In all likelihood Socrates takes over the idea that political rule is a job requiring certain skills from some of his older contemporaries. Plato includes among these Protagoras, who claimed to teach ‘‘sound deliberation [euboulia], both in domestic matters - how best to manage one’s household, and in public affairs - how to realize one’s maximum potential for success in political debate and action’’ (Prt. 319a),11 and Gorgias, who claimed to teach rhetoric, ‘‘the ability to persuade by speeches judges in a law court, councilors in a council meeting, and assemblymen in an assembly or in any other political gathering that might take place’’ (Grg. 452e) which produces ‘‘freedom for humankind itself and... the source of rule over others in one’s own city’’ (452d). Both Protagoras and Gorgias characterize politics as a field in which one can excel when one has achieved the mastery over the skills (deliberation, rhetoric) that they teach.
Before we delve into Socrates’ engagement with the sophists and orators, a word about what they were doing in Athens. The demand for sophists and orators seems to have arisen with two changes in Athenian circumstances in the fifth century which made traditional elites’ claim to political power and prior political skills obsolete: democracy and empire. If the vote of the demos was required for a politician’s plan to carry, it was no longer enough to be a great general; the politician had to be able to speak persuasively to the assembled demos, and since he did not have a common culture and education with them, he had to learn what appealed to them in particular. In addition, Athens’ new status as an imperial power complicated its affairs and this, combined with the requirement that any issue be decided by the Assembly in a single day, created a demand for politicians who could devote themselves to mastering
Athenian political affairs. Plato’s contemporary Isocrates expresses one kind of response to the complexity of Athens’ affairs when he denies the possibility of scientific knowledge {episteme) of ‘‘what we should do or what we should say’’ and instead upholds the importance to the politician of ‘‘insight’’ {phrontcsis) and the ability ‘‘by his powers of conjecture [tais doxais] to arrive generally at the best course’’ {Isoc. Antid. ca. 271). 2 But however desirable mastery of political affairs or good judgment may have been in a politician, the democratic system made the ability to speak persuasively not just a desideratum but a necessity.13
In this context, ‘‘professionalizing’’ political rule amounts to claiming that there is a body of knowledge, sufficiently wide in scope and precise in formulation, upon the learning of which the would-be political leader should expect success. Describing a new discipline as a techne {profession, craft, art) or episteme {science) is a way of claiming for it a status possessed by better-established practices like medicine. That status derives in part from the professional’s ability to bring about a valued result {such as health) on the basis of some understanding of the factors involved {rather than by luck). {I have chosen the term ‘‘profession’’ to translate techne rather than the more usual ‘‘craft’’ or ‘‘art’’ for several reasons. First, in English, ‘‘craft’’ sounds as if it refers to something one does with one’s hands and ‘‘art’’ to something in the fine arts, perhaps as opposed to the sciences, whereas technee has none of these connotations; like the technai about which there are disputes, such as medicine and politics, a profession is thought to have an important intellectual component. Second, in contemporary English ‘‘professional’’ has normative connotations that seem to resonate with those of techne: people speak today of professional standards and professional {or unprofessional) behavior.)
I mean this to be a minimalist account of what is entailed by calling the subject one practices or teaches a technee, and I want a minimalist account because it seems to me that more substantial accounts reflect controversial innovations by Socrates {and other fifth century intellectuals) to which we will want to pay special attention. So, for example, Aristotle characterizes a techne as involving knowledge of universals, by contrast with experience { empeiria) or knowledge of particulars; as involving knowledge of causes; and as teachable {Metaphysics 1.1). But these may be peculiarly Socratic emphases {on the contrast with experience, and on knowledge of universals and causes, see e. g. Grg. 464c-465a; on teachability, Prt. 319b-e, 361a-c). Aristotle’s characterization is quite different from that of the late fifth century Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine, according to which medicine’s claim to be a science rests on its answering a need, having a starting point and longstanding method for discovery, and being explicable to laypersons {2). While this text also insists on medicine’s having a precise and complete understanding of causes and their effects on the body {20), it insists that these are found out by experience, which allows distinctive causes to be investigated by the method of difference - by contrast with causal and explanatory principles that derive from a more general physical investigation. Again, Socrates’ insistent demand that any claimant to a techne specify its product {ergon) {Plato Grg. 447d-454b; Prt. 318a-319a; Euthd. 288e-292d; Cleit. 409b-d) builds on what must have been a widespread expectation that a professional could name or point to the beneficial product he had on offer, but it goes beyond that expectation in demanding that the professional give an account of this product. After all, a doctor might be expected to tell his patient the symptoms of his disease and of his cure, but it is not reasonable to expect him to give a nonexpert an explanation of how the disease produces the symptoms, or how the treatment effects the cure, or of what health is, particularly in any given case. (However, Socrates is himself subjected to this higher standard of giving an account of the product of a craft when Thrasymachus demands that he say what the just (which Socrates has been treating as the product of the techne of justice, Resp. 332d ff.) is without saying that it is the advantageous or beneficial and so on (Resp. 336c-d; cf. Cleit. 409c-d).)
In his conversations with the sophists and orators, Socrates accepts the formal claim that expert knowledge in politics brings about good political results. His questions focus on the content of the expert knowledge they profess (What is it about? What is the evidence that they really have it?), on their conception of good political results (Are these really good? If not, what are the good results to be brought about by political rule?), and on the relationship between the two (Does their expertise really have the results they claim it does? Or what sort of expert knowledge would it take to bring about these results, or genuinely good results?). So, for example, in the Gorgias, Socrates counters Gorgias’ claim that rhetoric is an expertise which produces the good political result of enhanced social and political power for the orator-politician (452d-e) by pointing out that however rhetoric achieves its effects, it is not through any knowledge of the matters of justice and injustice about which it makes speeches (459a-e, 461b), and that even if it enables the orator-politician to visit evil upon anyone he wishes, it does not enable him to bring about any good for himself or anyone else (466b-468e). So rhetoric fails to be political expertise on two counts: it lacks knowledge of central political matters (the just and unjust), and it fails to bring about any genuine good.
The sophists and orators contemporary with Socrates cannot have welcomed his agreement with their claim that expert knowledge in politics brings about good political results. For Socrates not only agrees with them that expert knowledge brings about successful political rule, but also adds that only those with expert knowledge are qualified to (thus should, or may) rule. Sophists and orators like Gorgias, Protagoras, and Thrasymachus, noncitizens in Athens, would have shied away from being seen as telling the Athenians how they should run their city; they claimed only to be helping aspirants to political power within the existing constitution, thereby allowing their professional training to be equally attractive to partisans of democracy and oligarchy. Socrates, on the other hand, was centrally in the business of evaluating ways of living, both individual and communal. Further, while the need to attract students led sophists and orators to allow the conception of successful political rule to depend on the would-be student’s conception of success or advantage, Socrates’ insistence on a substantive account of the (goods) produced by successful political rule brought into the limelight the difficulties of making recommendations without any views on what is noninstrumentally good.
In Republic 1, Plato points out both the common ground and the differences between Socrates and a contemporary sophist, Thrasymachus. It is Thrasymachus who introduces the idea of a professional expertise of ruling which enables its possessor, insofar as he is a professional, to rule unerringly (340c-341b). Socrates accepts the idea that there is a profession of ruling; he disagrees with Thrasymachus, however, about the goal of this profession. According to Thrasymachus, the professional ruler rules to his own advantage. But the introduction of the idea of a professional ruler opens up other dimensions of the profession of ruling. Socrates argues, by analogy with the other professions, that a profession’s goal is always the improvement of that over which it has power. He seems to be reasoning: if [as you Thrasymachus maintain] ruling is a profession, then [you must concede that] its product is like that of other professions, and the product of any other profession is the improvement of that over which it has jurisdiction. For example, the doctor in the precise sense is so called because he treats the sick, the healing of the sick being the advantage which the profession of medicine is directed toward (341c-d, 342c). He generalizes, ‘‘No kind of knowledge seeks or orders what is advantageous to itself... but what is advantageous to the weaker, which is subject to it’’ (342c-d; trans. Grube, rev. Reeve in Cooper 1997b). If political rule is rule over citizens, then its goal must be their betterment, not the ruler’s. In the Gorgias, Socrates announces that he himself is a practitioner of the political profession (521d), perhaps the only one. If improving citizens is the goal of the political professional, then, since Socrates’ protreptic and elenctic activities have that goal, he can reasonably count himself a political professional.
In this argument, Socrates claims that the professions ‘‘by nature’’ aim at the betterment of whatever they have jurisdiction over; for example, medicine was discovered to remedy the deficiencies of the human body (341d-e). This seems a deliberate departure from the common line of thought that the professions were discovered for the benefit of mankind: Protagoras’ myth gives us many other examples of the deficiencies to remedy which Prometheus and Zeus gave humans the various professions (Prt. 321c-322d). The common line is, although initially more plausible, perhaps more vulnerable to misuse than Socrates’. If we specify the goal of a profession by the benefits it gives us humans - saying with Thrasymachus that the goal of shepherding is surely not the welfare of the sheep but rather the production of the meat and wool the sheep provide for the shepherd’s benefit (343b) - then it is open to someone to specify the goal of another profession by the benefits it gives some one subgroup of humans, perhaps even by exploiting another subgroup. (Thrasymachus’ choice of an example is particularly striking, given the standard characterization of the ruler as a shepherd (e. g. Hom. Il. 2.243; Xen. Mem. 3.2.1; Arist. Eth. Nic. 8.11, 1161a12-15; criticized at Pl. Plt. 267c ff.).) Safer, then, to look for an internal connection between a profession and its goal. And to specify the internal connection when we also have to determine the goal, it makes sense to turn to the other professions as models, on the assumption that the professions resemble each other. Resemblance between the professions seems to be the basis of Socrates’ argument that injustice isn’t an expertise and the unjust person isn’t clever or good because the unjust try to outdo each other whereas experts only try to outdo nonexperts, not other experts (349a-350c).
Socrates’ conception of the relationship between a profession and its goal is stronger than might be thought. Socrates does not claim that in no circumstance can it ever benefit the practitioner of a profession to practice his profession (a view which, as long as he wants to treat justice as a profession, would deliver him right into the hands of Thrasymachus, who claims that justice is another’s good (343c)). He only claims that benefiting its practitioner is not the goal of any profession. Benefit to the practitioner might be an incidental result of the profession; it might be the result of practicing the profession, perhaps in a given social context - doctors might get monetary payment, recognition, or gratitude for practicing medicine, but the goal of medicine remains healing. Similarly, rulers may get wages, honors, or they may only avoid the ‘‘penalty’’ ofhavingworse people than themselves ruling (347a-d), but it will not do to confuse the job of ruling with any of these socially mediated consequences. But that is just what people who think of ruling as a privilege, like Thrasymachus, do.
Socrates’ answer to the question ‘‘what is the goal of the job of ruling?’’ converges with one answer to the question ‘‘who should rule?’’: the goal of the job of ruling is the benefit of the ruled; that individual or group should rule who is best qualified to benefit the ruled.15 We saw above that advocates of democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny all claim to benefit the ruled - so Socrates is hardly being controversial by claiming that political rule aims at the benefit of the ruled. Rather, he is showing that the sophists, who would prefer to remain silent on the ‘‘who should rule?’’ question, are committed by the very notion of a profession of ruling to the answer ‘‘he who best fulfills the goal of ruling’’ - for any profession has action-guiding norms which are structured by the profession’s goal(s).
Socrates’ use ofthe notion ofa profession deprives Thrasymachus ofthe respectability associated with being a professional practitioner or teacher - insofar as Thrasymachus himself pursues the injustice he praises (343c-344c). If one’s motive for engaging in a profession conflicts with the goal ofthat profession, one’s claim to be a professional of that sort is invalidated. Not everyone will care about this loss, and this marks the limits of the normative force of the notion of a profession. Anyone who can swallow the loss of prestige that goes with having to take a position that says, ‘‘I don’t care about being a professional, I just want my own advantage,’’ will need a deeper response than Socrates gives to Thrasymachus. (On this point, it is worth noting that while Thrasymachus is unmoved by Socrates’ argument that someone who uses his power to benefit himself rather than those he rules is, contrary to Thrasymachus, no expert ruler, he sweats and blushes when Socrates argues that the unjust person is neither clever nor good.) It is perhaps in recognition of this need for a deeper argument that from Republic 2 on, Plato takes on the more fundamental question of why it is better to be just rather than unjust.
World History
