Socrates' and Callicles' Settlement--or, The Invention of the Impossible Body Politic

Introduction

“If Right cannot prevail, then Might will take over!” How often have we heard this cry of despair? How sensible it is to cry for Reason in this way when faced with the horrors we witness every day. And yet, this cry too has a history—a history that I want to probe because it might allow us to distinguish anew science from politics, and maybe to explain why the Body Politic has been invented in such a way as to be rendered impossible, impotent, illegitimate, a born bastard.

When I say that this rallying cry has a history, I do not mean that it moves at a fast pace. On the contrary, centuries may pass without affecting it a bit. Its tempo resembles that of Fermat’s theorem, or plate tectonics, or glaciations. Witness, for instance, the similarity between Socrates’ vehement address to the Sophist Callicles, in the famous dialogue of the Gorgias, and this recent instance by Steven Weinberg, fresh off the presses, in an issue of the New York Review of Books: “Our civilization,” Weinberg writes,

has been powerfully affected by the discovery that nature is strictly governed by impersonal laws. . . . We will need to confirm and strengthen the vision of a rationally understandable world if we are to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity. ¹

And here is Socrates’ famed admonition: geômetrias gar ameleis!

In fact, Callicles, the experts’ opinion is that cooperation, love, order, discipline, and justice bind heaven and earth, gods and men. That’s why they call the universe an ordered whole, my friend, rather than a disorderly mess or an unruly shambles. It seems to me that, for all your expertise in the field, you’re overlooking this point. You’ve failed to notice how much power geometrical equality has among gods and men, and this neglect of geometry has led you to believe that one should try to gain a disproportionate share of things. (508 a) ²

What these two quotations have in common, across the huge gap of centuries, is the strong linkage they establish between the respect for impersonal natural laws on the one hand, and the fight against irrationality, immorality, and political disorder on the other. In both quotations, the fate of Reason and the fate of Politics are associated in one single destiny. To attack Reason is to render morality and social peace impossible. Right is what protects us against Might. Reason against civil warfare. The common tenet is that we need something “inhuman”—for Weinberg, the natural laws no human has constructed; for Socrates, geometry whose demonstrations escape human whim—if we want to be able to fight against “inhumanity.” To sum up even more succinctly: only inhumanity will quash inhumanity. Only a Science that is not man-made will protect a Body Politic that is in constant risk of being mob-made. Yes, Reason is our rampart, our Great Wall of China, our Maginot line against the dangerous unruly mob.

This line of reasoning, which I will call “inhumanity against inhumanity,” has been attacked, of course, ever since it began—first by the Sophists, against whom Plato launches his all-out attack, all the way to this motley gang of people branded with the label of “postmodernism” (an accusation, by the way, as vague as the curse of being a “sophist”). Postmoderns of the past and of the present have tried to break the connection between the discovery of natural laws of the cosmos and the problems of making the Body Politic safe for its citizens. Some have claimed that adding inhumanity to inhumanity has simply increased the misery and the civil strife, and that a staunch fight against Science and Reason should be started to protect politics against the intrusion of science and technology. Still others, targeted publicly today (with whom, I am sorry to say, I am often mistakenly lumped), have tried to show that mob rule, the violence of the Body Politic, is everywhere polluting the purity of Science, which becomes every day human, all...