Of Dissidents and Democracy

...In college he began Greek and dreamed of teaching philosophy...

...Aristophanes devoted a whole comedy to him, and key speakers in the dialogues are prominent in the histories of the time-mostly on the "wrong," the antidemocratic, side...

...After hearing him, only a slight majority voted for conviction...

...Stone began with our own Constitution and its English ancestry, worked back through the Protestant Reformation and the Middle Ages, until he arrived in Periclean Athens of the fifth century B.C...

...Following the Athenian defeat, Critias and Charmides, speakers in the dialogues and close relatives of Plato, led an oligarchic coup supported by Sparta...

...But Socrates went on to offend the jurors by telling them that instead of punishment, he should be awarded a seat of honor at communal banquets for trying to teach Athenians virtue...

...How could they put to death the man whom the Delphic oracle declared the wisest in all Greece...

...On the few occasions when he was forced into political action, he noted, he defended restraint and justice at some risk to himself...

...Politically speaking there actually were dangerous antidemocratic witches in Athens, and they turn up under their own names in the Platonic dialogues...

...Before they were overthrown, 1,500 Athenians were executed...

...Had he conducted his defense as a free speech case, invoking the traditions of the city, he might easily, Stone thinks, "have shifted the troubled jury in his favor...

...Large Communist parties threatened democracy in France and Italy...

...In preparation for the first antidemocratic revolution they organized death squads that were "prototypes of the death squads the military used in Argentina, El Salvador, and Chile in our time...

...Stone effectively brings such dissent to the foreground again at a moment when the antidemocratic Right here and abroad is once more attacking Uberai democracy and its "relativism" in the name of absolute philosophies which claim a base transcending history...

...Angered or frightened by his arrogance, a larger majority of the jurors now voted the death sentence...

...In 399 B.C...

...Like most of us around his age, he had four years of Latin in high school...

...Unfortunately the affinity for Sparta was not merely theoretical, it was bloody and treasonous...

...In his parallel of Athens and America Stone does not discuss the behavior of the individuals accused here of past or present Communist Party membership...

...From 1940 to 1946 he was Washington editor of the Nation...

...Stone's Weekly with almost no resources and was the sole contributor...

...It was for the many, the "herd" to obey, and for the statist equivalent of sheep dogs to direct them...

...Some witnesses, who had not been Communists, denied the authority of the investigating committees and chose bravely to resist them...

...Stone, age 80, has spent his recent years urgently contemplating Socrates, although he is a redoubtable Left-liberal who has been writing on social issues since he was 15...

...This book, addressed also to our immediate present, is the provocative result...

...Socrates was a heretic...

...Notwithstanding the carryover of some anti-anti-Communist attitudes that Stone's own later writings on Russia actually negate, The Trial of Socrates is invaluable, particularly at the present time, for the forthright way it locates Socrates and his circle in the crises of democracy in fifth-century Athens...

...To read the Oresteia of Aeschylus "took me," Stone says, "12 weeks, five to six hours a day, and seven days a week...

...Facing his accusers, he denied he was a professional teacher, as the Sophists were, and denied responsibility for what those who conversed with him in their youth did later in life...

...By using the term "witch hunt," Stone drops back into the ambiguity of his own position between the late '30s and early '50s: As a Socialist he defended Stalin's Russia, and as a Jeffersonian he attacked the restriction of freedom in the United States of Roosevelt and Truman...

...Stone's Epilogue, "Was there a Witch Hunt in Ancient Athens...

...The proud Athenian citizen was equally ruler and ruled...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University Asked why he began reading Plato in his old age, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes responded, "To improve my mind...

...Aristophanes had already singled them out in his comedies...

...Anytus, his chief accuser, was a moderate democrat...

...But generally Marxists, who had defended the Moscow show trials, presented themselves as Jeffersonians and, unlike Socrates, attacked the committees in the name of freedoms they themselves did not believe in...

...After the War, a series of trials-those of Klaus Fuchs, Hiss and the Rosenbergs -and of flights-those of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean-showed what the slogan "Defend the Soviet Union" meant in practice...

...When St...

...Those who "know" should rule, and rule absolutely...

...In the 1930s in England and America many gifted youths, having become Marxist, saw the Soviet Union as their Sparta...

...China had gone Communist and driven back our troops in Korea...

...Russia already dominated Central Europe...

...This was the challenge of Sidney Hook's controversial short book, "Heresy, Yes-Conspiracy, No...

...The mood in this country was like that in an Athens not yet recovered from the bloody treason of those allied with Sparta...

...Stone admires Socrates and Plato...

...One question would not let him rest...

...Allan Bloom, archconservative, says in his runaway bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, that America's problems are "not social, political, psychological or economic, but philosophic' And if we want to understand them, " contemplation of Socrates is our most urgent task...

...But he was already a newspaper stringer stirred up by ideas from Kropotkin and Engels...

...Socrates and his aristocratic followers rejected all this, scorning government, as they put it, by cobblers and fullers and marketplace hucksters...

...Jesus founded Western Christianity...

...Still, why now Socrates...

...Stone is thoroughly fair to Plato, whose writing he treats almost rapturously, but he has no doubt about the implications of Platonic philosophy...

...It was very much in the minds of those who brought Socrates to trial...

...He did not take that course because "his victory would have been a victory for the democratic principles he scorned.' Stone concludes the book by saying, "Socrates needed the hemlock as Jesus needed the Crucifixion, to fulfill a mission.' Socrates was as truly a religious martyr as Jesus...

...He thought that an impending trial before a large jury of citizens who had suffered under Charmides and Critias would prompt Socrates to leave Athens out of prudence...

...He could vote, hold any office, speak in the assembly, and sit in a jury-court like the one that tried Socrates...

...In Plato's dialogues, where does Socrates end and Plato begin...

...answers its own question with a carefully researched "No...

...His close associates were conspirators who nearly destroyed freedom in Athens...

...Neither man gave us a word in writing, yet their speeches are presented as if verbatim...

...Socrates, a thorough Athenian with a sense of mission, would not leave...

...No other trial, except of Jesus," Stone writes, "has left so vivid an impression on the imagination of Western man...

...His feelings carry over from the '50s, the period of McCarthyism and of the Rosenberg and Hiss trials, when Stone was one of the fiercest critics of the way this country investigated and persecuted Communists...

...During the protracted Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the gifted, unprincipled Alcibiades, beloved of Socrates in the Symposium and already in bad repute as a "profaner of the mysteries," changed sides several times...

...Paul preached there he found an open city, as fascinated by new ideas as it had been when Aristophanes and Euripides were free to treat critically even the Olympian gods themselves...

...In Spartaa highly disciplined military aristocracy, more or less communist in its way of life, ruled over working-class helots who did not have any rights...

...My teacher at Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead, said, "All subsequent philosophy consists of a series of footnotes on Plato...

...The specific charges against Socrates were impiety and corrupting the young...

...Immediately he launched into a long-term study of political liberty, somewhat quixotically designed "to help embattled dissidents in the Communist world" toward "a liberating synthesis of Marx and Jefferson...

...The trial of Socrates was a prosecution of ideas," Stone writes...

...Athenian citizens (albeit not their slaves) enjoyed democratic rights that no country would afford again for over two millennia...

...the Athenians brought their gadfly philosopher Socrates before a citizen's court on charges of subversion and condemned him to death...

...This includes "wiping the slate clean" of those who oppose him, as Critias tried to do in Athens...

...In 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, he started I.F...

...His philosophy, like much subsequent Platonism, was a religion of transcendental ideas attained through mystic communion, an absolutist faith that rejected freedom of speech no less completely than orthodox Christianity would...

...Are these records faithful, especially where the speeches of opponents are concerned...

...At great personal sacrifice he had worked out the compromises that restored democracy in Athens, including an amnesty which prevented direct political charges at the trial...

...But if being right means being antidemocratic, he says, so much the worse for democracy...

...In Book Six of the Republic the philosopher who has made himself semidivine has the right, following a heavenly model, to reconstruct society totally...

...Even in his more moderate Laws we find a Nocturnal Council, "an inquisitorial body empowered to root out dissent, the archetype," as Stone says, "of our late but unlamented House Un-American Activities Committee...

...Critias had Alcibiades murdered, too...

...They joined (as I did myself) a disciplined ideological party under the control of Russia...

...He left college in his junior year to work for a series of well-known liberal papers that successively collapsed for lack of funds...

...But after the trial of Socrates antidemocrats were not sought out and persecuted in Athens the way Communists were in this country, beginning in the Truman Administration...

...He admires as well, however, the Greek city-state, the polis, a unique culturalpolitical entity with a magnificent state theater whose plays we continue to perform...

...Socrates founded Western philosophy...

...Demagogues had taken over the investigations at a time when the Communist Party was so weakened as to be inconsiderable politically...

...Stone believes it lucky that at the time of the trial Plato's Republic had not been written...

...None of this, Stone observes, is mentioned in the Platonic dialogues, where Critias and Charmides appear "surrounded by a kind of golden haze...

...Such treason could be alarming when it involved the atomic bomb...

...Dissent was punished by death...

...Democracy, nevertheless, remained in danger, and Anytus, like many Athenians, wanted to get rid of Socrates and his influence -but not by killing him...

...And as happened with those close to Socrates, enthusiasm for a dictatorship of "those who know" was more than a matter of ideas...

...He is writing in the tradition of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, a massive dissent from Plato, Hegel and Marx begun when the Nazis took over Austria...

...Stone admires Athenian democracy and thinks the prosecution of Socrates was a violation of its principles, a "tragic crime...

...Stone explains in part at the beginning of the book...

...Did "all the people" at the trial of Jesus really call out, "His blood be upon us and on our children...

...The book cites Thucydides on the terror springing from the secret aristocratic clubs created, according to Stone, by "the type of rich young men who formed the entourage of Socrates...

...Despite the fact that Sparta was culturally far inferior to Athens, the Socratic circle idealized its form of government...

...There he so fell in love with the Greeks and their literature that he decided to master the language and be free of biased translators...

...By 1971, when an attack of angina pectoris made him give it up, the Weekly had achieved a circulation of 70,000...

...What Stone calls " the germ of totalitarianism" in Socrates' political thought becomes explicit in Plato's Republic...

...We have a more varied perspective on Socrates, though, than we do on Jesus...

...Then it would "have been even harder to convince the court that Socrates had not turned some of the most gifted youths into dangerous revolutionaries.' Indeed, in some cases he had...

...He had done so-and he made this point central-with the divine authority of the Delphian Apollo who declared him the wisest man in Greece...

...Bloom thinks the Athenian case against Socrates as antidemocratic was valid...

...As a result, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death in America as Socrates had been in Athens...

...There were antidemocratic witches in this country, and the responsibility of Jeffersonians was not to deny their existence but to see that investigations protected democratic rights and made the proper distinction between idea and act...

...With classical dictionaries and scholarly commentaries piled around him, Stone has tackled the Greek texts as fervently as he once investigated racism in Arkansas and American military intervention in Korea...