As its name suggests, political philosophy is the search for wisdom about politics. Mark Blitz's comprehensive and challenging new book makes the broader claim that politics and philosophy are intimately and inextricably interwoven. “Philosophic life,” he writes, is “a transformative extension of everyday satisfaction and excellence” that remains “rooted in ordinary understanding…. Plato shows the mutual connection of everyday and philosophic life, not just in what we seek but also in what and how we see” (p. 273). His view is evident in an intriguing formulation by which he occasionally refers to political or everyday life: the “co-philosophical world” (pp. 17, 23, 142, 270).

Blitz develops the links between philosophic and political life as he offers an expansive survey of the Platonic corpus that includes penetrating analyses of some of the least accessible Platonic dialogues and that treats a variety of themes, such as Socrates' attempt to elevate ordinary political life, the philosopher's motivations, and the character and extent of the wisdom that philosophy seeks. It would be impossible for this reviewer to do justice to all of Blitz's careful and subtle treatments, and so instead I will try to summarize what seems to be the thematic thread that runs throughout the book. This is an inquiry into virtue; Blitz argues that the initial examination of the virtues, as they emerge in political life, not only provides the impetus for philosophy but also guides its proper path (pp. 3, 92, 269).

According to the author, Plato has two goals in examining virtue: “protecting and advancing ethical virtue” and discerning the virtues' “specific qualities and possible unity” (p. 270). Blitz shows that these goals are evident in the Laws, which both offers a vision of a healthier, more rational political life and points to the need for greater clarity about virtue than ordinary political life achieves. In the Laws, the attempt to satisfy that need most fully is to occur in the Nocturnal Council, whose members will study the unity of virtue, for according to the Athenian Stranger, “we don't know the virtues until we know their unity” (p. 112).

Why, though, is the unity of virtue a question? Blitz painstakingly shows the origins of the question in conversations that Socrates has about children's education, duties toward parents, and political ambition. Through these conversations, Socrates brings ordinary citizens to see both that virtue is important and that it needs guidance. Moderation is a “proper yielding to pleasure” (p. 79); courage must confront the “proper risk” (p. 80). The vexing problem is determining what is “proper.” Reflection on this problem yields the views that virtue requires (or perhaps is) knowledge of the true human good and that “one cannot grasp any virtue without seeing its connection to the other virtues and to virtue as a whole” (p. 78). Such knowledge and insight—such wisdom—would enable us always to know how to act, whether in the face of fears (courage) and pleasures (moderation) or toward the gods (piety) and the city (justice). The virtues would be unified in that they would all depend upon the same knowledge.

Blitz argues, though, that the virtues “are not knowledge simply” (p. 105) and that they differ, “even if this difference seems harder to discern in excellence than in imperfection” (p. 262). But in what exactly does their difference consist? In Blitz's rich and nuanced account, it seems not so much that the virtues differ from each other as that they have multiple versions, depending on the wholes of which they are parts or on the several ends they may serve. For example, courage looks different in the soldier and the philosopher; whereas the soldier risks his life in defending the city, the philosopher risks “opprobrium” in questioning convention and seeking wisdom (p. 176). In this case, the existence of two different “wholes” or ends yields two different manifestations of the virtues.

The differences between what might be called the political and the philosophic versions of the virtues seems to imply that the virtues lack unity, contrary to the Athenian Stranger's view. If, however, one version is inferior, then it might be said not to be genuine virtue, in which case the thesis that virtue is one remains intact. Blitz's book indicates the difficulty of resolving this issue. On the one hand, the author suggests a certain inferiority in political virtue when he says such things as even the just city's “parts never fit simply in their purity and fullness as themselves” (p. 175). On the other hand, he also suggests that political virtue is not trumped or transcended by philosophic virtue: “[W]hatever the magnificence of philosophic love and spirit they do not simply replace more conventional courage and moderation. Risking death is like but not identical to risking outrage or ridicule. Proper love of permanent truths is like but not identical to sensual pleasure in loving communion” (p. 177). In this case, there is a kind of independence to the versions of courage and the other virtues, depending on whether the end is justice in the city or wisdom.

If, however, the virtues lack unity because of these different ends, how is it possible to judge between them when their dictates conflict? The problem can be seen earlier in the book, when in the course of his examination of the Protagoras, Blitz says that “incorrect judgment is not the only truth about the will's weakness…. [D]o not different degrees of spiritedness and desire differentiate some—say, Alcibiades—from the rest of us, allowing them a nobility too daunting for those with less nerve to carry it off?” (p. 79). Blitz does not spell out why Alcibiades' nobility might require extraordinary spiritedness. Is it because what he seeks is good but difficult and thus requires a subrational toughness to grasp, like the toughness required to undergo necessary but painful surgery? Or is it because the goodness of what he seeks is unclear and perhaps problematic?

The most serious issue at stake in the question of whether the virtues must ultimately be understood as one or many seems to be the possible disjuncture between the noble and the good. Can nobility and its demand that we sometimes sacrifice our own good be reconciled with the belief that virtue is also good for the virtuous individual, or is nobility altogether another standard, different from the good? This tension calls for an investigation of how Plato understands nobility and its relation to the good. Blitz examines the noble in the course of an analysis of the Greater Hippias, which, he says, “suggests but does not work through the complex connection between the beautiful and the good, and their assimilation to and separation from each other” (p. 156). His summation presents a variety of ways in which Plato presents beauty or the noble in other dialogues as well (pp. 162–65), further elaborating the “complex connection.”

Blitz leaves it at elaborating this connection as it appears in Plato, as befits an introduction to Plato's political philosophy (“My goal is to bring to the fore Plato's basic articulation of the realm of political philosophy” [p. 5]). The difficulty of “working through” the connection between the noble and the good makes it difficult to treat virtue as a unity. For this reason, and perhaps others, philosophic virtue and political virtue appear in the book less as competitors for the name “virtue” than as coexisting on a continuum. If the political virtues are “imperfect,” they are nonetheless virtues: “The philosophic life extends and enlarges but does not exclude these excellences” (p. 273). Plato's Political Philosophy as a whole suggests that political life retains its fundamental importance because part of our fulfillment as human beings lies in being guided not simply by the good but also by the noble. If so, this helps to explain his calling the political, everyday world, the “co-philosophical world.” It is a thought-provoking suggestion, and this is an excellent place to help one begin to think it through.