Political Dissent in Democratic Athens

"This book is very instructive. It helps us understand Plato in the political and intellectual context he was writing in. What Ober posits is that we can see a whole generation of people who are critical of the prevailing norms and practices of the Athenian democracy and are exploring new ways to write and speak which challenge those norms. It’s in that context that we can understand Plato. Ober’s book really helps us because it makes Plato not this singular one-off comet, but rather someone who is part of a broader political and intellectual movement. Yes, he was dissenting against democracy. It’s very hard for us to recapture how radical this was. Athens was the first democracy at this time — there are others, but it’s the most powerful. It has these moments of inner turmoil, the oligarchic coups I mentioned earlier, arising from tensions of internal politics exacerbated by fighting a war against Sparta and her allies that Athens eventually lost. This is the first regime in which the majority of common people — people who are poor and may not own any property, who are maybe artisans or tenant farmers — actually have political power. To win success in politics you have to speak in terms that they are going to approve of, as members of the assembly and popular juries. That leads to a certain idea of what knowledge is, or what power is, what one should aim at. That’s what Plato, and others like him, were criticising. Crudely, yes. Of course it’s more subtle than that. Some scholars have argued that you can see reflections of democratic practices in the way he conceives the free speech of philosophy: free speech being a value that democracy also had. So I don’t think one can say it quite so simply. But there certainly are moments in Plato — for example when he argues against the idea that majority rule is the standard of legitimacy or even truth — where he really wants to dramatically challenge and say, “We have an independent philosophical standard of truth rooted in the nature of reality, and what the majority thinks can’t change that.”"