Political philosophy in the Continental tradition rarely fits neatly into existing conceptual schemes, and Christopher P. Long’s recent work could accordingly be classified under any number of philosophical subdisciplines. Long presents fresh interpretations of six of Plato’s Dialogues in order to juxtapose a Platonic politics of writing with a Socratic politics of speaking. His organization and method follows six decades of hermeneutical engagement (by figures such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martha Nussbaum) with classic texts from intellectual history. Accordingly, Long walks a fine line between ahistorically importing biased assumptions into each text and missing the underlying gap separating ancient and contemporary life worlds. The book’s trans-historical, inter-disciplinary attempt to treat “hermeneutics… as a political activity” (127) serves both as its original sin and its saving grace.

In Chapter 1, “Politics as Philosophy,” Long reads the Gorgias by juxtaposing Socratic political speaking (‘topology’) with Platonic political writing (‘topography’). He continues with an interpretation of Protagoras in Chapter 2, “Crisis of Community,” focusing on the influence of social relationships upon one’s way of life. Chapter 3, “Attempting the Political Art” features an original reading of Gorgias, which finds Long repeating his refrain that Plato’s performed political praxis upon us readers parallels Socrates’ performed political praxis upon his interlocutors. In Chapter 4, “The Politics of Finitude,” Long offers a reading of the Phaedo, whereby Socrates and Plato articulate and employ discourse’s power of communal transformation. Long portrays text reading as a political act of opening oneself up to the possibility of being moved by written discourse. He continues with an interpretation of the Apology in Chapter 5, “Socratic Disturbances, Platonic Politics,” in which Socrates deconstructs the dichotomy between public politics and private philosophizing without entirely conflating praxis and theoria. Long interprets the Apology both as a Socratic failure to inject philosophy into politics and as a Platonic possibility which invites readers to complete such a project by attending to justice as a community-animating ideal. In Chapter 6, “The Politics of Writing,” Long mines the Phaedrus to articulate Socratic political praxis as “doing things with words animated by a love of wisdom” (165). He concludes in Chapter 7, “Philosophy as Politics,” with a recapitulation of Socratic and Platonic politics as an “erotic idealism” whose ideals are capable of enacting “transformative possibilities” in and through listeners and readers (170).

Long’s methodology is risky, yet it often pays off. His interpretations run deep and wide, and he explores the original Greek language and ideas at length. His fruitful examination of Plato’s “showing” and Socrates’ “telling” harmonizes their distinct voices in imagining new relational possibilities, envisioning the limits of extant political structures, and in modeling the enactment of ideals (176). However, the conclusions that he feels entitled to draw sometimes range between the trivial and the unwarranted, and it is difficult to see why he feels the need to engage with the actual texts of the Platonic dialogues when his main points seem rather straightforward: abstract ideals should inform concrete actualities. Communities and relationships influence individuals’ ways of life. Speech has the power to transform the commitments of hearers and readers. But perhaps the paramount difficulty with Long’s work is that its notion of ‘the political’ seems under-determined. Long is in good philosophical company in positing a primordial political sphere that is ontologically prior to actual political structures and practices. However, he is too quick to call ‘political’ any connection between people and ideas, and he seems to equivocate between the political and the ethical in recalling Socratic and Platonic attempts to cultivate virtue in interlocutors and readers (123). Long discusses ideal justice and ideal morality in one breath, ignoring the fact that modern politics has largely been premised upon the separation of the right from the good. If Long is interested in the (worthy) goal of recovering a virtue-oriented political praxis, then he must reckon more directly with its anti-democratic historical roots in Plato’s corpus. I agree that a substantive political notion of the good is worth fighting for, yet Long remains vague enough about such a concept that it fails to adequately perform the moral tasks that he assigns it. At points, Long admits that politics is a partial, not exhaustive, motive of Plato’s axiological writing; however, the undertone of his project is that politics is everything and everything is politics. Such an expansive move actually serves to reduce, rather than enrich, other areas of human experience.

Long’s project hinges on interesting connections between such disparate regions of experience. Such a synthetic approach is promising, but also problematic. He attempts to bridge the gap between the ideal and the real, but thereby insufficiently acknowledges their distinctiveness. Likewise, his interpretation of technē as being “erotically oriented toward the best” (47) conflates several categories (technē, eros, and agathos) to the point of losing the meaning of each. Finally, he equivocates between valuing the concrete over the abstract and valuing the ideal (the just, the good, the true, and the beautiful) over the actual (58). Long’s attempt to navigate a deconstructive via media between binaries is laudable, but he occasionally ends up subtracting from—rather than sublating—the significance of opposing concepts. Of course, such is the risk one must take to engage in a “dialogical poetics” of authentic speaking and attentive listening (73). As Long would suggest, the real litmus test of the truth within his writing awaits actualization by the reader who continues the political project which Long has inherited from Socrates and Plato.

This book packs 205 fascinating pages (including bibliography and index) into a slim, solidly bound, gloss-wrapped, hardcover volume featuring playful medieval cover art of the two namesake philosophers. Within its pages, Long—despite some ambiguities of its manifold textual purposes—offers his readers lively re-interpretations of philosophical classics that promise to rejuvenate the political agency of anyone willing to submit oneself to the dialogical practices of philosophy.