What Use Is Literature to Political Philosophy?: Or The Funny Thing about Socrates’s Nose

Readers of Plato’s Republic wildly underestimate Thrasymachus’s challenge if they treat it as a claim about “justice,” and in grasping Plato’s response it is dangerous to confuse his aims and methods with those agreed on by his characters. Plato’s service to political philosophy is not merely literary but comic. Plato’s drama exposes and ridicules the generalization from his own moral psychology at the heart of Thrasymachus’s political vision. Insight and comedy are born together, when a pig who theorizes a city of pigs answers the absurdity of a bandit who theorizes a city of bandits.