I. F. Stone: The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 31, 1988.
Athenian democrats sentenced the philosopher Socrates to death, charging that he did “injustice by corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other beings that are new.” The case provides an object lesson in the perils of direct democracy, a lesson understood by the American Founders. In The Federalist, James Madison defends the long terms the Constitution sets down for United States senators by evoking Socrates’ trial and its aftermath: “What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had not contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might have escaped the indelible approach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.”
I. F. Stone has opposed American commercial republicanism throughout his long career as a journalist. He has wished for “a liberating synthesis of Marx and Jefferson”—a line recalling Andrè Malraux’s observation, “the only life of the café schools was the rationalizing of irreconcilables.” While the example of Socrates’ trial would not much faze a truly doctrinaire advocate of direct democracy, many egalitarians are intellectuals first, democrats second, and the sight of a philosopher in the dock makes them nervous. “It shook my Jeffersonian faith in the common man,” Stone concedes.
Stone sets out not so much to vindicate the ancient Athenians of their embarrassing proto-‘McCarthyism’ as to explain them, to show why Socrates should bear much of the blame for his sentence. In so doing, he produces a book of remarkable interest; he writes as if an Athenian democrat had somehow lived through the modern ‘Enlightenment,’ learning a lot but gaining no wisdom.
Stone very sensibly goes back to “the original documents themselves”—the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, the writings of Greek historians. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know how to read them. He reads philosophic dialogues as if they were indeed documents, evidence to be introduced at court. He searches them for incriminating and exonerating evidence, missing the complex ironies at play in these very literary compositions. Stone’s as-it-were democratic literal-mindedness stumbles repeatedly in its chase after the elusive Socratic prey.
For example, he mistakenly says that Plato’s Republic and Laws feature “the first sketches of what we now call totalitarian societies,” overlooking how Plato undercuts such visions by showing them to be impossible in practice and undesirable in theory. Stone imagines that Socrates waxes reverential over kings, when in fact Socrates shows little reverence for anyone.
Stone contradictorily claims that Socrates “feared change,” constructing an epistemology of static ‘forms’ or ideas as “a way to escape it,” but also used sarcasm to “undermine the polis, defame the men upon whom it depended, and alienate the youth.” Echoing a previous book by the philosopher Karl Popper, Stone contends that “Socrates is revered as a nonconformist but few realize that he was a reel against the open society and an admirer of the closed.” The truth is more complex. Ancient Athens was hardly an “open society” in the modern, ‘liberal’ sense of the term; after all, there were “gods of the city”—an established religion—with the attendant laws against blasphemy. Socrates raised questions about all forms of political life, not only democracy, and about political life as such. He also recognized the necessity of political life. (Stone can’t figure out why Socrates shows respect for the laws of Athens when conversing with Crito.) Stone sees that the (even more) closed society of Sparta could never tolerate a Socrates. He fails to credit Socrates for seeing this, too.
Socrates distinguishes sharply between theory and practice. Stone does not. Thus he takes with complete seriousness, Socrates’ proposal to exile all non-philosophers over the age of ten. Stone defines Platonic ‘ideas’ as blueprints for action—precisely what they are not. He rejects Socratic epistemology, then convicts Socrates of cherishing notions that only make sense without that epistemology.
Stone thinks it would have been easy for Socrates to win acquittal, had Socrates wanted to. This may be right. But Stone charges that “Socrates wanted to die” in part because his survival would have been “a victory for the democratic principles he scorned.” This is silly. Socrates did not take democracy that seriously. He took no regime that seriously.
Stone believes the relation of philosophy to democracy fundamentally unproblematic. In this he is ‘Enlightenment’s’ child. Socrates thinks differently. If philosophy requires an ascent from the cave of mere opinion, a rational examination of whatever opinions prevail in the polis, then any political order poses a threat to the philosophic life. At the same time, some political orders, regimes, protect the philosophers themselves from the hostility of non-philosophers. This tension is permanent, so long as philosophy endures. Each political order poses its own kinds of problems to the philosophic quest, and it is up to philosophers to identify those problems and live in such a manner that enables them to introduce that quest to young potential philosophers.
A “liberating synthesis of Marx and Jefferson” cannot liberate anyone for philosophy. It might not liberate many for political life, either. It is up to political philosophers to point this out to sincere men animated by the passion for justice, men like I. F. Stone.
2017 Note:
Since this review appeared, controversy has boiled over whether I. F. Stone really had been a “sincere man animated by the passion for justice” or was in fact a Soviet agent. He was unquestionably a ‘fellow-traveler,’ a sympathizer, especially during the years of the Popular Front in the mid-to-late 1930—the years prior to the infamous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939—and a demi-Marxist to the end of his life. As the inquiry now stands, no rock-solid evidence of espionage or of Kremlin-directed propaganda efforts has surfaced, though suspicions remain.
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