self-sacrifice. Religion inflects this conduct, but it is noteworthy that no priest and no imam ever appears in the course of the story. Chateaubriand keeps his thought experiment centered on the conduct of aristocrats as aristocrats, across religious frontiers. Aristocrats can settle peace between rival religions, at the cost of exile and loving sacrifice. Chateaubriand’s much younger distant cousin, Alexis de Tocqueville, would find a different role for aristocrats, one consonant with their decline in the wake of civil-social equality, a role consistent with the maintenance of honor.

Socrates and the Sophist

October 9, 2024 by Will Morrisey

Plato: Greater Hippias. Harold N. Foster translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Catherine H. Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Chapter 4, section iv: “The Sophist’s Inability to Say What Is Noble.”

Socrates greets the prominent sophist, Hippias of Elis, newly arrived at Athens, calling him kalos (noble, beautiful) and wise—the word ‘sophist’ itself meaning ‘wise one.’ “What a long time it has been since you have put in at the port of Athens!” Well, yes, “I have no leisure, Socrates,” since the regime in Elis calls on him whenever it needs to transact business with “any of the poleis,” calling upon his ambassadorial skills, “thinking that I am the ablest judge and messenger of the words that are spoken by the several poleis“— particularly formidable Lacedaemon. After all, a truly wise man must be the best judge and also the one most capable of relaying messages accurately, and of understanding their meaning. Socrates appears impressed, indeed enthusiastic, exclaiming, “That’s what it is, Hippias, to be a truly wise and perfect man!” Hippias looks like the perfect specimen of humanness itself, traveling from polis to polis, serving Elis but in some respects a citizen of the world, or at least of Greece as a whole, its many poleis with their several regimes. He seems at once a patriot and one who transcends city-states and their regimes. What is more, privately, he makes “much money from the young,” whom he charges for his teaching, while “confer[ring] upon them still greater benefits than you receive,” even as he “benefits[s]” his own city-state, “as a man must who is not to be despised but held in high repute among the many.” Hippias seems to square all the circles. But is his seeming a reality? If, for example, he has no leisure, when does he have the time to think, to become wise, a ‘soph-ist’? Or does his sophistry mean that, having become wise already, he no longer needs to think?

As always, Socrates has a question. “What in the world is the reason why those men of old whose names are called great in respect to wisdom—Pittacus, and Bias, and the Milesian Thales with his followers—and also the later ones, down to Anaxagoras, are all or most of them, found to refrain from the affairs of the polis?” Because they were not me, Hippias replies; they “were not able to compass by their wisdom both public and private matters.” They were wise privately but lacked political wisdom. Their public reputation was a recognition by the many of their sound personal advice; they were the Dr. Phils of their time.

Hippias affirms Socrates’ suggestion, that “your art has progressed” since then, “just as the other arts have progressed,” and so the ancients “who were concerned with wisdom are of no account in comparison with you.” This might suggest that the art of sophistry might progress still further, that Hippias might still have much to learn, that he is not fully wise after all. But Hippias doesn’t take the hint. Instead, he confides a trade secret: although he knows his superiority to the ancients, “I am in the habit of praising the ancients and our predecessors rather than the men of the present day” as “a precaution against the envy of the living and through fear of the wrath of those who are dead.” (Hippias appears to presume that the dead only get wind of his public statements, not his private ones.) Socrates makes a show of agreement, pointing to the sophist Gorgias, who came to Athens and “spoke excellently in the public assembly, and in his private capacity, by giving exhibitions and associating with the young, he earned and received a great deal of money from this city.” “Our friend here, Prodicus,” has done the same thing. [1] “But none of those ancients ever thought fit to exact money as payment for his wisdom or to give exhibitions among people of various places; so simple-minded were they, and so unconscious of the fact that money is of greatest value.” And indeed, Socrates himself, admittedly no sophist, no wise man but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, charges no money for his conversations.

Socratic irony is lost on Hippias. “Why Socrates, you know nothing of the beauties of this. For if you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed.” Not only has he far surpassed the ancients, but he has bested his competitors, his contemporaries: “I pretty well think that I have made more money than any other two sophists together,” including Protagoras, older and more famous than Hippias but surpassed by him in getting money out of Sicily. Still in seeming agreement, Socrates cites the earlier sophists “of the school of Anaxagoras,” who likewise missed the money boat, and Anaxagoras himself, who made money and then lost it “so mindless was his wisdom”—he, who taught that Mind rules the universe. Hippias caps the point by aphorizing, “A wise man must be wise for himself especially, and the test of this is, who makes the most money.” Evidently, even Hippias’ service to his city-state amounts to an advertisement for himself, an indirect means of lining his pockets. And of course, Elis is his city-state; its prosperity may well redound to Hippias’ benefit. For Hippias, a ‘proof’ consists not of a logical argument, nor of a right assessment of another’s soul, but of a visible, tangible thing. He is an ’empiricist.’

But not so fast, Hippias. Have you made the most money at Lacedaemon, the city-state you have visited most frequently? This elicits Hippias’ first oath: “No, by Zeus. I never made anything at all” there. Socrates finds this obvious self-contradiction “a marvel, and a wondrous one at that.” And so he asks, your wisdom makes “better men in regard to virtue?” And yet the Lacedaemonians desire virtue as much as the citizens of other city-states and they have the money to pay him. Nor do they educate their children better than you, Hippias, as Hippias readily affirms. Nor did the fathers of the young Lacedaemonians “begrudge it to their children to become as good as possible.” Further, Lacedaemon is well-ruled, and in well-ruled city states “virtue is most highly honored”? And you are, as you say, demonstrably the best at “transmitting” virtue to others, the proof of which is seen in one’s earnings, which you didn’t get from the Lacedaemonian regime or from its citizens?

What is more, since sophistry an art, why should it have a different effect in Lacedaemon than elsewhere? The best teacher of horsemanship could teach it Thessaly, be “most honored” there, and in all of Greece, receiving more money than all of the other teachers of that art. This being so, as Hippias concedes, “then will not he who is able to transmit the doctrines that are of most value for the acquisition of virtue be most highly honored in Lacedaemon and make the most money, if he so wishes, and in any other of the Greek poleis that is well governed?” Tell us why, then, Lacedaemon failed to lavish you with drachmas? Why, it is because they are hidebound, Hippias replies. “It is not the inherited usage of the Lacedaemonians to change their laws or to educate their children differently from what is customary.” They resist progress. Do you mean to say, Hippias, that “for the Lacedaemonians” it is “the hereditary usage not to act rightly, but to commit errors?” Surely, if a father has the choice between following the traditions of the ancestors, the ancients, and doing what is best for them, he will choose to do what is best, educate the young better, not worse? But (now changing ground) “it is not lawful for them to give [the young men] a foreign education,” Hippias explains, shifting the blame from Lacedaemonian traditionalism to their suspicion of the foreign. The Lacedaemonians love to listen to me; “they applaud me”; but they do not pay me much because “it is not the law.”

This raises the question of the status of law. “Do you say that law is an injury to the polis, or a benefit?” It is made “with benefit in view,” according to the opinion that it is beneficial, but “if the law is badly made,” if the art of lawmaking is defective in that instance, “it is injurious.” Hippias agrees that lawmakers, those who ‘craft’ the laws (as our eminently artistic American lawmakers like to say, nowadays), do so for “the greatest good to the polis,” and to fail to do so would make it “impossible to enjoy good government.” If those who make the laws “miss the good” they have “missed the lawful and the law,” yes? That is, law is an instrument crafted by lawmakers for the sake of the good, which is therefore not identical to the law. Yet to be good law, true law, the law must serve the good? Hippias cannot disagree: “Speaking accurately, Socrates, that is true, however, men are not accustomed to think so.” What men? Those who know, or those who don’t know? Why, those who don’t know, “the many.” As to those who do know, they must “think that in truth for all men that which is more beneficial is more lawful than that which is less beneficial”? Well, Hippias answers, “they think it is so in truth.” Hippias, a sophist or ‘wise one,’ that knower of truth, allows the possibility that there may be a disjunction between wisdom conceived as knowledge of the good and wisdom conceived as he conceives it, as money-making.

If so, Socrates persists, for the Lacedaemonians it must then be “more beneficial to be educated in your education, which is foreign, than in the local education”; more, beneficial things are lawful; therefore, it is more lawful to be educated “contrary to the law” in Lacedaemon. “I agree to that,” Hippias now states, “for you seem to be making your argument in my favor.” If only the Lacedaemonians saw what Socrates sees, they would have given me money, the measure of wisdom. Arguments do not prove anything, but they can be useful. Pesky logic says otherwise, however: turning to their listeners (thus appealing to the opinion sophists seek to manipulate) Socrates says, “My friends, we find that the Lacedaemonians are law-breakers, and that too in the most important affairs—they who are regarded as the most law-abiding of men.” Their reputation, the public opinion not only of themselves but of all Greeks, is mistaken. If so, Hippias, “what sort of discourses” do these lawless upholders of law and of tradition enjoy and applaud you for? Astronomy? No. Geometry? No, some of them don’t even know arithmetic. “The processes of thought,” then? “Far from it indeed, by Zeus.” Nor harmonies. Rather than such matters of the mind, such as it were Anaxagorean concerns, they love to hear about “the genealogies of heroes and men,” the “foundations of cities in ancient times and, in short, about antiquity in general”—precisely those things progressive, master of the art of sophistry Hippias has deprecated. “For their sake”—that is, for his own sake—Hippias “has been obliged to learn all that sort of thing by heart and practice it thoroughly.” But does that not mean that Hippias cares for something other than money, only? Does he not love to be applauded, honored?

This is enough to elicit an oath not from Hippias but now from Socrates. “By Zeus, Hippias, it is lucky for you that the Lacedaemonians do not enjoy hearing one recite the list of our archons from Solon’s time,” as it is very long. [2] But Socrates, “I can remember fifty names.” My mistake, Hippias, “I did not understand that you possess the science of memory” as well as the science of wisdom. But in both cases, what are your arts for? The Lacedaemonians “make use of you as children make use of old women, to tell stories agreeably.” They rule you, not you them; for all your supposed wisdom, betokened by wealth, they don’t pay you a dime. This brings out a “by Zeus” from the sophist; on the contrary, my reputation in Lacedaemon derives from “telling story about noble and beautiful pursuits,” exactly the virtues Socrates had initially attributed to him. I recount what the pursuits “of a young man should be.” That is, the memorized genealogies of heroes, men, and cities teach virtue. His finest speech consists of the story of Neoptolemus, who, after the fall of Troy, “asked Nestor what the noble and beautiful pursuits were,” and received a list of “many lawful and beautiful pursuits” (if not necessarily noble ones?). Hippias invites Socrates to listen to his discourse, which he will deliver at a school tomorrow. And be sure that you bring “others who are able to judge of discourses that they hear.” In the Greek poetic tradition, Nestor, the elderly adviser of warriors at Troy, gives counsel that sometimes doesn’t work out well, although this may register the unpredictability of gods or luck more than unwisdom; Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, has a decidedly mixed record in terms of both virtue (he seems to have had a cruel streak) and fortune (he founded a city but was killed by Orestes). Promising to go, “God willing” (the philosopher is more mindful of circumstances than either warriors or sophists), Socrates quickly turns to a philosophic question, having been “reminded” of the beautiful “just at the right moment.” In doing so, concocts an imaginary questioner who supposedly asked him “very insolently” how he knew what the beautiful is. The insolent questioner asks exactly the kind of question Socrates himself famously asks. Claiming that he vowed to ask the next of the “wise men” he met, in order to return to renew the dialectic with his questioner, he puts the question to Hippias. As usual, the sophist does not lack confidence. If I cannot do this, Hippias says, “my profession would be worthless and ordinary.” Indeed. Socrates promises to imitate the insolent questioner by interjecting “exceptions,” counter-examples,” to what Hippias will say.

Just, wise, men and good things are so by justice, wisdom, and goodness; beautiful things are beautiful “by the beautiful.” Very well, what is the beautiful? Hippias asserts that there is no difference between the beautiful (what the beautiful is) and beautiful things (what is beautiful). All right, but the questioner wanted to know what the beautiful is, to which Hippias answers that a beautiful maiden is beautiful—a what-is-beautiful answer, not the answer to the question. The questioner remarks that a beautiful mare is also beautiful, as are a beautiful lyre and even a beautiful pot. All of these objects share beautiful in common, but they are different things. How can what the beautiful is be the same thing as what is beautiful?

Hippias is offended at the mention of the lowly pot. “Socrates, who is the fellow? What an uncultivated person, who has the impudence to mention such worthless things in a dignified discussion!” To this ad hominem argument Socrates immediately but ironically yields: “That’s the sort of person he is, Hippias, not elegant, but vulgar, thinking of nothing but the truth.” Yet isn’t a well-wrought Grecian pot beautiful? Yes, for what it is, but “it does not deserve to be regarded as beautiful in comparison with a mare and a maiden and all the beautiful things,” things innately superior to a pot. Yes, but if we compare maidens or wise men to gods, will they too not be inferior in beauty? And even so, we have not found what “the absolute beauty,” beauty itself, is.

Just as we begin to suspect that Hippias cannot think abstractly, only concretely and instrumentally (as would a materialist, Zuckert observes), he tells Socrates that if that is all the questioner is looking for, “nothing is easier to answer.” Beauty is that “by which all other things are adorned and by the addition of which they are made to appear beautiful.” Tell him that the beautiful “is nothing else than gold.” To the sophist, a thing is as it appears to be. The sophist, who takes money to be the coin of wisdom, takes beauty to be less than skin deep, a thing of surfaces. The wise man coats his speech with appealing words, glistening appearances. Money is gold, gold is money.

Socrates’s vulgar questioner is ready with a counter-example. Phidias the sculptor doesn’t cover his beautiful statue of Athena (goddess of the wisdom Hippias claims to possess, calling himself a ‘sophist’) with gold. His statue is made of ivory. A beautiful pot may hold soup, which may be nutritious but is seldom beautiful. The statue is ivory all the way through; it beautiful; it does not merely appear to be beautiful. Don’t even talk with this fellow “when he asks such questions,” noble-by-appearance, wise-by-appearance Hippias advises. Socrates accordingly shifts to another, related question: Is the ladle of gold or a ladle of fig wood more appropriate to spooning soup? The ladle of fig wood, Hippias replies. But why did Phidias “not make the middle parts of the eyes also of ivory, but of stone, procuring stone as similar as possible to the ivory,” since the ivory is beautiful? The beautiful stone is also beautiful, Hippias stipulates, so long as it is “appropriate.” Then, it will be ugly when not appropriate? Emphatically so—indeed, “if anyone has anything to say against this, you may say I know nothing at all.” Hippias assumes that he knows quite a lot, that he has escaped the dialectic, whereas the philosopher is famous for asserting that indeed he knows nothing except that he does not know. To prove that he knows quite a lot, Hippias ventures a definition of what a beautiful way of life is, implying that he knows not only what is beautiful but what is noble. “I say, then, that for every man and everywhere”—universally—it is “most beautiful to be rich and healthy, and honored by the Greeks, to reach old age, and, after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring.” Wealth, health, honor, longevity, giver and receiver of beautiful funerals—such is the fitting, the appropriate. As Zuckert writes, “the sophist wants to be admired everywhere, by everyone” for his wisdom, but this depends upon the opinion of both the few and the many. The sophist wants self-sufficiency but depends upon reputation, granted by others. That is, the profitability of his art, whether in money or in honor, depends upon his ability to defend his art in the face of Socrates, in the face of a philosopher, in terms of the rational dialectic he would prefer to avoid.

Socrates congratulates Hippias. The philosopher now swearing by Hera, the kind goddess, for “coming to my assistance”—well, “to the best of your ability.” The appearance of Hippias is one thing, his nature another. He is neither gold nor ivory, all the way through. But, Socrates conjectures, the questioner will laugh at the answer. If so, Hippias assures him he will “be laughing at himself and will himself be laughed at by those present”; the questioner will lose ‘face,’ the appearance of wisdom, the honor that accrues to the appearance of wisdom. Not only that, Socrates says; more alarmingly, the questioner may beat me with a stick. Is he your master, Socrates? Or does Athens so “disregard justice and allow the citizens to beat one another unjustly?” On the contrary, Hippias, “the beating would be just, I think.” Now it is finally time for Hippias to ask a question: Why do you think so? Because the questioner “asked for the absolute beautiful,” that “by which everything to which it is added has the property of being beautiful.” You have evaded the question, but I, the questioner, have caught you and I shall now punish you, in justice. (Hippias could of course ask, ‘What is justice?’ but that would only suggest that he sees the questioner’s vulgar-but-true point, that the distinction between what beauty is and what is beautiful must be a real distinction, that ‘What is’ questions ‘make sense.’) The questioner will ask, bringing his own concrete example into the dialectic, if “the stranger from Elis”—patriotism cuts both ways—claims that “for Achilles it was beautiful to be buried later than his parents, and for his grandfather Aeacus, and all the others who were born of gods, and for the gods themselves”—some of whom overthrew the older gods, the Olympians having overthrown the Titans. Hippias can only sputter, recurring to an argumentum ad hominem, “these questions of the fellow’s are not even respectful to religion.” Socrates does not deny it, preferring respectfully to change the subject to the demigod hero, Heracles, who didn’t bury his parents, one of them being Zeus. Hippias continues to retreat before the dialectical onslaught. I didn’t mean to include the gods in my definition, or those who were children of gods. So, the beautiful is the fitting, the appropriate, then? Not even that, as a man might wear clothes that fit him and still be “ridiculous,” as Hippias understands. Socrates pounces, once again. “It could not be the fitting” to make things “appear more beautiful than they are,” to not “let them appear as such as they are.”

Still, “we must”—once again—attempt “to say what that is which makes things be beautiful.” Hippias gives it another try: “the fitting, Socrates, makes things both be and appear beautiful by its presence.” He has, at last (and at least) managed to separate an idea from things. This, Socrates remarks, means that things really beautiful must also appear to be beautiful. But why, then, is there so much “strife and contention” over what things are beautiful? If they were beautiful and appeared to be beautiful, and if that connection were necessary, then no such controversy would erupt. If the fitting both makes things beautiful and makes them appear so, then the coincidence of beauty and beautiful appearance would hold; since it doesn’t the fitting can at most only make things beautiful in reality, in their being, or in their appearance. Speaking very much as a sophist, Hippias chooses to say that the fitting makes things appear beautiful; to a sophist, a word fitly spoken gilds being with an attractive surface. But this is to admit that Socrates is right; the fitting cannot produce one dimension of beauty, namely, real beauty, the beauty of a thing by nature, its ‘inner’ beauty, as it were. We still haven’t discovered what beauty is.

The putatively wise knower now scales back on his claim to know, telling Socrates that he knows “that if I should go away into solitude and meditate alone by myself, I could tell [what the beautiful is] with the most perfect accuracy.” A reader might be excused for suspecting that the honor-loving, money-loving sophist wants to escape this dialogue with whatever remains of his reputation intact. “Ah, don’t boast, Hippias”; stay with us, “for Heaven’s sake,” and “find it in my presence or, if you please, join me, as you are now doing, in looking for it.” If we find it now, I will not be a nuisance” to you, anymore—no idle threat, given the precarity of Hippias’ profession, dependent as it is on the approval of the few and the many. Socrates has caught him in another contradiction, this one not in thought but in his way of life. To save his reputation, Hippias must go; to save his reputation, Hippias must stay. Socrates has turned the sophist’s tactic of ad hominem argument against the sophist. In the event, Hippias stays, and Socrates begins the inquiry anew.

He approaches the question by invoking a new idea or ‘abstraction,’ the useful. Perhaps the beautiful is “whatever is useful for us.” For example, beautiful eyes are not those that seem to be beautiful but are sightless; beautiful eyes are “those which are able and useful for seeing.” Similarly, “the whole body is beautiful” when fully ‘functional.’ And not only natural objects but artifacts, customs, and laws. We look at each thing with regard to “how it is formed by nature, how it is wrought, how it has been enacted”; “the useful we call beautiful, and beautiful in the way in which it is useful, and for the purpose for which it is useful, and at the time when it is useful.” More than two millennia later, Americans still exclaim ‘Beautiful!” when something ‘works.’ Beleaguered Hippias quickly agrees.

Oh, but no. A powerless thing is a useless thing. If usefulness is beauty, then power is beautiful and lack of power is “disgraceful or ugly.” The money-lover likes the sound of that: “Decidedly. Other things, Socrates, testify for us that this is so, but especially political affairs; for in political affairs and in one’s own polis to be powerful is the most beautiful of all things, but to be powerless is the most disgraceful of all.” Very well, then is wisdom, your claim to power or authority, “also for this reason the most beautiful thing and ignorance the most disgraceful thing”? Maybe, Hippias cautiously rejoins. And maybe not. If a person cannot do “what he did not know how and was utterly powerless to do,” and if “men do many more bad things than good,” erring involuntarily, then the acts of the powerful cannot necessarily be beautiful and power cannot be beautiful. Hippias then suggests a qualification. The acts that one has the power to do are beautiful “if they are powerful and useful for good.” If so, Socrates says, beautiful persons and customs must be beautiful because they are beneficial, “the beautiful seems to us to be the beneficial.”

But no. If the beautiful causes the good, if the beautiful “has the nature of a kind of father,” then the good cannot be the caused by the beautiful any more than a father can be his own son. “By Zeus,” the beautiful cannot be the good, or the good beautiful. This “does not please me at all,” Hippias says, himself swearing by Zeus. He is stuck conversing with ugly old Socrates, who pronounces himself to be “at a loss.” As for Hippias, he has nothing more to say, except to recur to his desired escape-hatch: he is “sure I shall find it after meditation.”

Socrates happily presses on, being a man who is never at a loss for long. Perhaps “the beautiful is that which is pleasing through hearing and sight.” For example, beautiful customs and laws are beautiful for that reason; we are pleased to hear and see Lacedaemonian customs and laws, to take the ones instanced earlier. Socrates prompts Hippias to admit that sensual pleasures, not only laws and customs, are truly pleasurable. This admission may ruin the claim, however, since the act of eating and the act of sexual intercourse can be pleasant but they are hardly pleasant to hear or to see. And if you were to admit that these pleasures are beautiful, you would lose respect among the people, since they “do not seem so to most people,” and you depend upon public opinion to make money. But that is not truly dispositive, since “that is not what [the questioner] asked”: again, he asked not “what seems to most people to be beautiful, but what is so.” So, we still might say “that that part of the pleasant which comes by sight and hearing is beautiful,” despite what the many may suppose. If we say that what is pleasant through sight is beautiful, we do not mean to say that what is pleasant through the other senses is not beautiful.” All these pleasant things “have something identical which makes them beautiful,” both as individual things and collectively. Or, taking another idea, as Hippias now sees, “if we are both just, would not each of us be just also and if each is unjust, would not both again also be unjust”? Now on a roll, as the expression goes, Hippias identifies health, affliction, nobility, wisdom, honor, age and youth as the sort of characteristics the questioner has in mind. But he has a new objection.

“You see, Socrates, you do not consider the entirety of things, nor do they with whom you are in the habit of conversing, but you all test the beautiful and each individual entity by taking them separately and cutting them to pieces. For this reason, you fail to observe that embodiments of reality are by nature so great and undivided. And now you have failed to observe to such a degree that you think there is some affection or reality which pertains to both of these together, but not to each individually, or again to each, but not to both; so unreasoning and undiscerning and foolish and unreflecting is your state of mind.” That is, Hippias wants to emphasize the unity of the cosmos, its homogeneity, against the Socratic claim of a heterogeneous whole. The homogeneous cosmos fits nicely with Hippias’ sophistry because the more the cosmos is conceived as homogeneous, undifferentiated, the less reason, with its principle of non-contradiction, can understand it. As Zuckert remarks, Hippias “embodies a way of life based on such a homogeneous cosmology,” posing “an important test of the rationale for Socratic inquiry” and, one might add, to any “rationale” at all. Hippias claims to understand reality all at once and as a whole; again, as Zuckert has it, Hippias has no felt need for dialogue because he is unerotic, supposing he already has wisdom, already knows the nature of the cosmos.

Unfortunately for Hippias, “human affairs,” as Socrates replies, “are not what a man wishes, but what can”; wishful thinking doesn’t make the wish ‘come true.’ Hippias now tries to bluff his way out: “You will speak to one who knows, Socrates,” a soph-ist, “for I know the state of mind of all who are concerned with discussion; but nevertheless, if you prefer, speak.” “Well, I do prefer.”

And now, Hippias is really in for it. “Are you and I one or are you and I two?” Socrates begins. That is, are we both an odd number and an even number? Undeniably so. Therefore, “what both are, each is, and what each is, both are.” This establishes the principle of heterogeneous unity. By the same logic, “some things are so and some are not so.” Pleasures through sight and through hearing are distinct as to the senses through which they come to us, but they are both beautiful. You yourself have “conceded that both and each were beautiful.” If so, “if both are beautiful, they must be beautiful by that essence which belongs to both. So it is, with strength and “countless other cases.” That is, Socrates has proved that the cosmos is not homogeneous, that it encompasses heterogeneous parts. If so, then if a pleasurable thing may not be beautiful (as they have already agreed), pleasure is not the same as beauty; if it were, then all pleasurable things would be beautiful.

Hippias can no longer dispute the argument. He can dispute the worth of the argument. “What do you think all [philosophizing] this amounts to? It is mere scrapings and shavings of discourse, divided into bits.” It is sophistry that is “beautiful and of great worth” because sophistry can “convince the audience,” “carry off the greatest of prizes, the salvation of oneself, one’s property, and one’s friends,” unlike these “petty arguments” of yours, “mere talk and nonsense,” by which you “appear to be a fool”—whether you are or not. Given the coming trial of Socrates, in which the philosopher fails to defend himself against his accusers in front of a jury of Athenian citizens, would Socrates not be better off if he were a sophist? To recur to the earlier argument, Hippias claims to be the noble mare, denigrating Socrates as the lowly pot. Socrates may be beautiful, but only in an inferior way.

Socrates agrees, ironically. Yes, “my dear Hippias you are blessed because you know the things a man ought to practice, and have, as you say, practiced them satisfactorily,” while “I, as it seems, am possessed by some accursed fortune, so that I am always wandering and perplexed, and, exhibiting my perplexity to you wise men, am in turn reviled by you in speech whenever I exhibit it.” Why, I am so confused, “I do not even know what the beautiful itself is.” It is questionable, then, whether I am better to be alive than dead; in this way, the sophist’s accusation loses its force, not because it is false but because it is the sophist who fails to see “the entirety of things” even while asserting the homogeneity of things. In the case at hand, the danger of capital punishment might not be a real danger at all, inasmuch as I might be better off if my fellow Athenians go ahead and kill me. That, too, is a matter for philosophic inquiry. There is, however, one sure benefit to the philosophic life. I may not know what the beautiful is, but “I think I know the meaning of the proverb, ‘beautiful things are difficult.'” To move from wishful thinking to rational thinking is difficult because the cosmos is heterogeneous, complex, in need of rational explication, not as simple as the sophist wants it to be.

Notes

Prodicus has come down to us as the teller of the story of the ‘choice of Hercules,” who chooses chaste Lady Virtue over seductive but injurious Lady Vice. Is this wholesome teaching the sort of thing that makes Prodicus Socrates’ friend, if still a sophist? No other sophist is called Socrates’ friend in this dialogue, including Hippias—despite Socrates’ friendly greeting.
Plato’s readers will recall the Ion, in which Socrates dialogues with the eponymous rhapsode, a prodigy of memory who seldom bothers to think.

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Socrates and the Sophist