Socratic Citizenship

Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disinclined to fulfill the obligations of citizenship or the responsibilities of self-government. In response, the critics urge community involvement and renewed education in the civic virtues. But what kind of civic engagement do we want, and what sort of citizenship should we encourage? In Socratic Citizenship, Dana Villa takes issue with those who would reduce citizenship to community involvement or to political participation for its own sake. He argues that we need to place more value on a form of conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship invented by Socrates, one that is critical in orientation and dissident in practice. Taking Plato's Apology of Socrates as his starting point, Villa argues that Socrates was the first to show, in his words and deeds, how moral and intellectual integrity can go hand in hand, and how they can constitute importantly civic--and not just philosophical or moral--virtues. More specifically, Socrates urged that good citizens should value this sort of integrity more highly than such apparent virtues as patriotism, political participation, piety, and unwavering obedience to the law. Yet Socrates' radical redefinition of citizenship has had relatively little influence on Western political thought. Villa considers how the Socratic idea of the thinking citizen is treated by five of the most influential political thinkers of the past two centuries--John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. In doing so, he not only deepens our understanding of these thinkers' work and of modern ideas of citizenship, he also shows how the fragile Socratic idea of citizenship has been lost through a persistent devaluation of independent thought and action in public life. Engaging current debates among political and social theorists, this insightful book shows how we must reconceive the idea of good citizenship if we are to begin to address the shaky fundamentals of civic culture in America today.

Socrates, the father of political philosophy, was put to death in 399 BC by the world's first democracy. Ever since, defenders of democracy have attempted to show that the central tension symbolized by that event -- between philosophical truth, embodied by Socrates, and democratic whim -- could be contained. In The Socratic Citizen, Adolf G. Gundersen addresses this tension in a new way, by recasting Socrates as a model for the democratic citizen. Gundersen asserts that political deliberation is best thought of as a two-person affair, or a dyad. He proposes this dyadic theory as an intriguing alternative to the present American system, where interest groups define the debate and the average citizen is reduced to simply agreeing or disagreeing with these manufactured positions. A powerful reclamation of everyday conversation as an integral form of political discourse, The Socratic Citizen is an original contribution to political philosophy.

This book challenges popular modern views of Socrates by examining the political significance of his activity in ancient Athens.

Over the last ten years citizenship has become an area of interdisciplinary research and teaching in its own right. This book highlights that globalization poses new challenges for established understandings and practices of citizenship, and that intellectual work is required to fashion models of citizenship better suited to present problems and realities. In particular, this volume emphasizes the pluralization of identities and communities within states brought about by such forces as mass immigration, global communication, substate regionalism and more generally the fragmentation of modern notions of nation. The challenge is to devise forms of democracy and political identity adequate to these 'globalized' conditions. Ideally suited to anyone interested in globalization, cultural diversity and citizenship.

Best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau is often considered a recluse who emerged from solitude only occasionally to take a stand on the issues of his day. In Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, Shannon L. Mariotti explores Thoreau’s nature writings to offer a new way of understanding the unique politics of the so-called hermit of Walden Pond. Drawing imaginatively from the twentieth-century German social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, she shows how withdrawal from the public sphere can paradoxically be a valuable part of democratic politics. Separated by time, space, and context, Thoreau and Adorno share a common belief that critical inquiry is essential to democracy but threatened by modern society. While walking, huckleberrying, and picking wild apples, Thoreau tries to recover the capacities for independent perception and thought that are blunted by “Main Street,” conventional society, and the rapidly industrializing world that surrounded him. Adorno’s thoughts on particularity and the microscopic gaze he employs to work against the alienated experience of modernity help us better understand the value of Thoreau’s excursions into nature. Reading Thoreau with Adorno, we see how periodic withdrawals from public spaces are not necessarily apolitical or apathetic but can revitalize our capacity for the critical thought that truly defines democracy. In graceful, readable prose, Mariotti reintroduces us to a celebrated American thinker, offers new insights on Adorno, and highlights the striking common ground they share. Their provocative and challenging ideas, she shows, still hold lessons on how we can be responsible citizens in a society that often discourages original, critical analysis of public issues.

This 2006 study examines how the ancient Greeks decided questions of justice as a key to understanding the intersection of our moral and political lives. Combining contemporary political philosophy with historical, literary and philosophical texts, it examines a series of remarkable individuals who performed 'scripts' of justice in early Iron Age, archaic and classical Greece. From the earlier periods, these include Homer's Achilles and Odysseus as heroic individuals who are also prototypical citizens, and Solon the lawgiver, writing the scripts of statute law and the jury trial. In democratic Athens, the focus turns to dialogues between a citizen's moral autonomy and political obligation in Aeschyleon tragedy, Pericles' citizenship paradigm, Antiphon's sophistic thought and forensic oratory, the political leadership of Alcibiades and Socrates' moral individualism.

The author explores the recovery of Socratic philosophy in the political thought of G.W.F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Ward identifies the cause of the renewed interest in Socrates in Hegel’s call for the absorption of the individual within the modern, liberal state and the concomitant claim that Socratic skepticism should cease because history has reached its end and perfection. Recoiling from Hegel’s attempt to chain the individual within the “cave,” nineteenth century thinkers push back against his deification of the state. Yet, underlying Kierkegaard, Mill and Nietzsche’s turn to Socrates is their acceptance of Hegel’s critique of the liberal conception of the rights-bearing individual. Like Hegel, they agree that such an individual is an unworthy competitor to the state. In search of a noble individual to hold up against the state and counter the belief in the “end” of history, Kierkegaard, Mill and Nietzsche bring back and transform Socrates in significant ways. For Kierkegaard the Socratic philosopher in modern times is the person of faith, for Mill the public intellectual whose idiosyncratic identity arises from the freedom of speech, and for Nietzsche the Dionysian artist. Each model the beauty of individuality in our democratic age.

Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy invites readers to participate in the practices of Socratic and Platonic politics.