Socratic politics: Lessons from the Gorgias

Almost forty years ago, the liberal pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty published an essay titled “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.”  I recall hating it immediately, from the title alone.  The sentiment was appalling coming from anyone, but especially from a philosopher.  Philosophy aims at the true and the good, democracy merely at what the majority happens to want.  That can sometimes be false and very bad indeed – and in one notorious case it was the execution of Socrates, the model for all philosophers.  How could philosophy not have the priority?

Prioritizing democracy

But what exactly is it for either to have “priority” to the other?  What Rorty had in mind is this.  The liberal democratic tradition has pushed religion ever further out of the public square.  Theology is now widely regarded as a purely private interest whose claims have no bearing on the political order.  But for centuries, liberalism took philosophy to retain political relevance.  In particular, liberal theorists took their favored polity to require philosophical foundations – in Locke’s natural rights theory, Mill’s utilitarianism, or whatever.

But none of the various alternative liberal political philosophies has ever found universal acceptance.  The pluralism of modern liberal democratic societies is so great that agreement on philosophical premises is no more likely than on theological premises.  Rorty’s conclusion is that the quest for philosophical foundations should be abandoned, and that philosophy has no more business in the public square than religion.  You might say that, just as liberalism has created a separation of Church and state, Rorty calls for a separation of philosophy and state. 

What, then, can ground liberal democracy?  If grounding it entails rooting liberal democratic principles in truths about human nature that transcend all particular cultures and historical eras, Rorty’s answer is that nothing can ground it.  But neither, in his view, does it need such a foundation.  A contemporary liberal democratic society can ground itself in whatever principles it happens to take as basic and non-negotiable, even if these are very different from those that would have been embraced in other eras or by other societies.

If a critic asks why anyone should accept such principles, Rorty’s answer is that nothing more need be said than that this is what “we” citizens of a modern liberal democracy take to be basic, and that’s that.  Any alternative is, for “us,” simply beyond the pale.  He is well aware that there are those within modern liberal democratic society who do not agree, and are committed to religious, philosophical, or other views that are incompatible with its basic principles.  But the majority, who accept those principles, regard such people as “crazy” and need pay them no mind.  Says Rorty:

They are not crazy because they have mistaken the ahistorical nature of human beings.  They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously.  This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation. (p. 288)

Rorty is also well aware that the resulting position is “relatively local and ethnocentric – the tradition of a particular community, the consensus of a particular culture” (p. 281).  It is, in short, frankly relativist.  Except that Rorty urges us to be “light-minded” about traditional philosophical topics such as truth and relativism (p. 293), the debate over which is as ancient as Plato and his Sophist rivals.  Partisans of liberal democracy needn’t engage with the critic who would raise against them the traditional objections to views like Rorty’s.  They may “simply drop [such] questions and the vocabulary in which those questions are posed” and “refuse to argue” with those who press them (p. 290).

Hence, where such traditional philosophical views come into conflict with the assumptions of liberal democracy, “democracy takes precedence over philosophy” (p. 291).  For defenders of liberal democracy, in Rorty’s view, philosophy can only be about “putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit” (p. 282). 

Rorty’s position is similar to John Rawls’s view that liberalism does not need any metaphysical foundation, but can be grounded instead in an “overlapping consensus” between the “reasonable comprehensive doctrines” that exist within a pluralistic society – where, on closer inspection, it turns out that a doctrine counts as “reasonable” in Rawls’s view only if it accepts the liberal’s conception of political order.  Indeed, Rorty sees himself as essentially giving a more explicitly pragmatist formulation of Rawls’s basic idea.  And as with Rawls, the result is a shamelessly question-begging position.  For it amounts to the thesis that liberalism can be given an adequate foundation as long as you accept the basic principles of liberalism.

The reason Rorty and Rawls think they can get away with this is evidently that they suppose that there are enough people in modern liberal democratic societies – or enough people with power and influence, anyway – who are willing to let them get away with it.  That assumption is much less plausible today than it was at the time Rorty wrote his essay.  But even if it were true, it amounts to little more than an urbane riff on the fallacy of appealing to the mob.

Prioritizing philosophy

In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates gives powerful expression to the priority of philosophy to democracy, and of its priority to politics more generally.  Addressing Callicles – who, like Rorty, puts politics above philosophy – Socrates says:

I am in love… with philosophy, you with the democracy of Athens… For all your cleverness you are unable to contradict any assertion made by the object of your love, but shift your ground this way and that… If the Athenian democracy denies any statement made by you in a speech, you change your policy in deference to its wishes… My love, philosophy… is perpetually saying… what you are now hearing from me, and she is a great deal less capricious… Philosophy never changes… Better that the mass of mankind should disagree with me and contradict me than that I, a single individual, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict myself. (Hamilton translation, pp. 75-76)

Notoriously, Callicles takes the view that might makes right, and that Socrates’ unwavering adherence to reason and moral principle evinces weakness.  He judges the philosopher to be impractical and unworldly, someone comparable to “those who stammer and play childish games” and who “deserve[s] a whipping for his unmanly behavior” (pp. 80-81).  In Callicles’ view, the point of life is power, the way to attain power is through politics, and the key to success in politics is skill at keeping the mob on one’s side through rhetoric.  Hence Socrates’ charge that Callicles is in love with the democracy of Athens, insofar as he accommodates himself to whatever it wishes.

Callicles’ frank celebration of the strongman may make him seem very different from Rorty, who deploys the soft rhetoric of tolerance and pluralism.  But what they have in common is more significant than their differences.  Both scorn Socratic philosophy’s appeal to objective rational and moral standards.  Both would replace them with the prevailing democratic consensus (even if what Rorty had in mind by this is something less ephemeral than what Socrates accuses Callicles of catering to).  Both essentially ground the political order in raw power – in Callicles’ case, the power of the demagogue, in Rorty’s the power of conventional opinion.

For the Socrates of the Gorgias, though, it is not just that philosophy is prior to politics insofar as the truth it pursues is of greater importance than majority opinion.  He also holds that philosophy should order politics, inverting Rorty’s position that politics should shape philosophy.  Of political discourse, Socrates says:

There are two kinds of political oratory, one of them is pandering and base clap-trap; only the other is good, which aims at the edification of the souls of the citizens and is always striving to say what is best, whether it be welcome or unwelcome to the ears of the audience. (p. 110)

And the aim of Socratic orators is not merely to increase the listener’s theoretical knowledge but “to improve their fellow-citizens as much as possible” (Ibid.).  That is to say, they are engaged in a moral exercise no less than an intellectual one.  Socrates continues:

The means which produce order and proportion in the soul are called ‘regulation’ and ‘law’; these are what make men law-abiding and orderly, and so we have righteousness and moderation… Then the good orator, being also a man of expert knowledge, will have these ends in view in any speech or action by which he seeks to influence the souls of men… His attention will be wholly concentrated on bringing righteousness and moderation and every other virtue to birth in the souls of his fellow-citizens, and on removing their opposites, unrighteousness and excess and vice. (pp. 112-13)

Nor is this merely a matter of the philosopher acting in a private capacity to exhort his fellow citizens to what is true and good.  Rather, the state and its rulers must work for this end.  One’s “sole concern as a public man will be to make us who are citizens as good as possible… that is the duty of the statesman… the service which a good man owes to his country” (pp. 128-29).  And only a good man can do this job:

Ought we not then to set about our treatment of the state and its citizens on this principle, with the idea of making the citizens themselves as good as possible?  Without such a principle… one can do no good; no other service to the state is of the slightest avail if those who are to acquire riches or authority over people or any other kind of power are not men of good will. (pp. 126-27)

For Socrates, this is not an optional utopian ideal, but the very essence of statesmanship, to be practiced whatever the cost.  In response to Callicles’ advice that he pander to democratic opinion lest his opposition to it put him in danger, Socrates says:

I believe that I am one of the few Athenians – perhaps indeed there is no other – who studies the genuine art of statesmanship, and that I am the only man now living who puts it into practice… What I say on any occasion is not designed to please, and… I aim not at what is most agreeable but at what is best, and will not employ the subtle arts which you advise. (p. 140)

Similarly, Socrates says, the good man must not pander to a despot any more than to the mob, in the interests of securing power or keeping himself safe.  Even if he should succeed, the victory will be Pyrrhic, for “in that case there will befall him the greatest of all evils, a soul vitiated and corrupted by the imitation of his master and the power thus acquired” (p. 122).  We must “take care… that we do not find… that we have purchased political power at the cost of all that we hold most dear” (p. 125).

We see in the Gorgias, then, the seeds of a conception of politics that would be worked out in greater detail and more systematically in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, and later still in the work of natural law thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas.  Of course, these thinkers differ in important ways.  But they agree that a state must facilitate the moral perfection of its citizens, that the guidance of sound philosophy is essential to this, and that rulers must be virtuous themselves if they are plausibly going to further this end.

Modern liberalism would come to define itself in opposition to this classical “perfectionist” conception of politics.  It takes the aim of politics to be, not the facilitation of citizens’ pursuit of the good, but the protection of their pursuit of whatever ends they happen to have – even ends that are gravely immoral by classical standards.  It eschews the philosophical and theological sources of wisdom the classical tradition says ought to inform statecraft.  And it tends to prize mere technocratic competence rather than the sorts of virtues a Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas would attribute to the ideal statesman.

Whither postliberalism?

One of the insights of postliberalism is that the liberal tradition always had within it the seeds of the decadent liberalism of Rawls and Rorty – and that this desiccated late stage liberalism was bound in turn to give way to the more radical “woke” ideologies that have in recent years begun to destabilize liberal democracy from within. 

What does postliberalism propose to put in its place?  The main postliberal writers are clearly committed to a revival of some version or other of the classical, Socratic conception of politics.  Their main inspirations tend to include thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and other notables from this tradition.  We might call this approach “Socratic postliberalism.” 

However, there is another tendency which is sometimes characterized as “postliberal,” albeit by the critics of postliberalism rather than by postliberals themselves.  Socratic postliberalism arose largely within academia, and has been presented in formal essays and books featuring carefully developed lines of argument and analysis.  By contrast, the other tendency I refer to derives more from online culture and is typically expressed in podcasts, tweets, and the occasional amateurish treatise.  As to its content, it tends toward a tribalism that manifests itself in a fixation on matters of race and a crude jingoism.  It is enthusiastic about tearing down existing institutions, and impatient with any suggestion that it would be better to reform them, or at least to think carefully about what might replace them before tearing them down.  It is less interested in persuasion than in rallying allies and offending and flummoxing opponents through outrageous rhetoric – a right-wing variation on “épater la bourgeoisie.”  And it sees only weakness in calls for moderation or intellectual consistency, preferring leaders who are aggressive to the point of obnoxiousness, and actions that are bold to the point of recklessness.

This tendency may pay occasional lip service to the Socratic tradition, but its spirit is definitely that of Callicles.  Its ideal is not the philosopher who pursues the true and the good even if it costs him his life (as it did Socrates), but the strongman who can channel the will of the tribe and lead it in crushing its enemies.  If it is “postliberal” insofar as it directs its animus at some of the same tendencies opposed by Socratic postliberalism, it is nevertheless a very different animal.  We might label it “Calliclean postliberalism.”

Socratic and Calliclean postliberalism alike are enemies of the liberalism of Rawls and Rorty.  But as what I’ve said so far indicates, Calliclean postliberalism is in reality closer to Rorty’s position than might at first appear. For they are agreed in prioritizing politics over philosophy, power over principle, the will of the mob over unwavering fidelity to the true and the good.  True, Calliclean postliberalism is shrilly populist whereas Rortian liberalism is urbanely democratic.  But that just means that they appeal to different mobs.

Because of what they have in common, Calliclean postliberalism is no more coherent than Rortian liberalism, and no less subject to Socrates’ refutation of Callicles in the Gorgias.  It channels some understandable frustrations, but also some ugly and irrational hatreds and resentments.  And while it can protest our disordered political and cultural situation, it cannot provide a remedy.  Calliclean politics can at most win a battle or two, until it is itself crushed by whatever gang of thugs the rival mob votes into office.  Socratic politics built our civilization, and only a Socratic postliberalism can renew it.