Review of Socrates’ Second Sailing: on Plato’s Republic

Arlene Saxonhouse, Review of Socrates' Second Sailing: on Plato's RepublicPolitical Theory, Vol. 18, no. 4 (Nov. 1990): 690-705.

As with much of Benardete’s other work, this is not an easy book to read. To say that it is dense, boldly paradoxical, replete with hellenized English, and abjures the standard expectations of expository writing only hints at the difficulties one must face in reading this text. … And yet this is also the classic Benardete, where cryptic allusions, startling paradoxes, new questions (that seem obvious once they are asked) about long-accepted passages all work to give brilliant new insights into the Platonic text and therewith as well the possibility or impossibility of combining politics and philosophy, practice and theory.