Journal of the History of Philosophy

While specialists of the Platonic corpus often evoke the most remarkable passages of the Statesman or use it to trace the evolution of Plato’s political thought, few invite us to appreciate this difficult text itself. We can, therefore, only revel in the almost missionary zeal with which Dimitri El Murr champions this neglected dialogue in his Savoir et gouverner.

The best way to appreciate the Statesman is to recognize its distinct contribution; and what sets this dialogue apart, according to El Murr, is the attention paid to the idea of politics as a form of knowledge possessed by the ruler. This intense focus on the issue of politics as a science—found neither in the Republic nor Laws—is unique to the Statesman, which is why El Murr places it at the heart of his examination. Although he situates the Statesman relative to certain questions raised in the Euthydemus, and despite a few comments on the similarities and dissimilarities between Plato’s three major political dialogues, El Murr refuses to approach the Statesman from a developmental point of view. He takes for granted that the Stranger, as primary interlocutor, expresses Plato’s ideas, but his perspective on the three political dialogues is complémentariste (17). Although the title of the book suggests that its central objective is to examine the contribution of the Statesman to Platonic political thought, the book’s main virtue consists in bringing to light the internal cohesion of the dialogue, the topic at the heart of the first three chapters.

Showing the unity of the Statesman is no small challenge. El Murr accomplishes this task in two ways. First, he highlights how the different pieces of the inquiry are in fact integrated into a long, sinuous, but unique diaeresis. Second, he argues that, contrary to what is generally thought, the dialogue does not suffer from a thematic duality, as the two major themes, politics and methodology, are closely linked. In the wake of the hermeneutic approach adopted by Melissa Lane, who highlighted the qualities common to the dialectic and to the political “weavers” in Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (1998), El Murr invites us to note at least three ways in which the two themes are linked. He argues “that questions of method are discussed in the dialogue only to the extent that they have a direct impact on the conception of politics advocated therein” (43, my translations). He suggests that politics and method are in a paradigmatic relationship insofar as politics, as the art of intertwining, is a paradigm used to represent dialectic; and principally—though this is the least well explained point—he argues that politics is defined in this dialogue “from the point of view of the dialectician” (20, 41), by which he appears to mean in favor of the dialectician. That would explain the laborious intricacies of the work. With this attention to the question of the unity of the text, the book begins with a strong thesis about the overall import of the dialogue, an argument likely to pique the reader’s curiosity.

Nevertheless, the commentary often steps away from this comprehensive perspective to consider the text meticulously. Indeed, El Murr alternates continually between a telescopic approach to the dialogue, viewing it as a whole and highlighting the links between the different pieces of the diaeresis; and a microscopic approach, wherein individual sections are scrutinized. This methodological duality is particularly striking in chapter 2 on the use of paradigms, but is also present in chapters 4 on the first steps of the division, 5 on the definition of the object of politics as a “featherless biped,” 6 on the myth of the cosmic [End Page 153] revolutions, 7 on the review of the weaving paradigm, 8 on the analysis of constitutions and the status of laws, and 9 on the final description of the science and the work of the statesman as weaver.

Through these frequent dives to the microscopic...