BMCR 2009.04.13: De Brasi on Gerald Mara, The Civic Conversations of Thucydides

Gerald M. Mara, The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato:
Classical Political Philosophy and the Limits of Democracy.  Albany:
SUNY Press, 2008.  Pp. x, 327.  ISBN 9780791474990.  $85.00.

Reviewed by Diego De Brasi, Otto-Friedrich-Universitaet Bamberg
([email protected])
Word count:  3400 words
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-04-13.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/04/20090413.html
-------------------------------

Gerald Mara (hereafter M.) presents to the academic community a
complex, insightful and quite difficult book, whose audience, it should
be immediately said, could only be one of specialists.[[1]] The reading
of his book entails, indeed, not only knowledge of his previous book on
Socrates,[[2]] where M. traces in more detail the opposition between
Socratic logos and ergon, but also a reasonably deep acquaintance with
modern democratic theorists such as Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and
John Rawls.

The first chapter, which represents a sort of introduction to the
central analysis of Thucydides' History and some Platonic Dialogues,
elucidates M.'s goals. Beginning with an observation about the
different effects of progressive democratization on political practices
and on political thought, the author sets out the principal thesis of
his book: that the power and justice of democratic institutions need
continually to be reexamined, this scrutiny having a valuable
comparative source in the works of Thucydides and Plato (cf. 2). This
means, in practical terms, that M. will compare Thucydides' narrative
and Plato's <greek>diale/gesqai</greek> with four types of modern
democratic theory, viz: rational choice theory (chapter 2),
deliberative democratic theory (chapter 3), the interpretation of
democratic culture (chapter 4) and postmodernism (chapter 5). The
author proceeds to explain the method he will use (reconstructive
readings) and the aim he pursues: against the interpretation of both
classical authors as enemies of democracy, M. argues that (3):


they address the limits of democracy by extending the borders of what
can legitimately be talked about within democratic political
deliberations. Neither author believes that establishing democratic
political institutions is a sufficient guarantee against mistaken or
destructive political acts. And both suggest that the language of
democratic political culture resists some intellectual sources whose
presence is vital for democracy's well-being. However, these criticisms
do not mean that democracy can or should be replaced with any
alternative form of politics. Instead, I show the ways in which both
authors broaden practical discourse, potentially making democratic
politics more thoughtful and more just.


To do that, M. presents three areas in which, according to him,
democratic practices and theory are still in need of problematization:
the question of civic/human rights, the question of democratic
governance, and the question of democratic quality of life. He argues
that the four modern democratic theories that are going to be analyzed
through the book cannot offer an exhaustive examination of these
problems. Thereafter he sets out why, according to him, classical
political thought, as expressed in the works of the Athenian historian
and of the founder of the Academy, does have the necessary means to
offer such a problematization. M.'s main point consists in underscoring
within both authors the difference between speeches or arguments, which
are explicitly critical toward Athenian democracy, and speech-acts,
which are more discursive and conciliatory. This leads him to claim
that both authors practise a conversational rather than a deductive
form of political thought.

Even though many of M.'s methodological implications are undoubtedly
correct, e.g. the importance of dialogical form, which he rightly
emphasizes,[[3]] and the stress on the political and historical
contextualization of Plato's Dialogues (21), that some arguments are,
already in this chapter, hard to follow. It is quite unclear how the
ways of theorizing possibilities for improvement attributable to
democratic institutions shrink as democratic political theory becomes
hegemonic (1). M. offers his own non-dogmatic interpretation of a
passage of Plato's Republic, without considering other possible
interpretations or undertones.[[4]] Moreover, M. seems to accept the
Second Letter as genuinely Platonic, without even mentioning in a note
the debate over its authenticity.[[5]] And in general it must be said
that the examination of speech-acts given by M. could have the
disadvantage of distracting attention from how pathological the two
classical authors consider democracy to be.[[6]]

This detailed examination of the first chapter was required by the
complexity of the book itself, which can be properly understood only
if, after reading the introduction, the reader understands that the aim
of M.'s investigation is the engagement of Thucydides and Plato with
modern democratic theory from a critical point of view, and not the
application of modern democratic terms for the interpretation of their
works. Once this is clear, it is possible to examine in a more summary
way the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 is dedicated to the examination of the contributions made by
Thucydides and Plato to rational choice theory. First, M. offers a
brief presentation of the central arguments of this theory and a
critique of it as a theory which, putting too much stress on private
interests, forgets the borders of rationality, i.e. non-strategic and
irrational choice. On the basis of this critique, he analyzes, as
examples of the different treatment that Thucydides provides of
rationality, the speeches of Corcyrean and Corinthian envoys at the
Athenian assembly in the first book of the History, the speeches of
Euphemus and Hermocrates in Camarina (6.75.3 - 88.2), the Melian
dialogue in the fifth book and the debate about the future of Mytilene
between Cleon and Diodotus (3.36.6 - 49.1). The main thread of M.'s
interpretation is the accentuation of multi-vocality in making
political decisions. He claims that Thucydides represents the political
<greek>gnw/mh</greek> as the product of interaction of
<greek>lo/gos</greek> and <greek>e)/rgon</greek> and, on this basis,
argues that the Athenian historian does not represent political debates
as a conflict between private strategic interests, as rational choice
theory would allege, but as the emergence, through opposing arguments,
of psycho-cultural elements that inform the political imagination of
the parties involved. (By political imagination must be understood the
condition for rational political speech and action.) In particular, a
more complex understanding of the <greek>lo/gos</greek>-democracy
relation appears from Diodotus' speech, as this Thucydidean character
seems to argue, against Cleon's rational choice theory (men are looking
only for their interests and these originate outside politics), that
emotions and rationality are related in a way that originates in
Athenian cultural and political institutions. M.'s assertion that
characters such as Philocrates, son of Demeas, and Diodotus are not
necessarily historical people, but fictive characters, created by
Thucydides to express in an indirect way his own critical opinion of
Athenian imperialism, seems problematic.

As for Plato, M. examines in this chapter the Protagoras and the
Charmides. These dialogues are dramatically contextualized in the
period of the Peloponnesian War (note e.g. the presence of Critias and
Charmides in both dialogues, and the presence of Alcibiades in the
Protagoras), and, M. argues, this contextualization should allow the
reader to look upon the ethical themes at the centre of these works
from a political perspective. In particular, M. offers an
interpretation of the scene near the end of the Protagoras (the debate
about courage which slips into a discussion about hedonism and the
<greek>metrhtikh\ te/xnh</greek>) which tries to show how Socrates, in
spite of a strategic rationality, refuses this technical science and
privileges a more dialogical way of thinking: rationality should be
understood as a perfecting and not as a strategic activity. The
analysis of the Charmides develops this claim from another point of
view. Critias is the champion of a directive rationality, so to speak:
Plato's cousin argues in the dialogue for the power of rationality to
exercise political government. It emerges from the discussion that, in
M.'s opinion, the political aim of the dialogue in terms of democratic
theory is to uncover the illusion and the dangers in aiming to
establish a scientific hegemony.

Chapter 3 focuses on deliberative democratic theory, and it begins
again with a description of the main theses supported by these
theorists. At first sight it seems that deliberative democratic theory
could be quite similar to the political thought of Thucydides and Plato
as M. represents it. Deliberative democratic theory, in fact, points
out how discursive interaction and democratic politics reinforce each
other, on the one side by stressing the importance of communicative
reasoning, on the other side by recognizing that historical and
cultural circumstances constitute situations with which interactive
discourse engages. In this respect deliberative democratic theory is
preferable to rational choice theory but has the drawback that it does
not focus on the teleological significance of discursive political
interaction, and shows an overriding focus on procedures. The
examination of the classical texts is thematically organized in this
chapter: first an analysis of how both Thucydides and Plato treat the
relationship of political trust to political mistrust, then a scrutiny
of the way in which they represent political judgment through their
works. The main point of the first part is to argue that, in the
Mytilenean debate and Plato's Protagoras, the classical texts offer a
more complex view about the relation between political trust and
political mistrust than that presented by deliberative democratic
theory.[[7]] In the section on political judgment, M. examines the
three Periclean speeches in the Thucydidean narrative, the speech of
Diodotus, again, and the speech of Athenagoras during the Syracusan
debate (6.33-41). According to M., it appears that the Periclean
speeches, from which a one-sided conception of Athenian well-being
emerges, offer a nondescript form of civic judgment. Conversely, the
argumentation of Diodotus prompts the democratic theorist to consider
more closely how political trust and democratic judgment intersect.
This impression seems to be confirmed by the dichotomy between speech
and speech-act in Athenagoras' performance.

M. proceeds with an examination of Plato's Gorgias. Here too, M.'s goal
is to show that a 'reconstructive' reading of Socrates' arguments could
offer more support to democracy than a literal reading of Socrates'
statements. M. asserts, rightly, that for Socrates political judgment
is situated between private and public realms and that he has a
teleological perspective. Then, he continues, the Socratic critique of
rhetoric shows its political significance by pointing out that rhetoric
tries to silence rationality as the self-critical element of a human
being, by accentuating the role of emotion in making political
decisions. This should however not be misunderstood: the Socratic
dialogic <greek>e)/rgon</greek> stresses that Socrates does not present
himself as an authoritative leader, but as a champion of discursive
philosophy. In this insight, M. repeats again his main thesis, that
discursive philosophy implies self-criticism, rational but with
affective associations, and that it seems to be more firmly grounded,
like the sort of self-criticism postulated by modern democratic
theories. Less clear, however, is how the stress on
<greek>paidei/a</greek>, which for Plato and Socrates is the first
element which could improve a State, slips, with respect to the
Gorgias, into the statement that all cultural practices, in theory,
exert educative influences on members of a society. Moreover, M. seems
to go too far again when he states that Plato includes comedy, and with
it a strong democratic point of view, as a critical voice in his works,
persuaded as he is that comedy is not criticized by Plato in any of his
works.[[8]]

Chapter 4 analyzes the interpretation of democratic culture according
to Rawls'  Political Liberalism and constitutes undoubtedly the most
complex and least clear chapter of the book. M. concentrates on the
investigation of justice in Rawls, Thucydides and Plato. With respect
to the ancient authors, he assumes the central role of the fifth
century debate over <greek>no/mos</greek> vs. <greek>fu/sis</greek>,
reformulating it as a contrast between culture and nature (where nature
is seen as the psychic force in human behavior which cannot be bounded
by cultural education). M. presents the Thucydidean narrative of the
<greek>sta/sis</greek> on Corcyra as the historian's meditation on the
nature and role of <greek>fu/sis</greek> in political communities and
argues that the goal of Thucydides in this passage is to show how
culture could exercise any influence on human perception of nature.
>From this point the analysis switches to an examination of the
definition of justice in the History: Thucydides does not offer one in
his own name, but represents it through his account of the Spartan and
the Athenian way of life. He further claims that the two rival cities
interpret justice in light of political cultural priorities (so for the
Spartans just behavior consists in a sort of conformism, but for the
Athenians a sort of self-criticism deeply bound up with Athens'
perception of power and its imperialism). In this context, it is not
clear how M. could argue that the deceitfulness of the Spartans does
not imply a calculated hypocrisy, given the importance of respect for
oaths and duty in the Spartan notion of justice both as they express it
and as they embed it in their educational system.

On the other side seems to stand Plato's Republic, read by M. as the
description of civic community <greek>kata\ fu/sin</greek>. Although M.
is surely right that the Republic contains historical features, it is
hard to agree with him, that the basis of the dialogue is heavily
historical and tied with the Corcyrean narrative of Thucydides, or that
this work draws heavily on the meanings and practices of democracy, or
that what goes beyond democracy are not the insights of pure
intellection but the outcomes of critical reflection on both psychic
and cultural possibilities. It has to be asked if reading the cave myth
as a myth against culture is epistemically legitimate: the reading of
the images of Sun, Line and Cave together shows clearly that their
epistemic value goes from a sensory to a philosophical knowledge of the
world, where the Ideas and the Good transcend the sensory world.
Moreover, what does M. mean when he says: 'The political arrangement in
the cave binds all of the members in their places, yet interactions
among them can also lead to a release from bonds and upward movement'?
This reconstruction of the text again goes too far, as there is no
mention of such 'democratic' interaction in the text.[[9]] Also
questionable is the assertion that the metaphor of democracy as a
multi-colored garment (557cd) does not imply that for Socrates
democracy's political organization is incoherent, but only that the
critics are addressed to the broader democratic culture rather than to
its arrangement of political power. M. seems to ignore again that
<greek>paidei/a</greek> and politics were for Socrates/Plato two faces
of the same coin, and that, therefore, a critique of democratic culture
implies a critique of democratic political action.[[10]]

Chapter 5, finally, examines Plato and Thucydides in close dialogue
with postmodernism, understood as the democratic theory of critical
pluralism. Against this view, M. criticizes postmodernism for not
offering an appropriate treatment of otherness, as it limits itself to
the defense of 'others' from attempts to demonize them, and it does not
pursue critical judgments in politics with a vigor proportional to its
stress on the need for searching beneath the categories of difference,
otherness and fundamentalism. Furthermore, it offers citizens little
guidance for exploring the positive or negative effects of any proposal
for collective action. Different again, according to M., is the
treatment of these themes in our classical authors. M. examines first
the Thucydidean narrative of the invasion of Mycalessus by the
Thracians (7.29ff.). The behavior of the Thracians during the invasion
is represented by the Athenian historian as similar to that of
barbarians, who are moved only by bloodthirstiness. M. argues that
Thracian bloodthirstiness is connected with Athenian daring as
presented by Pericles funeral speech, showing that Thucydides
challenges the Periclean image of Athens and that the other Greeks
perceived the Attic city with a turbulent mixture of fear and
admiration. Thus the Thracian incursion into Boeotia occurs because of
Athens' desire for victory and honor, and the barbarian element, i. e.
the bloodthirstiness, which in this case -- so M. -- acts in
interaction with Greek culture as praised by Pericles, leads to the
most reproachable war actions, i. e. impiety against the gods and
genocide. So, concludes M., Thucydides aims to elicit the critical
self-examination of democracy, pointing out that otherness (in this
case <greek> to\ barbariko/n</greek>) and self (i.e. <greek> to\
*(Ellhniko/n</greek>) could almost be related.

An examination of Plato's Symposion follows. In this case too, M. looks
for an historical and thematic connection between the Mycalessian
narrative and the dialogue. Questionable is whether the simple presence
of Alcibiades legitimizes this connection from the historical
perspective, and whether the device of having the banquet narrated by
Apollodorus and his friend at the dramatic date of 416 B.C., while the
symposium itself took place much earlier, could be interpreted as a
reflection on how memory intersects with privileged symbol systems.
Examining the seven speeches of the dialogue, M. argues rightly that
the dialogue creates a theme of the question of love at various levels
and underscores the substantial otherness of <greek>e)/rws</greek> as
it emerges from the description of Socrates offered by Alcibiades, who
affirms that his beloved is not similar to any other human being
(221c4-5). In particular the otherness of <greek>e)/rws</greek> and the
way in which it could be accommodated by culture (a theme of the
speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachos, Aristophanes and Agathon)
must be stressed, as must the otherness of philosophy with respect to
politics (in the speeches of Socrates/Diotima and Alcibiades). This
second otherness, because of the discursive and dialogic character of
philosophy, is always active within politics. In the conclusion of this
chapter, M. puts the problematic image of otherness that emerges from
his analysis in comparison with the theories of Jacques Derrida and
Judith Butler, to claim again that the classical political thought of
Thucydides and Plato, interpreted in light of its dialogical and
discursive character, questions and obfuscates the problem of
otherness, fundamentalism and difference in a more complex and
multi-vocal way than postmodernism.

With chapter 6, M. offers his conclusion. He reconsiders the three
questions that he posed at the beginning of the introduction
(civic/human rights, democratic governance, and the way and quality of
life in democracies), and sums up the answers that his examination of
Thucydides and Plato has brought to the surface. He then focuses on the
contribution of those ancient authors to democratic conversation.
Thucydides seems to be comparable with Hannah Arendt, when she affirms
that politics is a space between past and future, but presents a more
problematic approach to the political problem, for Diodotus' speech
shows that: 1) the condition of politics is a pragmatic encounter with
difficult dilemmas rather than simply plurality; 2) when these dilemmas
are engaged, they require appropriate choice as their solution; 3)
political discourse should be--as Diodotus' speech argues--critical and
constructive; 4) political dilemmas need to be examined from the
perspective of the realities of human nature; 5) the right approach to
politics is to cope with persistent and inevitable problems. With
respect to Plato, M. underscores again the difference that lies between
the content of his arguments and the dialogical context which frames
them. According to this reading, the Socratic virtues could be read as
'supportive of a political morality compatible with democratic
conventions' and the political portrait of Socrates as a dissident
against democracy[[11]] should be considered in a more positive way.
Socrates would not be perceived as a critic of Athenian democracy, but
a democratic citizen who underscores the need for rationality in
democratic politics, and conversely the resistance of the latter
against the former. The final words of M. are intended to present a
more intriguing point of view on those two authors from the perspective
of war and peace.

As I said at the beginning of the review, the book is complex and
requires advanced knowledge both of the original texts and modern
democratic theories. In my opinion, the strong separation between
speech-content and speech-act that M. seems to enforce throughout the
entire book is generally questionable. Could the speech-acts only be
interpreted as a democratic device that mitigates Socrates' harsh
comments on democracy? Moreover, M. declares that it is not possible to
equate Thucydides' points of view and those of his characters, but he
contradicts himself when he considers Diodotus' speech to be a sort of
Thucydidean perspective. Additionally, it must be said with respect to
Plato that his political theory, even when expressed in dialogical
form, cannot be separated from the other branches of his dialectic
system, i.e. metaphysics, ethics and anthropology: political action
should be led by knowledge of the Good and not only by 'democratic'
conversation. In other words, M.'s image of Thucydides and Plato seems
to be only a milder version of the common view on them. Finally, as a
European, I should regret the absence, in the bibliography, of any
interpreter or scholar who does not belong to Anglophone scholarship.


------------------
Notes:


1.   I am grateful to Mr. Dustin Heinen, University of Florida, who
kindly revised the English text of this review, and to the BMCR
referee, who made further improvements.

2.   G. M. Mara, Socrates' Discursive Democracy (Albany: SUNY Press,
1997).

3.   Cf. e.g. on Plato, G. A. Press, Plato. A Guide for the Perplexed
(London / New York: Continuum, 2007).

4.   The passage in question is Plato. Resp. 533a, in which Socrates,
speaking to Glaucon, affirms that Plato's brother would not be able to
follow him on the way to the discovery of the Good. He would no longer
see an image of the things they are speaking about, but the truth
itself as it appears to Socrates. Even though I do not belong to the
so-called Tuebinger Schule, there is sufficient reason to see in this
passage one of Szleza/k's Aussparungstellen (cf. T. A. Szleza/k, Platon
Lesen, Stuttgart / Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993). Namely,
there is a point in the dialogue in which it is not possible to say
more about the theme, either because Socrates' interlocutor has not yet
acquired the philosophical preparation to understand the real essence
of the Good (which is the actual point of view of the Tuebinger Schule)
or because it is not possible to know more about the Good, except that
it exists over the Ideas (cf. for this position, F. Trabattoni, La
verita\ nascosta. Oralita\ e scrittura in Platone e nella Grecia
classica, Roma: Carocci, 2005.). M. goes too far in seeing the passage
as an examination of the objectivity of philosophical knowledge and as
an assertion about the nature of wisdom as a merely questionable point
of view. See also Szleza/k, Die Idee des Guten in Platons Politeia.
Beobachtungen zu den mittleren Buechern (Sankt Augustin: Academia,
2003). On the side of the new skeptical interpretation of Plato,
several scholars argue for the ontological transcendence of the Good
and consequently for its objective value against opinions. See e.g. F.
J. Gonzalez, Perche/ non esiste una 'teoria platonica delle idee' in M.
Bonazzi and F. Trabattoni, Platone e la tradizione platonica (Atti di
un convegno platonico tenutosi a Milano nel novembre 2001. Quaderni di
Acme, 58) (Milano: LED Edizioni, 2003), 31-67, and R. Ferber, Platons
Idee des Guten (2nd edn) (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 1989).

5.   Cf. M. Erler, Platon (= vol. 2/2 of H. Flashar, ed., Philosophie
der Antike) (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2007), 311. An acceptance of a
contested work (in this case the  Alcibiades major), without any
mention, even in a note, of the debate about it happens also in chapter
5 (although I am an advocate of the genuineness of this dialogue: see
De Brasi, 'Un esempio di educazione politica: una proposta di analisi
dell'Alcibiade primo', Wuerzburger Jahrbuecher fuer die
Altertumwissenschaft n. s. 32, 2007, 57-110).

6.   See J.-F. Pradeau, Platon, la de/mocratie et les de/mocrates.
Essai sur la re/ception contemporaine de la pense/e politique
platonicienne
(Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2005).

7.   It is questionable whether it is possible to argue that Socrates'
treatment of democracy in the Protagoras is more positive than
Protagoras' without misreading the general sense of his speech. See the
papers in G. Casertano (ed.), Il Protagora di Platone. Struttura e
problematiche (Napoli: Loffredo, 2004).

8.   On the criticism of comedy in Plato's Dialogues see A. W.
Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue. Plato and the Construct of Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), which M. quotes in his
references but does not really challenge in his arguments. Moreover M.
seems to forget that the platonic dialogues are meant to be the new
form of education in the perfect state. Philosophy is, if one reads the
Republic and the Laws, the new tragedy and the new
<greek>e)/pos</greek>. See on this point G. Di Panno, Dionisiaco e
alterita\ nelle Leggi di Platone. Ordine del corpo e auto movimento
dell'anima nella citta\ tragedia (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2007).

9.  <greek>sko/pei dh/, h)=n d' e)gw\, au)tw=n lu/sin te kai\ i)/asin
tw=n desmw=n kai\ th=s a)frosu/nhs, oi(/a tis a)\n ei)/h, ei) fu/sei
toia/de sumbai/noi au)toi=s.</greek> I follow the text of the new OCT:
S. Slings (ed.), Platonis. Rem publicam (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2003).

10.   Not to forget that the aim of the Platonic city--whether it would
be realizable or only thinkable as an ethical model for future
governments--is its unity and not its multi-vocality. Cf. J.-F.
Pradeau, Plato and the City. A new introduction to Plato's political
thought (transl. by Janet Lloyd) (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
2002).

11.   Cf. D. Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002), which M. also quotes.