Product details
- ISBN 9780271020761
- Weight: 653g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Feb 2001
- Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this first comprehensive treatment of Plato’s political thought in a long time, John Wallach offers a "critical historicist" interpretation of Plato. Wallach shows how Plato’s theory, while a radical critique of the conventional ethical and political practice of his own era, can be seen as having the potential for contributing to democratic discourse about ethics and politics today.
The author argues that Plato articulates and "solves" his Socratic Problem in his various dialogues in different but potentially complementary ways. The book effectively extracts Plato from the straightjacket of Platonism and from the interpretive perspectives of the past fifty years—principally those of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, M. I. Finley, Jacques Derrida, and Gregory Vlastos.
The author’s distinctive approach for understanding Plato—and, he argues, for the history of political theory in general—can inform contemporary theorizing about democracy, opening pathways for criticizing democracy on behalf of virtue, justice, and democracy itself.
John R. Wallach is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, CUNY. His previous book, co-edited with J. Peter Euben and Josiah Ober, is Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (1994).
