At the beginning of this searching volume, Gerald Mara contends that the “power and justice of democratic institutions are in need of continued reexamination” (2). Contemporary democratic theorists have difficulty fulfilling this need, according to Mara, because they refuse on principle to inquire critically into democratic purposes or ends. They characteristically overemphasize procedures or “democratic space” because they are too deferential to democratic politics itself and too silent about the quality of its debates. Yet, contrary to their own commitments, they unwittingly advance particular and unexamined theses about human nature, political power, and the appropriate goals of democratic life. Does the deferential stance of contemporary theorists possibly express an intrinsic tension between philosophy and democracy, if philosophical exponents of democracy must carefully monitor any unwelcome theoretical intrusions into the public square? To counteract such worries, Mara provocatively argues that theorists' best hope of improving democracy lies in resuscitating the “persistent” political voices of Thucydides and Plato. The ancient theorists can still provide democratic citizens with enlarged resources of self-understanding and self-criticism.
Mara must admit that the deck is stacked against any such efforts. Few contemporary democratic theorists will accept that Plato and Thucydides—ostensibly elitist critics of democracy and political rhetoric par excellence—can provide constructive democratic resources. Agonistic, deliberative, and Rawlsian democrats will reject as “essentialist” the ancients' promotion of substantive theories of human nature. Liberal theorists will tend to be suspicious of the ancients' robust (if not downright oppressive) commitment to political virtue. Cambridge School readers will never warm to what Mara, in a Habermasian vein, calls “reconstructed” or “reconstructive” readings (3; cf. 261 n. 6), that is, interpretations meant to address questions unacknowledged by historical authors themselves. Many Straussians will reject Mara's view that the literary or discursive dimensions of Platonic and Thucydidean texts bespeak a democratic openness rather than ironic or esoteric strategies to advance the claims of natural aristocracy. Classical scholars might wonder why Mara finds his democratic resources in the work of two extravagantly wealthy and apparently antidemocratic authors, rather than in the theoretically rich corpus of Athenian oratory.
Yet by the end, Mara argues persuasively that democratic theorists and citizens should care about Thucydides and Plato not simply in order to rebut the classical critique of democracy but also in order to expand and deepen their own self-understanding. To awaken salutary levels of self-doubt among contemporary theorists, Mara first goes on the offensive. In his central four chapters, he criticizes rational choice theorists, deliberative democrats, the Rawlsian cultural turn, and postmodern theorists, in each case illustrating how specific interpretations of Thucydides and Plato can help us remedy contemporary blind spots and defects. In what ways have today's theorists fallen short? The book catalogues a surprising number of wrong turns and false starts; the key is that, according to Mara, contemporary theorists are unreceptive to relentless self-questioning, either about democratic purposes or about democracy as a regime type. By contrast, Mara finds in Thucydides and Plato evidence of a classical rationalism that is noninstrumental and self-assertive and yet also promiscuously self-critical and free of dogmatism. Thucydides and Plato can teach us, all over again, to ground our convictions in provisional and discursive understandings of human nature, in a spirit of gentleness and openness. The ancient authors hold out the promise of challenging the currently fashionable view that social relations are reducible to, and solely explicable in terms of, power. Finally, recovering Thucydidean and Platonic resources will enable us to envision rational public dialogue about permanent human questions without abandoning our democratic commitments to equality, self-determination, and individual dignity. Mara's time travel is nothing if not ambitious.
Mara's approach emerges clearly from his discussion of “the borders of rational choice” (chap. 2). While appreciating rational choice theory's focus on the relation of politics to rationality, Mara worries that rational choice theorists fail to adhere consistently to their own “value-neutral” standards. He contends that such theorists ignore at their peril “the broader psychocultural and pragmatic concerns that border, by both defining and limiting, strategic rationality” (27). As a result, rational choice theory invites criticisms from Foucaultian diagnosticians of power and knowledge, from postmodernists who fear the “displacement” of democratic politics, and from cultural theorists who emphasize rationality's constitutive or radical dependency upon cultural forms. Enter Thucydides and Plato, who salvage the possibility of investigating politics and rationality together. The ancients encourage us to evaluate directly the workings of rationality itself, and in particular the relationship between rationality and ideology, power, economics, and culture. As Mara's readings amply reveal, the political practices of rationality are always already hedged around with, and often driven by, unexamined cultural “obsessions,” consumptive habits, and ideological frameworks. Through pathways that are inaccessible to others, students of Thucydides and Plato will recognize the dangerous and yet potentially liberating embeddedness of rationality.
To advance his critique, Mara traces Thucydides' complex exploration of the feud between Corinth and Corcyra, the debate at Camarina, the Melian Dialogue, and the Mytilenaean Debate, all in a matter of some 20 pages. Like Saxonhouse, Orwin, and others, Mara repeatedly turns to Thucydides' Diodotus as the hero of democratic practical rationality. Unlike these others, however, Mara locates Diodotus's significance chiefly in his capacity to transcend Cleon's crudely instrumental rationality, which is redolent of rational choice theory's narrow self-image; Diodotus shrewdly persuades his Athenian audience that justice, imperialism, and democratic self-interest themselves stand in need of considerable rational scrutiny. Yet, since he recognizes that democratic politics is susceptible to numerous (especially rhetorical) pathologies, Diodotus raises seemingly unanswerable questions about the very possibility of political logos. Hence, Mara next turns to Plato. Protagoras and Charmides, he argues, enable us to characterize rationality not as happily subservient to ends constituted by individual or cultural preference, but rather as riddled with irony. Mara construes this irony as “the attempt to provide healthy reservations about the content of collective action without losing appreciation for its need and value” (71). Plato's dialogues thus begin to allay the anxieties that Diodotus might elicit concerning our potential for successful applications of political rationality.
Such is generally how the analysis proceeds: not by directly appropriating classical lessons, but rather by illustrating how telling episodes or argumentative fragments can, if read imaginatively, give us the wherewithal to intervene more openly, dialogically, self-critically, and even ethically into contemporary democratic conversations at all levels. Mara applies the same interpretative and philosophical strategies in his critical appreciation of deliberative democracy's proceduralism and renunciation of teleological reasoning, of the cultural turn of Rawls's Political Liberalism, and of postmodern theorists' troubled dichotomy between democratic free space and the darkly authoritarian other. Although Mara's questions are inspired by contemporary theory, he never loses sight of his chosen authors' own architectonic designs. He also takes pains to acknowledge the intellectual contributions of contemporary theorists without ever treating unequal things equally.
Readers may find that Mara occasionally glides too smoothly over thorny exegetical terrain. He offers many suggestive interpretations but comparatively few sustained arguments to support his readings. For example, Mara moves quickly to the conclusion that the Socrates of Protagoras pretends to accept hedonism only to draw out the implications and limitations of Protagoras's own authentic hedonism; Socrates himself, in Mara's view, has the more profound yet aporetic purpose of laying bare the ambiguities and uncertainties of human goodness. This is an intriguing suggestion, but, without significantly fuller argumentation, it must remain simply a suggestion. (In fairness, Mara is often building in such cases on the arguments of his exciting though controversial first book, Socrates' Discursive Democracy: Logos and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy, 1997). Mara also accepts too readily, I think, the antidemocratic view that the classical Athenians' espousal of freedom implied the impossibility of establishing political institutions that would mold character (131). To the contrary: the Athenians certainly viewed themselves as practicing a distinctively democratic form of virtue politics at both ideological and institutional levels. On the other hand, Mara characteristically proves to be a sensitive, highly perceptive reader, as in his argument that Thucydides' narrative of Mycalessus destabilizes self-serving dichotomies between civilized self and barbarian other (201–7). Furthermore, his reinterpretation of Plato's Gorgias as comedy is an enjoyable provocation.
Beyond his specific arguments, though, Mara does a great service in drawing theorists' attention to the necessity of engaging as seriously with the ancients as with contemporaries. In doing so, Mara's book promises to stimulate future conversations and to entice readers into precisely the open-ended, discursive conversations that he favors. For that, and for much else, his work is to be highly commended.
