J. Michael Hoffpauir’s Between Socrates and the Many: A Study of Plato’s Crito is a thoughtful commentary on the dialogue’s eponymous character. As the title might indicate, Hoffpauir begins with the suggestion that we ought to view Crito as a liminal figure, one who is attracted to philosophy because of his affection and admiration for Socrates, but whose opinions (especially concerning justice and the good life) remain bound by the horizon of the nonphilosophical many. Yet, as the dialogue unfolds, and as Socrates repeatedly attempts (and repeatedly fails) to convince Crito that he ought not to escape from prison, it becomes clear that “it is not Crito who is between Socrates and the many but an unbridgeable chasm,” the ultimately impassable road between the reasoned judgments of philosophy and the opinions of the many (p. 109). Although the dialogue concludes with Crito seemingly convinced of the justness of Socrates’s decision, Crito is not persuaded by the philosophical arguments that motivate Socrates but by the speech of the laws, through which Socrates constructs a series of compensatory arguments that never fundamentally challenge Crito’s conception of justice as helping friends and harming enemies. Understanding Crito, Hoffpauir suggests, is also crucial for coming to terms with how we ought to situate ourselves as readers of Plato’s Crito. Like Crito, although we might entertain the Socratic claims that one should never commit injustice and that the good life is the just life, most of us would be willing to act unjustly in order to prevent the death of our loved ones. As readers of the dialogues, we must ultimately recognize that we are more like Crito than like Socrates, and this requires that we read the Crito and the Platonic dialogues more generally as works designed to awaken us to the need for our own projects of self-examination and self-knowledge. By offering a commentary, rather than an “argument-driven analysis,” Hoffpauir hopes that this work will help guide readers to reach their own conclusions about the dialogue and its significance (p. 4).

The book is organized into 11 chapters along with a conclusion. Whereas chapter 1 serves as an introduction (setting out the main goals of the work and the interpretive framework that will be brought to bear on the dialogue), chapter 2 surveys the evidence we can glean about Crito the individual from the other Platonic dialogues in which he appears or is mentioned: the Euthydemus, Apology, and Phaedo. The remaining nine chapters constitute a running commentary on the Crito, one that attends closely to the dramatic and rhetorical elements of the dialogue. A conclusion offers a brief summary of the interpretation of the Crito offered in the book.

Although the close attention paid to the character of Crito (rather than Socrates) might offer a novel approach to the reading of the Crito, it is not clear that this approach ultimately yields much that is new. Hoffpauir illustrates how attending to the characterization of Crito should lead us to challenge the claim that the laws’ speech at the end of the dialogue reveals Socrates’s reasons for refusing to escape. Rather, they are a necessary concession that Socrates makes to Crito given the latter’s inability to understand why one ought to never commit injustice and what it means to live well (which represent Socrates’s real reasons for refusing to escape). Yet, as Hoffpauir acknowledges, the upshot of his analysis would appear to be only a slight emendation of that of Strauss in his reading of the dialogue: rather than saying “the speech of the Laws has entirely convinced him [Crito]” (as Strauss does), we ought to say, “The speech of the Laws has convinced Crito, for now” (168, emphasis in original). Here, one wishes that Hoffpauir had pressed his disagreement with Strauss’s formulation further: Might we perhaps say that Crito agrees without truly being convinced? This would seem to fit with the characterization of Crito throughout the dialogue, as one who has, in the past, agreed with Socrates that one ought to never commit injustice and that our goal ought to be living well, but was never fully convinced because he never really understood the arguments in the first place. It may also suggest an even deeper divide between the philosopher and the many than that which either Strauss or Hoffpauir has observed. If Socrates’s failure to persuade Crito on the basis of his own philosophical arguments reveals the “unbridgeable chasm” between Socrates and the many, then what do we make of the fact that, even when Socrates is willing to accommodate the opinions of the many in his attempt to persuade Crito, the result is a form of conviction that is at best weak and likely fleeting?

In addition, there are places where a broader engagement with the scholarly literature on the Platonic dialogues might have helped deepen Hoffpauir’s analysis. For example, the idea that we, as readers of the dialogues, have more in common with Socrates’s interlocutors than with Socrates himself echoes an interpretation offered by Alexander Nehamas (The Art of Living, 1998). For Nehamas, our identification with Socrates is the product of Platonic irony, suggesting that the form of the dialogues themselves invites such a (mis)-identification. Nehamas’s claim raises a methodological question regarding what it means “to study the Platonic dialogues in an effort to understand the limitations and possibilities of one’s own opinions” (p. 3), and it would have been helpful to see how Hoffpauir would situate his approach in response to this. Second, Hoffpauir often places a good deal of interpretive weight on the terms of address that are ubiquitous throughout the Platonic dialogues: he notes, for example, that when Socrates addresses Crito as the “best of men” (at 48a5), it is in response to the latter’s agreement that there is something more honorable than the body. Although Hoffpauir interprets this phrase as indicative of Crito’s shift away from the many and toward Socrates, a philological analysis suggests that such terms of address cannot bear the interpretive weight they are given here (e.g., see Eleanor Dickey, Greek Forms of Address, 1996).

This leads to a final and related point, one concerning the tension between Hoffpauir’s limited engagement with the scholarly literatures that deploy a methodological framework other than his own and his stated goal of guiding readers to come to their own conclusions about the dialogue. Given that the book is framed as a commentary, rather than an “argument-driven analysis,” its brief conclusion offers “a sketch of the leading problems revealed through this study of Plato’s Crito,” rather than a summary of its arguments. Yet, the analysis of the dialogue is framed by a particular hermeneutical approach, and it clearly advances claims (whether explicitly or implicitly) about the dialogue that are informed by this approach. For example, Strauss’s articulation of the “city and man” problem is central to how Hoffpauir frames his characterization of Crito, and to rely on such interpretive frameworks while claiming that one is merely offering a commentary is to hide the argumentative skeleton of the analysis. The choice not to bring other interpretative frameworks to bear on the dialogue is also an implicit form of argument, one that dismisses the value of how, for example, an historical analysis of law in democratic Athens might inform our understanding of the laws’ speech. It is ultimately not clear to me why Hoffpauir’s approach is more likely to lead readers to examine the dialogue for themselves than an argument-driven analysis that makes explicit these interpretive choices and defends them.