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Socratic Citizenship. By Dana Villa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 370p. $65.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.
Gerald Mara, Georgetown University
The publication of Dana Villa's Socratic Citizenship coincides accidentally with recent events that have shaken and solidified American society. Yet the issues his book addresses are directly relevant to how a democratic society confronts such challenges. Villa investigates various forms of democratic citizenship and argues for a kind of civic activity that has been dangerously obscured within modern debates about democracy. Particularly within periods of regime stress, liberalism's good citizen who votes, pays taxes, and plays by the rules seems underequipped to meet the commitments the times require. The framework of the communitarians or the civic republicans wherein one discovers the value of "a shared commitment to something bigger than one's self... [endorsing a] life of community or civic engagement" (p. x) seems more helpful. Villa's concern is that this view of citizenship too easily enlists the community's members in projects of collective affirmation, while ignoring the importance of a critical rationality that asks skeptical questions about the content and the moral consequences of a politics driven by a "newly rediscovered sense of political membership" (p. x). In response, he rediscovers the possibility of a form of citizenship that places "intellectual doubt at the heart of moral reflection," demanding not commitment but conscientiousness (p. xii). It is this form of citizenship that seems most compatible with moral individualism, and thus with the basic premises of democracy. He plausibly finds the origin of this kind of citizenship in the practices of Socrates as they are portrayed within the early Platonic dialogues, Apology, Crito, and Gorgias.
Villa begins with an interpretation of these dialogues, but his major concern is to reveal the fate of Socratic citizenship within modern political thought. He focuses particularly on five thinkers, J. S. Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. While all of them take "strong stands on the relevance of Socratic moral individualism to modern politics" (p. 59), they all, to different degrees, understand citizenship in ways that undercut rather than respect "the Socratic idea of philosophical, dissident citizenship" (p. 59).
The interpretation of the dialogues differentiates and endorses conscientious Socratic dissidence, as compared with the assertive Periclean citizenship...