Isocrates and Civic Education

Introduction

Isocrates as Civic Educator CIVIC virtue, and the sort of public education that was supposed to inculcate it, became something of a theme in American political discourse during the nineteen eighties. In this context, appeals were often made to the ancient Greeks as having had a deep commitment to educate their citizens with a view to virtues of character and devotion to public life. Among Greeks who wrote on political matters, it is Aristotle who seems to have received the lion’s share of the attention. That is partly because philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre have singled out Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics as a compendium of good talk about civic virtue and civic education (MacIntyre 1981; Garver 1995). Prominent rhetorical scholars too have cast Aristotle in the role of civic educator (Kennedy 1963; Farrell 1993). From the perspective of measurable influence on public debates rather than mere scholarly reflection, the current prominence of Aristotle can be traced to the efforts of William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and later author of a best-selling Book of Virtues (Bennett 1993). Bennett promoted Aristotle as a model of public-spirited, virtue-centered civic education. Partly in consequence of these efforts, the theme of civic education became something of the possession of conservatives. Such preaching may have had a point as a counter to purely procedural liberalism, which declares all values and most behaviors to be private matters and thinks of our public life as devoted simply to providing economic, legal, and political machinery calculated to get everyone the best possible deal. They may also be of some use in blunting the nativism of the Christian right. But virtue talk, espe1 david depew and takis poulakos Introduction cially when it is so closely tied to the elitist Aristotle, has elicited considerable resistance from rhetors who have been arguing for a more diverse, less sexist, less “republican” vision of democratic life. The discourse of dead white European males in the radically sexist, militarist, and imperialist culture of ancient Athens has seemed in this context to be worse than irrelevant . Its reinvocation can be perceived as constituting a coded attack on the values that progressives, liberals, and democratic radicals have been trying to instill in our democratic life for a long time and which seem as important as ever to defend today. This said, we must report that the contributors to the present volume are in agreement with at least one assumption of today’s “virtuecrats.” They are willing to consider the possibility that those who value democratic pluralism need not entirely dismiss our old, and perhaps still useful, habit of thinking about ourselves by thinking about the ancient Greeks. We need not tell ourselves that ancient Greek males were a whit less miserable on questions about women, foreigners, and the fate of the lower classes than they have been shown to be. But many of our authors suspect that the theme of civic education in a democratic culture, and especially its relation to humanistic educational practices, might be advanced more surely if we take not Aristotle, but Isocrates, as a focal figure—not for imitation, as he was an elitist too, but as a whetstone for our own reflections on contemporary humanistic education and its relation to the theme of civic virtue. For one thing, this is a matter simply of setting the historical record straight. In his own time, and well into later classical antiquity, Isocrates was a more central figure in discussions of civic education, and especially the role of rhetorical training in civic education, than Aristotle ever was. Isocrates , too, arguably makes a more plausible foil for Plato than Aristotle. Like Plato, his near contemporary, Isocrates founded a school in Athens. (Isocrates was born in 436, Plato in 429.) Unlike Plato’s, though, Isocrates’ school did not elevate the status of philosophy by disparaging rhetoric as an educational medium for civic education. A hallmark of Isocratean civic education is that it recast philosophy as rhetoric precisely in order to introduce an element of reflective, aesthetic deliberation into the discussion of rhetorical training and practice. Isocrates undercut his rival’s identification of rhetoric with the ignoble ghostwriting and ambulance chasing that he too disdained. He did so without repudiating, as Plato certainly did, a principle that was to be taken up repeatedly by humanistic educators in centuries to come— that good speaking (eu legein) and good, prudential action (eu prattein) are...