What would Socrates do? This is the guiding question and title of Joel Schlosser’s engaging book. The answer turns out to be, essentially, what a left liberal professor would like him to do: expand the democratic promise to marginalized groups—across racial, sexual, and socioeconomic divides—and encourage individual empowerment through critical self-questioning and a life of sustained conversation with one’s fellow citizens. The living practice of Socratic philosophy comes to view as consistent with the faith that democracy reposes in ordinary people. I find these objectives admirable, but I am not convinced that Socratic philosophizing is so supportive of the contemporary Left—or indeed of democracy qua democracy—as Schlosser’s monograph sometimes suggests. Nonetheless, the book contains much to admire. What Would Socrates Do? is stimulating throughout, even (or especially) when one disagrees with it. Building upon the work of J. Peter Euben and Sara Monoson, it challenges elitist and ironic interpretations of Socrates, while deftly grappling with, and navigating between, the Aristophantic, Platonic, and Xenophontic accounts.

According to Schlosser, the unsettling character of Socrates—his atopia, which defines him more than any (alleged) irony (eironeia)—has become encrusted with an excessive familiarity. Socratic nostrums, like “the unexamined life is not worth living,” have become clichés, drained of meaning and power. The author attempts a recovery of that most peculiar of ancient men: the gadfly of Athens, sentenced to death by a jury of his democratic peers after a public defense of his life of inquiry. Schlosser scrutinizes how the practices of Socrates’ philosophy relate to Athenian habitus—a borrowing from Bourdieu (p. 9)—and his book attempts to demonstrate how Socrates’ distinctive life arose from, while also modifying and recasting, the practices of the Athenian democracy.

Following a framing introduction (Chap. 1), Socratic philosophy is explored with regard to democratic practices of accountability in Plato’s Meno (Chap. 2); the erotic practices of democratic subject formation in Plato’s Symposium and Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Chap. 3); frank speech, that is, parrhesia, in Aristophanes’ Clouds and Plato’s Gorgias (Chap. 4); and Socratic associations (sunousia), involving an examination of the trope of Socrates as midwife in Plato’s Theatetus (Chap 5). Chapter 6 revisits Socratic atopia, with reference to the Apologies of Plato and Xenophon, while Chapter 7 offers a concluding meditation on the question of the title.

Each chapter follows a basic pattern. Schlosser identifies an element of Athenian practice, drawn from the works of classical scholars, and then maps out a kinship between it and Socratic philosophizing as portrayed in key Socratic works. He thus reads Plato’s dialogues, for example, with an eye to understanding Socrates against the backdrop of Athenian politics. His angle of vision is, therefore, distinct from the philosophic purpose of this or that Platonic dialogue, at least as that dialogue unfolds its theme. At times, one wonders if Socratic philosophizing can be so neatly separated from the avowed purpose of individual dialogues—or, indeed, if Socrates’ own intention can be untangled from the Platonic one.

To raise a related question, one wonders the extent to which Socrates’s use of democratic tropes is skin deep, or whether it penetrates to the core of his thought. Does Socratic philosophy merely resemble democratic practice, or does it truly originate from it? And if the latter, does the origin prefigure the end? Could Socrates be showing how democracy points toward a philosophy transcending the regime? Schlosser frequently slides between the claim that X Socratic practice strongly resembles Y democratic one—and here, his arguments are innovative and compelling—and the more contentious claim that because there is a democratic origin, Socratic philosophy is (somehow) democratic in its essence.

It is true that Socrates converses with women (i.e., Diotima, Theodote, Aspasia) and even occasionally with slaves, as in the Meno, that is, with noncitizens. Moreover, he subverts traditional gender norms (i.e., the “Socrates in drag” of Chapter 3 or the “Socrates as midwife” of Chapter 5); and he consistently challenges authority. Does that make his philosophy democratic or “empowering”? Not necessarily. To be open to conversing with any individual is consistent with the belief that the majority are incapable of philosophy; it could reflect an elitism of nature, if not convention. Indeed, if opinion truly points toward knowledge, then every conversation leads to philosophy, whether the interlocutors are capable of it or not. The statement “the unexamined life is not worth living,” if conjoined with the claim that the majority are incapable of examining their lives, becomes a harshly antidemocratic proclamation indeed. I am not asserting that the preceding is the proper interpretation of this famous Socratic dictum, but merely that the remarkable slipperiness and strangeness of Socrates is surely bound up with paradoxes of this kind.

Schlosser, moreover, ignores elements of Socratic philosophizing that are antidemocratic. One might think, for example, of the noble lie or of the claim that the ideal city requires philosopher kings to rule it—topics absent from What Would Socrates Do? Indeed, Schlosser neglects the Republic, Laws, and Statesman, those most overtly political of Platonic dialogues, where democracy is extensively treated. By way of referencing these dialogues, which may reflect Plato’s views more than those of Socrates, I do not wish to contest Schlosser’s claim that Socratic philosophy can support democratic aims after a fashion—or, indeed, his salutary efforts to push back against rival interpretative visions—but simply to note that his own attack against others for domesticating Socrates is matched by a preferred domestication of his own.

Despite this trend, Schlosser’s excellent Chapter 5, “Midwifing Athens: Socratic Associations,” bucks it, offering an innovative defense of Socratic philosophy as truly democratic. For this reviewer at least, this was the book’s most rewarding chapter. In discussing the trope of Socrates as midwife in Plato’s Theatetus, Schlosser articulates a deeply egalitarian epistemic possibility. If Socrates is a seeker after knowledge and not a knower or possessor of it, then our common ignorance furnishes a quasi-philosophical defense of political equality. The need to discover for oneself in order to know—and crucially, to do so dialogically with others—conjoined with the pervasiveness of our ignorance generates a powerful critique of received authority, which supports democracy by default, as it were. One wishes that Schlosser had foregrounded this argument about sunousia and opinion/knowledge more, since it offers a robust defense of his project of reimagining Socrates in a democratic key. Yet, even here, one might raise an elitist question: If opinion points toward knowledge (or our lack of it), is everyone equally capable of knowledge of ignorance?

Schlosser has an easy (and enviable) manner of moving between secondary literature and various intellectual frameworks—his authorial touch is light and sure—and his use of metaphors is often original and sometimes striking. The readings of Socratic works are always lucid, stimulating, and admirably synthetic, but there is often more assertiveness than proof, and so key arguments may fail to persuade skeptical readers, though, as with this reader they will assuredly sharpen one’s own thoughts in suggestive ways.

And the stubborn fact remains: Socrates was a law-abiding democrat. So what would Socrates do? According to Schlosser’s conclusion, which retreats from certain bolder implications of his arguments (i.e, “The Dissonance of Philosophy,” pp. 174–77), this is a question that requires the question mark, lest we latter-day Apollodoruses slavishly embrace an authoritative Socrates and so fail to be animated by his free spirit. The silent question of the relationship between philosophy and politics (and not just democracy) in the life and mind of Socrates himself—and not merely in the writings of Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon, men with agendas, all—hangs over this book like a shadowy question mark. And what are we philosophically minded democrats to make of that?