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Introduction: Xenophon and the Making of a Political Leader
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20572 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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11 / 1992 |
1,033 Words |
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Thinking and doing are so different, we often suppose, that they are incompatible. Can thinkers be doers? Does intelligence have any function in human affairs? Plato asserted, perhaps ironically, that there will be no respite from evils in cities until we have philosophers who are kings or kings who are genuine philosophers. Twenty-five hundred years later, Bertrand Russell proclaimed, with no irony at all, that the perennial problem of philosophical politics is how to combine reason and power in the same agent.
One of the major participants in the philosopher-in-politics debate was Xenophon the Athenian, the companion of Socrates and a contemporary of Plato. Taking a stance and style totally different from his brilliant contemporary, Xenophon wrote a work on the ruler and on knowledge in ruling, The Education of Cyrus. It was widely thought to be no less brilliant than the dialogues of Plat, and it had a wide influence until the end of the eighteenth century. In the ancient world it was admired by Cicero, for example and in the high Renaissance it was praised by many-Machiavelli, Erasmus, Thomas More, Thomas Elyot, Montaigne, and, especially, Sir Philip Sidney. In the eighteenth century, Gibbon and Hume were admirers, but after them it became fashionable to disparage or ignore Xenophon-partly, no doubt because it was no longer considered necessary to educate rulers.
The theme this month, consisting of five articles of Xenophon's The Education of Cyrus, is remarkably current. It deals, for example, with equality of opportunity--the principle of meritocracy and its effects upon government (see W.R. Newell's article); with multiethnic problems of a large empire; with how domestic policy differs from foreign policy and how leadership in war differs from leadership in peace (Leslie Rubin); with the kind of leadership appropriate in our democracy and the way in which a ruler needs or does not need to be superior to the ruled (Paul Ellenbogen); about the extent to which political stability and justice are compatible (Wayne Ambler); and, above all, with the question of whether politics and knowledge ever can be combined. For those who are interested in the background to Xenophon and his writings, a fifth article, with maps and time charts, gives the necessary details. A straightforward summary of The Education of Cyrus can be found on pp. 488-493.
Plato was, of course, the first academic, founding the Academy and writing dialogues for public hearing; his work was not purely academic, however, for he wrote constitutions for and advised new and old states alike. Xenophon, on the other hand, was never an Academic and spent
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