Virtue Is Knowledge ─ The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy

The equation of virtue and knowledge points to the core of the Socratic view of human excellence at the same time as it reflects a central puzzle of the Platonic dialogues. Can Socrates be serious in his claims that human excellence is constituted simply by one virtue? That vice is merely the result of ignorance, and that the correct response to crime is education and not punishment? Some commentators have held these assertions to be rhetorical ploys more than anything else. Lorraine Pangle’s penetrating, new book contends that, despite their seeming strangeness, there is a truth at the core of each of these claims. In tracing the arguments for the goodness of virtue and the power of knowledge in the five dialogues that feature them most prominently—the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, and the Laws—she reveals the moral foundations of Socratic political philosophy. Ultimately, Pangle argues that Socrates was far more aware of the complex causes of human action and of the power of irrational passions than he may appear to be on the surface. Her perceptive readings reveal that many of his defenses of the Socratic thesis are in fact explorations of the factors that make it exceedingly difficult for humans to be the rational creatures that he (at first sight) seems to claim. Also critical to Pangle’s exegesis is her emphasis on the political dimensions of the dialogues. Underlying many of the paradoxes, she shows, is a distinction between philosophic and civic virtue that is critical to making sense of them. Ultimately, she uncovers the radically unconventional nerve of Socrates’ thought: that virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, yet true virtue is nothing other than wisdom.

Lorraine Smith Pangle is professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also codirector of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas. She is the author of three books, including, most recently, The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin.