I.F. Stone Questions Socrates

THE Closing of the American Mind may still sit safely ensconced atop the bestseller lists, but a Bloom backlash has set in. In the months since the initial hoopla over the book, aggrieved members of the academic community excoriated by Professor Bloom have mounted a counteroffensive.

The Trial of Socrates

By I.F. Stone

Little, Brown: 282 pp.: $18.95.

Unlike most of the book's civilian purchasers, they read on past Bloom's juicy passages on the mental masturbation of the MTV generation. There they found Bloom lamenting the "Nietzscheanization"--i.e., descent into cheap nihilism and easy relativism unworthy of Nietzsche--of the American university. In his longing for a return to a more Socratic conception of higher education, however, Bloom's later critics correctly discerned an author whose relationship with the democratic idea was ambiguous.

I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates provides an unintended counterweight to the central theses of Bloom, who fancies himself a disciple of Socrates. Stone, the legendary lefty muckraking journalist, set out in his retirement to write a sweeping tome on freedom of thought in human history. His studies inevitably drew him back to Athens. "There, like so many before me," he writes, "I fell in love with the Greeks."

But a great paradox tormented Stone as he confronted the Greeks. Athens was the glory of Hellas, "the earliest society where freedom of thought and its expression flourished on a scale never known before, and rarely equaled since." Yet Athenian democracy also put Socrates on trial for speaking his mind and voted to execute him for his "crimes." This horrified Stone, and, he writes, "shook my Jeffersonian faith in the common man." The Trial of Socrates is the result of his effort to understand, if not excuse, how Athens could have besmirched its good name and that of democracy by killing Socrates.

STONE sets Plato's Socratic dialogues against the accounts of contemporary Greek dramatists to try to reconstruct the story of Socrates and Athens. Plato, Socrates' Boswell, so to speak, was often disingenuous in recounting his mentor's ordeal. Through Plato, Socrates became a noble martyr forced to drink the hemlock because of he constantly exhorted his fellow Athenians to virtue. But, Stone writes, Socrates wasn't tried simply for being a nudge. Socrates may be "revered as a nonconformist, but few realize that he was a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed."

Stone finds some solace in the fact that the Athenians didn't try Socrates until he was 70 years old. At that time, Athens was in the throes of 10 years of turmoil during which the democracy twice was overthrown. Socrates taught many of the anti-democratic usurpers and his doctrines could easily be seen as inciting them toward future rebellion. In 411 and 404 B.C., Socrates, if only through his silence, sided with the forces of dictatorship. In 401 B.C., two years before Socrates went on trial, the enemies of democracy began plotting again.

Despite all this, and Socrates' repeated attempts to antagonize the jury, the vote against him was close, 280 to 220. Under the rules of the Athenian assembly, a second vote was needed to determine the punishment Socrates would receive. By Stone's account, Socrates gave the jury no choice but to give him the death penalty. He refused to appeal to democratic ideals of free speech, for that would be an unacceptable concession to democracy.

THE ANCIENT TEXTS were, literally, Greek to Stone. He taught himself the language and read them in the original, bringing to them the enthusisam of the muckraker and the autodidact. He loves the material, and his sense of excitement is contagious. Publication of the book is justfied if only to have a man with Stone's impeccable "progressive" credentials on record as a lover of the much-maligned great books. It can only help to have a writer with Stone's verve bring the ancient texts and characters to life and demonstrate how the classic writers of Athens speak to us today. Athens "is our yesterday," he writes, "and we cannot understand ourselves without it."

It is too often forgotten that democracy is an idea and that, like most great insights, it is not without paradox. One paradox is what to do with characters such as Socrates, who are vocal in their profound opposition to the democratic idea. Stone knows that the classic authors must be read, if only so that we can better refute them.

Unfortunately, the price of applying Stone's journalistic skills to the great texts was a lack of philosophical insight. Treating the ancient texts like modern-day government documents, Stone doesn't seem to have been interested in grappling with the secondary literature written on Plato and Socrates during the past millenia or two. Most egregious of all is his failure to deal with the controversial interpretations made by the man most responsible for the renaissance of classical studies in recent years.

The insight of Socrates, argued Leo Strauss, was that the rule of philosopher-kings was both necessary and impossible. The Republic, by this account, is really a massive excercise in irony, a lesson less in how to construct a utopia than in the limits of what we can reasonably expect from politics. Stone, attributing this interpretation to one "Alan [sic] Bloom", writes that, "Plato could hardly have spent his life spoofing himself."

Perhaps. But he may very well have spent his life spoofing politics and the non-philosophers who dominate political life. The political philosophy of Socrates thus is, oddly enough, anti-political. Only the philosophical life of contemplation is, ultimately, above contempt.

THUS we return to Bloom. Bloom's critique of contemporary American higher education stems from his belief in the idea of the university embodied in the literal meaning of the word: one truth. It should be a place where a few stout-hearted Socratic souls doggedly pursue Truth, without having to look over their shoulders worrying about what "the many" think of their efforts. Pre-professionals need not apply. The dissolution of modern American higher education into multiversities catering to the needs and demands of mass democracy is the great crime of something known as "the sixties."

Bloom obviously is on target with much of his criticism. At the very least, he certainly has struck a resonant chord among "the many" who have purchased his book. Yet his tenuous relationship with democracy is perhaps best captured in his failure to understand the importance of the democratizing role played by universities, especially the Ivies, in postwar American society.

Bloom is rightly impatient with those who are ever-ready to rail against elitism in the university. Universities are eliti institutions, at least insofar as they operate on the meritocratic principle. What needs to be guarded against in the great universities is a more insidiousism, aristocratism. Like it or not, universities are at some level credential factories. They serve as a springboard for middle and lower-class individuals not only to live with and befriend those of the privileged classes--which is at least as important for the sake of the latter--but also to join them, eventually, in running this country.

If the university can be a democratizing minor leagues for American society, it is serving a great and noble social purpose. Allan Bloom ignores this idea of the university because it only makes sense in the realm of worldly power and relationships that he abjures. Like his hero Socrates, the city that could claim his allegiance exists only in speeches, not anywhere on earth.

With Socrates, he holds on to the hope that in heaven, perhaps, "a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees." One man, not the many; within himself, not among his fellows. Socrates may have been content to contemplate his doctrines in the ivory tower. But if Stone's history can at all be relied upon, these ideas found their way into the hands of those anxious to act upon them. The government set up benefitted the few to the detriment of the many Socrates did not say a word.