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37953 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1846 of 1898

  • Introduction

  • Plato
  • Edited by Julia Annas, Robin Waterfield
  • Book:
    Plato: The Statesman
    Published online:
    12 September 2018
    Print publication:
    23 March 1995, pp ix-xxiv

  • Summary

    The Statesman (or Politicus) is central to any serious concern with Plato's political thought. It clarifies and modifies Plato's earlier positions, especially in the Republic, and illuminates the principles of his political thinking even while these are in the process of changing.

    Plato (429–347 bc) is known and discussed widely as a political thinker, but usually on the basis of his best-known work, the Republic, and this is in many ways a pity. The Republic is a work in which political theory is mixed together with ethical theory and metaphysics, and the political strand (which is not a very large one) is hard to disentangle and open to many different kinds of interpretation. Further, the political ideas, though expressed with vigour, are very sketchy, and their relation to contemporary political reality is remote. Plato's later works, Statesman and Laws, are more properly seen as works of political theory than is the Republic, and studying them can both help us to understand the Republic better, and also put it into perspective, as being only part of a long development in Plato's thinking.

    In the Statesman, for example, Plato defends the ideal of the ruler as possessor of a particular kind of expertise, namely expertise in the ‘political skill (or art)’ (politikē technē). This idea dominates the political aspect of the Republic: political problems are to be solved by imposing an ideal ruler, and the only interesting question is what the nature of that rule is to be.

Page 1846 of 1898