THE PROBLEM OF DIONYSIUS:

-EXCERPT: from The Reckless Mind: Afterword: The Lure of Syracuse (Mark Lilla)

It is an old myth about Plato that he was the proponent of a mad scheme to institute the rule of "philosopher-kings" in Greek cities, and that his "Sicilian adventure" was a first step toward realizing his ambition. When Martin Heidegger returned to teaching in 1934 after his shameful tenure as Nazi rector of Freiburg University, a now forgotten colleague, meaning to heap shame on his head, quipped, "Back from Syracuse?" As a bon mot this can hardly be bettered. But Plato's aims could not have been more different from Heidegger's. As Plato recounts in his Seventh Letter, he once dreamed of entering political life but was disheartened by the tyrannical rule of the Thirty in Athens (404 - 403 B.C.). He then renounced politics altogether when the democratic regime that succeeded the Thirty put to death his friend and teacher Socrates. He concluded, much as the character Socrates concludes in Plato's Republic, that once a political regime is corrupt there is little one can do to restore it to health "without friends and associates" -that is, without those who are both philosophical friends of justice and loyal friends of the city. Short of a miracle, in which philosophers would become kings or kings would turn to philosophy, the most that can be hoped for in politics is the establishment of a moderate government under the stable rule of law.

. . . Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceausescu and Milosevic-one's pen runs dry. In the nineteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived.

The problem of Dionysius is as old as creation. That of his intellectual partisans is new. As continental Europe gave birth to two great tyrannical systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, for which we need a new name: the philotyrannical intellectual. A few major thinkers of that period whose work is still meaningful for us today dared to serve the modern Dionysius openly in word and deed, and their cases are infamous: Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt in Nazi Germany, Georg Lukacs in Hungary, perhaps a few others. A great many joined Fascist and Communist parties on both sides of the Iron Curtain, whether out of elective affinities or professional ambition, without taking great risks; a few played soldier for a time in the jungles and deserts of the third world. A surprising number were pilgrims to the new Syracuses being built in Moscow, Berlin, Hanoi, and Havana. These were the political voyeurs who made carefully choreographed tours of the tyrant's domains with return tickets in hand, admiring the collective farms, the tractor factories, the sugarcane groves, the schools, but somehow never visiting the prisons.

Mainly, though, European intellectuals stayed at their desks, visiting Syracuse only in their imaginations, developing interesting, sometimes brilliant ideas to explain away the sufferings of peoples, whose eyes they would never meet. Distinguished professors, gifted poets, and influential journalists summoned their talents to convince all who would listen that modern tyrants were liberators and that their unconscionable crimes were noble, when seen in the proper perspective. Whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach.

In his book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter defines his topic as follows:

The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.

Guilty as charged. This must in fact be seen to be a significant part of the reason America has avoided the worst of the social experiments that have done so much damage to Europe--the exception being the New Deal/Great Society, which, though destructive, were rather limited by comparison to genuine socialism. The great Eric Hoffer put it best when he said: "The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us." Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2003 8:10 PM