Early Modern Responses to Socratic Political Philosophy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel examines successive responses to classical political theory in the early modern thought of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. In their heightened skepticism toward distributive justice as a natural and sustainable basis for government, how did the early moderns propose that factional conflict and popular indignation might best be channeled or mitigated? In what way did these thinkers either reject or repurpose the teachings of Plato and Aristotle in accounting for the moral preconditions for their successive models of democratic self-government? The following papers propose that a sustained examination of these modern responses to Socratic political philosophy sheds new light on the theoretical basis for a heightened skepticism toward natural inequality at the core of modern political thought. 

In light of increasing divisions between elites and popular masses in contemporary Western liberal democracies, Evan Cree Gee reexamines Machiavelli’s treatment of class conflict in the Discourses on Livy as a systematic rejection of Aristotle’s analysis of the causes of faction in Book V of the Politics. David Futscher considers the extent to which Hobbes’ response to factional conflict was likewise rooted in a rejection of Aristotle. Revising the view that Hobbes simply rejected the Aristotleian thesis that men are by nature political animals, Futscher argues that Hobbes instead offered an alternative account of human sociality as the basis for his insistence on the need for artificial representative government. Two papers then consider the moral conditions for democratic self-government in the works of Locke and Rousseau. Nathan Davis examines Locke’s theory of self-mastery as the psychological precondition for political self-government: he argues that Locke broke with a Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of self-mastery insofar as Locke roots the motivation for this virtue on innate human anxiety and insecurity. Finally, Sophie Pangle analyzes the political and religious teachings in Book IV of Emile to uncover Rousseau’s understanding of how popular indignation might be moderated by a democratized reinterpretation of the Socratic thesis that injustice is fundamentally involuntary.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Society for Greek Political Thought

Individual Presentations

• Vice Is Ignorance: Rousseau’s Response to Socrates - Sophie Pangle, Harvard University

• The Political Animal: Hobbes’s Critique of Aristotle - David Futscher, University of Texas at Austin

• The Aristotelian Alternative to Machiavelli’s Treatment of Faction - Evan Cree Gee, University of Texas, Austin

Chair

• Timothy Brennan University of Austin

Discussant

• Dimitrios Ioannis Halikias Princeton University