THE MEANING AND LIMITS OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

Xavier Márquez: A Stranger’s Knowledge:
Statesmanship, Philosophy and Law in Plato’s“Statesman.”
(Las Vegas: Parmenides, 2012. Pp. vii, 399.)

doi:10.1017/S0034670513000971

“Wearying,” “bizarre,” “disjointed,” “confused,” “a poor relation of the Republic and the Laws,” “a ‘dialogue’ without any real dialogue.” These are just a few of the phrases that have been used by scholars over the years to dismiss Plato’s Statesman as a work unworthy of serious study. Fortunately, in recent years, a number of scholars have written excellent commentaries on this dialogue in order to rehabilitate it as a work that rewards careful study and contributes important new elements to Plato’s notions of both method and politics. Xavier Márquez’s book, A Stranger’s Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy, and Law in Plato’s “Statesman” constitutes a wonderful new addition to this whole line of scholarship. While acknowledging his indebted- ness to a number of scholars who have defended this dialogue as a cohesive whole, Márquez’s nuanced, engaging, and erudite reading of the dialogue consistently produces new insights into the character of the Statesman’s complex unity or “hidden beauty” (xiii).

The book contains an illuminating discussion of the Eleatic Stranger ’s initial divisions and his treatment of the statesman as a shepherd of human beings. Márquez persuasively argues that the bizarre details and conclusions of this discussion are in fact crucial for understanding important aspects of states- manship that are only fully developed later in the dialogue. Thus, the Eleatic Stranger ’s first divisions, which result in the puzzling definitions of man as a “featherless biped” or a “two-footed pig” (as opposed to man as a rational animal), are meant to show that it is not man’ s rationality, but rather his insufficiently tame and social nature that is the most relevant aspect of human being when thinking about the peculiar character of statesmanship (30, 73, 91–93). It is human beings’ thumotic pride and quarrelsomeness in combination with their capacity for phronēsis that makes human beings “think that they are able to rule themselves even if they are not” (86). This fact about human beings points ahead to the role of the statesman at the end of the dialogue (306a–311c) in weaving together the overly tame and “moderate” and overly wild and “courageous” citizens to ensure a more stable polity (70, 74, 86, 93–94).

Márquez’s treatment of the myth is equally impressive in illuminating the underlying unity of the Statesman. He disagrees with scholars who see the movement of the myth from the age of Cronos to the age of Zeus as primarily signaling Plato’s rejection of some aspect of his earlier writings (e.g., Plato’s rejection of philosopher-kings) or of the earlier divisions of the Statesman itself (e.g., Plato’s rejection of the traditional paradigm of the ruler as a shep- herd). Márquez argues that both parts of the myth of the Statesman reveal important aspects of the dialogue’s treatment of statesmanship. Thus, the fact that the god in the first part of the myth lets go of the cosmos at a certain point and returns only when the cosmos is threatened with complete disorder and destruction parallels the role of the statesman vis-à-vis the city. His care is closer to that of a founder or refounder who only returns in times of emergency (10, 24, 121, 138–39, 259). The second part of the myth, that is, the age of Zeus, is characterized by the dissimilarities of characters and cir- cumstances, which make it impossible for a human statesman to care for each individual member of the city while caring for the whole (154). It is also characterized by the dispersion of the arts among separate human beings (168–73). Each of these characteristics corresponds to a particular aspect of the statesman’s care described later in the dialogue: The first points to the fact that the statesman must resort to the imperfect expediency of law that provides general rules for the whole herd, rather than specific provisions for each unique individual, as well as to the later  presentation of the states- man as a weaver of souls (154). The second points to the fact that the states- man must coordinate and decide the proper time for exercising the arts of generalship, rhetoric, and judging (174).

Márquez’s aim in the book, however, is not simply  to illustrate its unity, but rather to do so in order to defend his bold thesis that “the most complete treat- ment of the meaning and limits of political knowledge in Plato is not to be found in the Republic or the Laws, two well-studied and well-known dialo- gues, but in the less familiar Statesman” (4). In developing this thesis, Márquez shows how the notion of political knowledge outlined in the Statesman  is not “exhausted in the contemplation of eternal forms” (as is the case in  the Republic), but “is instead conceived as the ability to make use of a grasp of the invariant structure of reality to order the unstable world in which [the statesman] must operate” (32). In the Statesman, Plato comes to understand the politikē technē of statesmanship as epistēmē plus measurement, and linked to this,  he understands the products of all technē as images of formal structures (192). Second,  contra many commentators on the Statesman, Márquez argues that Plato’s treatment of the rule of law in the second-best, law-abiding regimes shows that it has significant cognitive capital, even though it is grounded in experience and thus depends on corre- lation not causation in its attempts to preserve the city (26–27, 294–95). Third, he argues that, although the political knowledge of the statesman is different from Socrates’s account of it in dialogues like the Gorgias and the Republic, and from the Athenian Stranger ’s account of the Nocturnal Council in the Laws, the Statesman still implicitly retains a place for Socratic inquiry and for insti- tutions like the Nocturnal Council in the second-best, law-abiding regimes (11, 28, 294, 364–65). Finally, he argues that Plato’s account of the statesman’s knowledge and the rule of law, as well as the  implicit argument about the need for inquiry in law-abiding regimes, provide important lessons for con- temporary theories of politics, even democratic ones (34, 341–64).

Márquez’s treatment of all of these themes is both lucid  and complex. He engages extensively with  the secondary literature on these topics, and  devel- ops his own unique position based upon an exceptionally careful reading of the Statesman as well as other texts in the Platonic corpus. He also does an excellent job of showing how Plato’s notion of statesmanship relates to con- temporary concerns ranging from the philosophy of science to the political theories of Rawls, Habermas, and Arendt.

If the book falls short on any front it is in Márquez’s profession to show how the political knowledge of statesmanship differs from other forms of knowl- edge (4), and this shortcoming is primarily due  to a lack of clarity about just what is meant by “knowledge” at various points in the book. According to Márquez, the political knowledge of the statesman is not democratic at all, but rather an incredibly rare form of expertise that remains an unlikely possi- bility in the real world of politics. Thus, it is presumably these other forms of knowledge that provide the democratic or realistic lessons of the Statesman. This seems to be confirmed by Márquez’s statement that “Plato in the Statesman does not enjoin us to look for the statesman in our midst, but to cultivate political knowledge in whatever form it may be found ” (360).

Márquez does say that the second-best, law-abiding regimes will require Socratic philosophers as rulers (11) and even citizens (364) because only the Socratic philosopher “knows that he does not know, and hence knows that he does not know better than what the law declares is just or good or noble, even though he realizes that the law does not know this either ” (11). He also says that institutions like the Nocturnal Council would be necessary in these regimes “for the accumulation of experience suitable for protecting the city against internal and external conflict and for integrating this experi- ence into the legal system of the city” (291). But what is left unclear is whether these are two different types of “knowledge,” and if so, how they relate to each other, and  to the knowledge characteristic of the other  philoso- pher of the Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger. Second, how do all of these forms of “knowledge” relate to the knowledge of the statesman? If, as Márquez argues, we can “gloss the statesman’s knowledge as knowledge of the time and mode of transcending the law” (316), then wouldn’t an institution like the Nocturnal Council also need this knowledge if it is allowed to “change [the] laws in accordance with experience” (289)? Finally, how do these forms of knowledge relate to the knowledge obtained by the reader of the dialogue?

For Márquez to answer these questions he would have to overcome his refusal to apply Plato’s positive estimation of experience, which he thinks is evident in the Statesman (187–89), to the political knowledge of the statesman. Linked to this, he would have to overcome his insistence that the statesman is a “freak accident of both nature and culture” (339). As he himself points out, the Stranger ’s discussion of paradigms suggests that experience is a precursor to knowledge and is involved in the movement from true belief to knowledge (209–13). He also argues that “only a Plato or an Aristotle, that is an ‘empiri- cal’ researcher into politics … could become a statesman in the sense of the later  dialogues, someone who produces the order of the city and is not also produced by it” (349). But the Stranger ’s discussion of, and education to, sta- tesmanship, which is experienced by the reader, is also part of Plato’s edu- cational regimen. While the city outlined in the Statesman might not produce the statesman, the entire discussion on display in the Statesman might well do so for certain readers. Such a reader would overcome the strict separation between the statesman and the philosopher, or politics and philosophy, that Márquez thinks is evident in the Statesman (20). This would mean that there is an even deeper unity to the dialogue than the one Márquez uncovers. It is one that Plato invites but does not force his readers to make. These reservations aside, Márquez’s book is an exceptional piece of Platonic scholarship that should be read by those who are new to the Statesman, as well as those who have experienced and negotiated its intricacies for many years.

–Christina Tarnopolsky
McGill University

Book Review: Xavier Márquez : A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy and Law in Plato's “Statesman.” (Las Vegas: Parmenides, 2012. Pp. vii, 399.), by Christina Tarnopolsky
The Review of Politics, Volume 76, Issue 01 (Winter 2014), pp 136-140
Copyright © 2014 University of Notre Dame. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press