Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Pseudodionysius ·
Aug 18, 2011 at 2:19pm
I was just rearranging the bookshelf in anticipation of my Plans for World Domination Tour (coming soon to an animal hospice near you) and this wonderful little book fell off the shelf and onto my lap. I'd forgotten I had it, so I immediately started thumbing the bibliography and came upon some glowing praise for Ricochet's very own king maker and belly dancing afficionado Paul Rahe. Prof Howland had some astonishing praise for Paul's book on Republics Ancient and Modern.
"The first part of this book provides the best discussion available in English of the distinctively political lives of the classical Athenians and Spartans."
You have the floor, Dr. Rahe.
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Jun '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
May I also butt in and ask a related question of Professor Rahe. Having read Karl Popper's The Open Science and its Enemies, I reached the conclusion the Plato's Republic is an intellectual precursor to totalitarianism. Popper makes a convincing argument, but I also keep reading people I respect who speak of Plato as a great philosopher (including a great political philosopher). Did Popper get it wrong?
Jul '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
I am not an expert in the topic, but I have studied Greek philosophy and some Homer (working slowly now on building up the skills needed to read it in the Homeric Greek) and working through Professor Rahe's is a great pleasure. It is very accessible while providing footnotes and, parenthetically, the original vocabulary for the concepts being discussed. There is a gap in our curricula somewhere between political science and civil engineering, and the Greeks worked it with some amazing results. Better than I had hoped for. It's taking me a while to go through it not because it is tough going bit because the world transforms from page to page, city to city, philosopher to philosopher.
And, as the book shows, Marx just plucked a set of very old ideas and bound them up in a strawman "science". The Whigs are still the real progressives.
Edited on Aug 17, 2011 at 7:41pmJul '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Plato's Republic postulates an ideal city state ruled by philosopher kings. He does not see it, nor would he accept it, as a tyranny in the modern sense. He is working his way to the wisest rule. By American sensibilities, tyranny would be inevitable, but the polity of Plato's Athens had not invented a virtue of individual freedom yet, and factions were harshly discouraged as a threat to the constantly at risk city states. Political debate was an exalted activity, available to the few men who were wealthy enough to neglect their family's livelihood while debating the issues of the day.
If America were in a continual state of alert facing multiple existential threats and huge uncertainties, we might begin to appreciate Hellenic Greece.
Jun '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Sisyphus
Plato's Republic postulates an ideal city state ruled by philosopher kings. He does not see it, nor would he accept it, as a tyranny in the modern sense. He is working his way to the wisest rule. By American sensibilities, tyranny would be inevitable, but the polity of Plato's Athens had not invented a virtue of individual freedom yet, and factions were harshly discouraged as a threat to the constantly at risk city states. Political debate was an exalted activity, available to the few men who were wealthy enough to neglect their family's livelihood while debating the issues of the day.
If America were in a continual state of alert facing multiple existential threats and huge uncertainties, we might begin to appreciate Hellenic Greece. · Aug 17 at 8:46pm
Thanks. So, if I understand what you're saying, Popper read The Republic too literally and out of context (i.e., it was the product of its day and Athenian society, not the 20th century).
Jul '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
tabula rasa
Thanks. So, if I understand what you're saying, Popper read The Republic too literally and out of context (i.e., it was the product of its day and Athenian society, not the 20th century).
I believe so.
Plato knew tyrants and direct democracies. His philosopher rulers are a rejection of selfish, thuggish tyrants arising out of an oligarchy and the disordered debate and chance of the democratic assemblies. He is taking a conceptual step toward the concept of the rule of law, if you will, except that Greek laws of the day tended toward haphazard and vague. So the philosophers would need to be law givers/reformers as well.
Through the horrific lens of the ideological totalitarians of the early 20th Century, the dangers inherent in Plato's Republic are vivid and terrifying. For Plato, the ideas are fresh, abstract, untried. Hope filled. The totalitarians found justifications for their terror in the words of Athenian philosophers.
Plato's student, Aristotle, would become advisor to the man that will crush the world Plato was trying to perfect, Alexander. And not very long after Rome would come crush the lot of them and absorb them into the Empire.
Sep '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
He is taking a conceptual step toward the concept of the rule of law, if you will, except that Greek laws of the day tended toward haphazard and vague.
Plato's Republic can only really be understood properly in conjunction with reading The Laws. I recommend Thomas L Pangle's translation along with commentary.
Edited on Aug 18, 2011 at 4:59amMar '11
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Tabula and Sisyphus: This is a really lengthy conversation and I certainly cannot get into all the nooks and crannies of understanding this extremely complicated, and often misunderstood, dialogue in a Ricochet post.
I would highly suggest to you that, instead of reading Popper--who has a particular reason for construing Plato as he does--you turn to the translation done by Allan Bloom. His interpretative essay is extremely good and will help you understand what Plato is actually on about.
In essence, the dialogue is not only about constructing a city in speech and the virtue of justice, but it is perhaps first and foremost about education. Plato describes this city to point out just what the lengths required to create the perfect city would be--and in this sense he is offering a cautionary tale and counseling political moderation (in the sense of not hoping for politics to yield utopias).
There's more even than this, and really you can't even understand this dialogue without a greater sense of where it fits in Plato's oeuvre (that's French, Peter), but toward that end I second Pseudo's recommendation on Pangle's translation of the Laws.
Mar '11
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Wait a minute - Prof Rahe is a belly dancing aficionado? How did I miss that?
Mar '11
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
That is the way I read it, back when I was a snot-nosed know-it-all liberal twerp. I think it might have been the first beam of light to penetrate the darkness caused by my ignorance (and by the hair hanging down over my eyes). The idea that none of it would ever work because you'll never end up with someone as wise and good as a philosopher-king shook up my world view.
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Yes, I think that the poor fellow lacked a sense of humor. Plato's Republic is a satire on political idealism designed to show the limits of politics by revealing what it would cost us to sacrifice every other human good for justice.. It is what the French call a jeu d'esprit designed to give sobriety a chance against our natural monomania.
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Pseudodionysius: He is taking a conceptual step toward the concept of the rule of law, if you will, except that Greek laws of the day tended toward haphazard and vague.
Plato's Republic can only really be understood properly in conjunction with reading The Laws. I recommend Thomas L Pangle's translation along with commentary. · Aug 17 at 9:44pm
Edited on Aug 18 at 04:59 am
You might add Plato's Statesman -- where statesmanship is compared with weaving with the point being that the good life, which a well-governed polity ought to promote, is constituted by a variety of disparate goods potentially at odds with one another and that the art of politics has to do with combining them in such a fashion that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
I have the floor, you say. What shall I do? Well, I might suggest that you buy the three paperback volumes that make up the book mentioned by my former colleague Jacob Howland (after all, I have children to educate). But first look at this webpage, where they are described, and, if you are intrigued, there is an hour-long interview pertinent to the three volumes on this webpage.
Let me also suggest that you take a look at Jacob Howland's books. You might start, given the theme of Pseudodyionysius' post, with Plato and the Talmud. He has also written recently on Kierkegaard.
If I had my way, we would hire Jacob here at Hillsdale. In his generation, he is the leading student of ancient philosophy.
Nov '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Paul A. Rahe
Yes, I think that the poor fellow lacked a sense of humor. Plato's Republic is a satire on political idealism designed to show the limits of politics by revealing what it would cost us to sacrifice every other human good for justice.
So... why didn't Aristotle get the joke? Politics II starts by criticizing the ideas in both Republic and Laws.
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Jan-Michael Rives
Paul A. Rahe
Yes, I think that the poor fellow lacked a sense of humor. Plato's Republic is a satire on political idealism designed to show the limits of politics by revealing what it would cost us to sacrifice every other human good for justice.
So... why didn't Aristotle get the joke? Politics II starts by criticizing the ideas in both Republic and Laws. · Aug 19 at 4:11am
The Politics is a set of lecture notes. In the passages that you point to, Aristotle is operating in the manner of a modern analytical philosopher. He is not examining the teaching of a book; he is criticizing a particular argument, bringing out what is wrong with particular practices within the regimes described. For the most part, Plato leaves that work to his readers. His aim is to induce them to think through things for themselves. Aristotle is showing them how this is done.
Sep '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
The Politics is a set of lecture notes
That reminds me: I have the Benardete/Davis translation of The Poetics, the George A Kennedy translation (2nd Edition) of On Rhetoric and am about to grab the incredible Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins translation and commentary of The Nicomachean Ethics (Terence Irwin be forewarned!) but do you have a recommended translation of The Politics for us Republicats?
Mar '11
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Pseudo: I recommend Carnes Lord's translation of the Politics (actually most of Lord's work is worth reading, but since he's done some teaching at the Naval War College, I might be prejudiced) though I defer to the good Prof. Rahe for his preference.
As to your edition of NE--should I prefer Bartlett's to the Joe Sachs edition?
Sep '10
Re: Shameless Jacob Howland Bait for Paul Rahe
Crow's Nest: the raves on Bartlett's edition are extraordinary. Harvey Mansfield for one, and it just goes on from there. The answer to your question is most certainly yes.