SB3. Covert Teaching of Tyranny in Platonic Political Philosophy

the final result of Socrates’ “educational” project is not passivity, but anarchic and destructive violence: there is a debate about the beating of parents followed by a mob uprising and arson against Socrates’ own school. One is reminded possibly, and in this case half-anachronistically, of Alcibiades, also Socrates’ student, and his involvement in the destruction of the herms and the profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries, events that the people of Athens took to be precursors to a plot for the violent suppression of democracy. Not that philosophy teaches ineffectual passive nihilism and anomie then, but that it is supremely dangerous because it makes young men lawless and violent, and possibly antidemocratic and tyrannical: this seems to have been the concern about philosophy.