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Hypatia 17.4 (2002) 235-238



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Book Review

Women in Plato's Political Theory


Women in Plato's Political Theory. By Morag Buchan. London, New York: Routledge, 1999.

When feminists of the seventies looked over the dismal range of writings by political theorists in the Western tradition from the ancients to the modern period, the only bright spots over two-and-a-half millennia were Plato and John Stuart Mill. So happy were we to find in Plato's Republic an argument that women could enter the public sphere and indeed be leaders because of the qualities of their souls (1968), irrespective of the reproductive qualities of their bodies, that we tended to embrace uncritically the Platonic advocacy of women's public engagement. An ally from the pantheon of great philosophers was too valuable to assess critically. In the years since that first embrace, though, assorted responses to Plato's apparent feminism have appeared. Morag Buchan reviews much of this literature, and recognizing the confusion created by juxtaposing Republic V with other less sympathetic parts of the Platonic corpus, introduces her own warnings about an embrace that may have been premature.

Buchan contributes to the debates concerning Plato's feminism concluding, I think wisely, that Plato actually did not care a whole lot about the status of women. She suggests that Plato is truly a misogynist, but her argument goes [End Page 235] beyond the familiar collection of misogynist taglines that pepper the dialogues. Rather, her argument rests on a study of the soul and whether the soul can be abstracted from gender. She maintains that it cannot; this in turn introduces questions about the assertions in the Republic that male and female souls can be equal despite their bodily and reproductive differences. Something other than an effort to address the iniquities of the Athenian regime—or even the glimmerings of sexual equality—motivated Plato to introduce women into the ruling class of the Republic. In particular, according to Buchan, Plato was largely concerned with the unity of the state and thus demanded the removal of all distractions such as the female and the family from the lives of its guardians. So much for Plato the feminist. Throughout this slim volume Buchan argues that women do not fare very well in Plato's political philosophy. Rather, Plato's philosophy is gendered with what Buchan names the "masculine soul" dominating his thought and the female as barely worth acknowledging, soul-less as she is.

It is the soul in Buchan's analysis that holds the key to the significance of gender in Plato's philosophy (31), and that soul is emphatically masculine. Far from the standard reading of Plato as separating the body from the soul—readings that emerge, for example, from the Phaedo (1993)—the soul according to Buchan has a "sexual identity." This argument relies on juxtaposing such texts as the Phaedrus which "indicates quite clearly that there is a distinction between individual souls in terms of superior and inferior" (38) with passages like the one from the Myth of Er where the female souls choose their life patterns separately from the male souls (1968, 618b) and most emphatically from the Timaeus where the best souls enter the male bodies. It is in this discussion of the gendered soul that Buchan is the most tenacious and original in her search for the tension-laden misogynist passages in Plato's texts. In contrast, the extended discussions about the importance of homosexual versus heterosexual love are more familiar; so too are the arguments about the female's proximity to a bodily nature scorned by the masculine philosophic soul. Yet, even as she explores these more familiar points, she raises well the challenge of whether we can think about the Platonic soul as separated from a gender that derives from the body.

Unfortunately, however, Buchan's spirited and engaging readings of the dialogues are marred by an indifference to current methodological questions that surround the interpretations of a Platonic [End Page 236] dialogue. Thus, throughout the book, it is Plato speaking irrespective of who is...

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