POLITICS 212(TH) HISTORY OF WESTERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Prof. Sammy Basu Department of Politics Willamette University mailto:sbasu@willamette.edu

Historiography and Plato

	Author	Text	Context
Whig	Unwilling to follow Socrates’ model of free enquiry because he fears freedom and how most people will behave when free.	Critiques democratic idealism and democratic character. Problematic defense of ‘closed society’ that maintains authoritarian control over reproduction, education, economic transactions, domestic and foreign policy.	Nascent executive, legislative and even judicial democratic institutions, championed by the likes of Pericles, are disapproved of by aristocratic and authoritarian elements in society.
Marxist	Aristocratic intellectual dismayed by democratization and increasing importance of merchant and wealthy classes, and hence engages in conservative reaction.	Does not challenge the elite cultural denigration of manual labor and laborers. To the contrary it gives it an elaborate mystifying rationalization: mind is better than body, and one man-one job, minding his own business.	Democratic regime is a bit of a sham, even though it even pays participants in juries, because it excludes women, resident aliens and slaves (i.e., most manual workers and traders), and practices cultural and economic imperialism in the name of protecting allies and spreading democracy, even as it uses the treasury of the Delian League to rebuild its Acropolis and Parthenon under Pericles.
Feminist	Perhaps because Socrates honored old wise women (and even though he alleged had a shrewish wife), Plato is able to look past cultural misogyny and take women seriously.	Trailblazing arguments for ignoring patriarchal and misogynist cultural assumptions in order to educate women and then value them on their merits. But did he mean it? And, his dichotomous conceptual approach may be vulnerable to m/f.	Even though the patron god of Athens is Athena, as the polis becomes more democratic it relegates respectable women to private domestic spheres of emotion and intimacy.
Post-Modern	Will to power disguised as disinterested love of knowledge that ignores the lived experiences, pluralism and particularity of those around him.	Highly influential model of a ‘meta-narrative’ or attempt to represent the big picture, into which everything else can be fit, with all of the attendant dangers that what does not fit (differences, desires, impulses) the schema is suppressed. The marginal is made monstrous.	Cultural agenda to suppress Dionysian and alien (female, resident aliens, Spartan, Persian) abundance of energies with Apollonian reason and order (see Parthenon and centaurs).