Plato's Statesman: The Web of Politics

St. Augustine's Press (1995)
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Abstract

In this book an eminent scholar presents a rich and penetrating analysis of the _Statesman_, perhaps Plato's most challenging work. Stanley Rosen contends that the main theme of this dialogue is a definition of the art of politics and the degree to which political experience is subject either to the rule of sound judgment or to technical construction. The _Statesman_, like Plato's earlier _Sophist_, features a Stranger who tries to refute Socrates. Much of his conversation is devoted to a minute analysis of the art of weaving, selected by the Stranger as a paradigm of the royal art of politics, for he conceives of the city as an artifact. But the Stranger's successive efforts to find a method for defining the art of politics are failures, because there is no fitting model or technique of measurement by which to grasp politics that includes within its scope the totality of human existence—there is, suggests Plato, no technical construction of politics. Rosen reflects on the relevance of Plato to contemporary debates about political reconstruction on the one hand and about the deeper issue of the supposed end of modernity on the other. He argues that, far from being the father of essentialism and the reification of human nature, as others have suggested, Plato elaborates a rhetoric of politics as self-defense against nature. Just as weaving produces clothing to protect the body against the elements, so the statesman must produce myths or local models to protect the soul against the body.

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Citations of this work

Is the Idea of the Good Beyond Being? Plato's "epekeina tês ousias" Revisited.Rafael Ferber & Gregor Damschen - 2015 - In Debra Nails, Harold Tarrant, Mika Kajava & Eero Salmenkivi (eds.), SECOND SAILING: Alternative Perspectives on Plato. Wellprint Oy. pp. 197-203.
A Horse Is a Horse, of Course, of Course, but What about Horseness?Necip Fikri Alican - 2015 - In Debra Nails & Harold Tarrant (eds.), Second Sailing: Alternative Perspectives on Plato. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica. pp. 307–324.
'Making New Gods? A Reflection on the Gift of the Symposium.Mitchell Miller - 2015 - In Debra Nails, Harold Tarrant, Mika Kajava & Eero Salmenkivi (eds.), Second Sailing: Alternative Perspectives on Plato. Societas Scientiarum Fennica. pp. 285-306.
The Groundwork for Dialectic in Statesman 277a-287b.Colin C. Smith - 2018 - International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 12 (2):132-150.

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