Jill Frank’s book on Plato’s Republic (Politeia) provides the most original and informative discussion of that dialogue to have been published in a long while. It continues a tradition initiated in the 1970s that rebelled against the reading of Platonic political theory as proto-totalitarian, elitist, or authoritarian (as indicated, e.g., by Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Gregory Vlastos, Sheldon Wolin) and reflected, in different ways, opposition to the zenith of authoritarian politics in the Northern Hemisphere. This interpretive trend replaced previous readings of Plato as a civilizing influence, which began with the democratization of the British Empire in the 1830s and ended with the eclipse of that empire, beginning in the 1930s.

Frank’s interpretation challenges conventional wisdom about Plato’s philosophical politics not only by de-emphasizing the apparent replacement of politics by “Platonism” but also by negating the authority of affirmation in the Republic and debilitating logos as a benchmark of reason. But Frank’s is not a poststructuralist or conventionally Straussian reading. Instead, she claims that her antiauthorial interpretation of the Republic is produced in a “democratic spirit” that illuminates Plato’s unorthodox redemption of mimetic poetry (which includes the work of dramatists and poets). This move becomes the vehicle for differentiating “the falsity of mimetic things from deception,” not as limitations but as preconditions of philosophy and justice, which is ultimately “the work of political philosophy” (pp. 45, 226). Does Frank offer a good reading of Plato’s Republic? The question of whether this reading is more Frank than Plato, and what kind of political theory she has offered, focuses this review.

Plato was born more than 40 years after Socrates, amid the tumultuous times of the Peloponnesian War—which ultimately saw the confounding defeat of the Athenians. His philosophical vocation emerged in the wake of Socrates’ trial, conviction, and self-induced execution five years after that war ended, and it is hard to doubt that amid others seeking to identify what is Socratic (e.g., Xenophon), Plato sought to redeem and reform his teacher’s memory after his death. After all, Socrates cut a novel, formidable, but also problematic philosophical and political figure of virtue (arete) in Athenian democracy.

In the wake of Socrates’ rejection of politics as a path to virtue, Plato seriously took up philosophy, began to write dialogues, and established the Academy. But Plato did not lecture in his Academy. Although we cannot know for sure (the authorship of his biographical letters is disputed), it seems that he promoted nondogmatic and only obliquely political philosophical conversation that reflected his dedication to dialectic as the path to those ever-elusive entities of truth and goodness. Plato navigated this vortex of currents so as to become an enduringly influential figure in Western philosophy and political thought. He did so through mediating the memory of Socrates as a character in his dialogues. Given the historical and cultural distance between the two intellectual pillars, we cannot assume that the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues mimics the historical Socrates or literally transmutes Plato’s voice though Socrates as a dialogical character (except, roughly, in The Apology of Socrates, an account of Socrates’ trial, which Plato attended). Yet Frank often understands Plato as speaking through the character of Socrates, making “Socrates” in the Republic a mouthpiece of her—not the conventionally understood—Plato (despite periodic qualifications to the contrary) or as a “mimetic poet” producing “mimetic poetry” on behalf of “poetic justice” (pp. 26–30, 33 ff., 51, 67, 77 ff., 82).

Frank reads Plato’s Socrates in the Republic as only marginally committed to the political and philosophical claims of the dialogue that regard justice as the interpretation of philosopher-guardians, because for her we have to read them as either authoritarians or as gentle persuaders; either politics is domination or it is apolitical ethics disconnected from a worldly conception of justice because it only becomes practical by the judgment of readers settling the book’s negation or circulation of authority (pp. 16–17, 21, 45, 81–110) She holds that the principal concern driving the composition of the Republic and Plato’s “political theory” or “political philosophy” is indeterminacy or “inconstancy.” Therefore, she associates Plato with no ethical-political commitments other than self-education as a citizen disabused of the allures of mimetic poetry, conventionally understood. Frank both carefully reads and simultaneously underplays the arguments literally made in Plato’s dialogues by aestheticizing logos, rather than simply acknowledging that logos is subject to practical interpretation. (pp. 21, 191) Thus transformed, the Plato of the Republic, despite his association with the character Socrates, is projected beyond the text into the minds of readers. It is in this way that the text can acquire a “democratic spirit”—ignoring the collective and power dimension of democracy and associating it, rather, with Plato’s caricature of democratic ethics as anarchic or “lacking external compulsion” in Book VIII (p. 171) but amenable to “soul justice” (p. 224). Frank merges Plato’s voice not only with the character of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues but also with (potentially) “the people of Athens” (p. 15). The result is a kinder, gentler Plato whose Republic does not recast power as well as ethics but who, rather, offers “an education in ethical and political self-governance”—also known as “collective self-rule” (pp. 5, 45, 115).

We surely cannot determine the real Plato, and Frank is surely right to view Plato as critical of conventional authorities, but to what extent does her picture of the Republic as silent about the construction of justice except via the negation of convention and generic attention to “the reader as citizen” help us appreciate what Plato wrote and how he contributes to political theory? One key to addressing these questions is taking stock of the relationship between the Greeks’ (and Plato’s) notions of techne (art, craft, and skill) and poiesis (often rendered as poetry). Both are kinds of making. Technai are determinate, productive activities informed by knowledge (whether or not that knowledge was possessed by its practitioner). A techne could refer to an intellectual activity (e.g., geometrical reasoning) or a reliable practice (e.g., carpentry). Poiesis was a major phenomenon for Plato’s contemporaries, as it included the work of poets, dramatists, and singers—the voices of conventional, discursive, cultural wisdom in an age without megaphones or electronic or visual media. In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates recounted his life at trial as part of his defense (apologia) and recounted how he respected the techne of craftsmen more than the claims to knowledge proffered by poets, dramatists, and rhetoricians. Unlike the latter, the former were able to put their knowledge to successful use (even as neither had a techne of arete, which their position as authorities in the agora and Assembly seemed to imply).

Poetic Justice focuses on Plato’s effort to recast conventional poetry. Despite her interest in reading the Republic as responsive to the disaster of the Athenians war against the Peloponnesians (p. 15), Frank does not attend to his reconstruction of conventional technai and political authority in kallipolis in antimilitaristic, anti-imperial, and egalitarian as well as hierarchical ways because in a surprisingly Straussian vein, she has subjected it to auto-critique (pp. 110, 147). Similarly, in the vein of the readings of Plato by Straussians and Harry Berger, Jr., Frank highlights the importance of character over argument as the main anchors of Plato’s text (for Berger, see pp. 40, 103; for Strauss, see pp. 9 n. 25 and 29 n. 34). Does that move make sense? How does Frank justify her Republic?

By framing her “rereading” of the Republic as Plato’s effort to reconstruct mimetic poetry, rather than prevailing conceptions of justice or ethical and political practice (pp. 81–110), Frank argues that Plato wrote in ways that emphasized the authority of the reader, over and against Plato’s own as an author (pp. 15–17). To be sure, this validates the often-overlooked character of the Republic as a nondogmatic dialogue that initially addresses the structure of the polis or politeia (the city-state or its constitution) for the sake of illuminating a notion of justice that can inform the soul (psyche) of the reader (see Republic 591e). And at the end of Republic, after the structures of the good state and soul, as well as bad states and souls, have been articulated, Plato returns to a focus on the utility of his hypothetical conditions for the virtuous self, whether in this life or the afterlife.

But were the political interpretations of Books II–IX mostly iterations of authoritarianism, designed to point us outside the realms of politics and power toward poetic justice? That interpretation is plausible if Plato genuinely separated the soul from the state. Yet he does not do that in any of his other dialogues that deal with power and virtue—which is to say most of his dialogues. Why should he here? Frank does not seriously engage interpreters who have taken the text at its word (albeit marked by irony and Plato’s anonymity) and seen it as a strenuous combination of politics, ethics, philosophy, and literary talent that depends partly on the reader for its truth (p. 5). Instead, she highlights the puzzling way in which Plato treats poetry in the Republic—initially reforming it in Book III so as to become a benefit to education and then banning it (apart from performing hymnals) from his ideal city in Book X. In her reading of Books II–V (Plato’s discussion of popular disregard for philosophy in Book VI is a glaring absence), there is no attempt to read aspects of kallipolis as necessary for reforming an Athens that had lost a war it should have won. There is virtually no discussion of Book V, in which Plato's Socrates confronts the three “waves” of opposition to his initial description of kallipolis—where philosopher-guardians rule without property, personal families, or consideration of gender differences—or his accounts in Book VI and VII of how ordinary citizens, initially manipulated by sophists and rhetoricians to despise philosophers, could come around to believing in the wisdom of philosophy. Nor does Frank attend much to the soul–state interactions of Books IV and VIII–IX as reflections on political ethics. Perhaps most tellingly, she does not mention the dialogue’s concern with stasis—the civil strife that rendered both ethical discourse and political order untenable in Greek societies.

Of course, this makes a great deal of sense if the Republic is not contending with stasis on behalf of justice but with competing agents of public discourse. This also would make it easier for Frank to minimize the deep engagement of Plato’s Socrates in the Republic with his view of the myriad sources of stasis, an abiding concern in Western political thought from Thucydides to the present, and instead to emphasize the book’s anticonventional sense of poetic justice and ignore the myriad sources of corrosive psychological and political conflict. In Poetic Justice, Frank offers a highly intelligent and coherent reading of Plato’s Republic. But if understood as Frank would have it be, Plato’s magnum opus has very little to say about the ethical and political conflicts that motivate the narrative of the dialogue and very little to contribute to ethical and political thought and action. Ultimately, Frank’s very good book may tell us less about Plato’s Republic than about certain literary, ahistorical, and antipolitical turns in American political theory.