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Xavier Márquez : A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy and Law in Plato's "Statesman." (Las Vegas : Parmenides , 2012. Pp. vii, 399.)
Book Reviews: THE MEANING AND LIMITS OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE
"Wearying," "bizarre," "disjointed," "confused," "a poor relation of the Republic and the Laws," "a 'dialogue' without any real dialogue." These are just a few of the phrases that have been used by scholars over the years to dismiss Plato's Statesman as a work unworthy of serious study. Fortunately, in recent years, a number of scholars have written excellent commentaries on this dialogue in order to rehabilitate it as a work that rewards careful study and contributes important new elements to Plato's notions of both method and politics. Xavier Márquez's book, A Stranger's Knowledge: Statesmanship, Philosophy, and Law in Plato's "Statesman" constitutes a wonderful new addition to this whole line of scholarship. While acknowledging his indebtedness to a number of scholars who have defended this dialogue as a cohesive whole, Márquez's nuanced, engaging, and erudite reading of the dialogue consistently produces new insights into the character of the Statesman's complex unity or "hidden beauty" (xiii).
The book contains an illuminating discussion of the Eleatic Stranger's initial divisions and his treatment of the statesman as a shepherd of human beings. Márquez persuasively argues that the bizarre details and conclusions of this discussion are in fact crucial for understanding important aspects of statesmanship that are only fully developed later in the dialogue. Thus, the Eleatic Stranger's first divisions, which result in the puzzling definitions of man as a "featherless biped" or a "two-footed pig" (as opposed to man as a rational animal), are meant to show that it is not man's rationality, but rather his insufficiently tame and social nature that is the most relevant aspect of human being when thinking about the peculiar character of statesmanship (30, 73, 91-93). It is human beings' thumotic pride and quarrelsomeness in combination with their capacity for phronesis that makes human beings "think that they are able to rule themselves even if they are not" (86). This fact about human beings points ahead to the role of the statesman at the end of the dialogue (306a-311c) in weaving together the overly...