Tim Romano wrote:

> > The 2500 year bad reputation of the sophists has been one
> > continuous attack on democracy.
>
> Not clear to me what you meant exactly with this last sentence. Could you
> please elaborate?

:-) Not really very clear to me either! But I'll try, anyhow. First, without
increasing the clarity I can at least clean up the syntax. " For 2500 years
writers, in echoing Plato's sneering account of the Sophists, have kept
alive his denial of the capacity of ordinary humans to engage in the the
life of the Polis." Protagoras, the greatest of the Sophists, claimed that
he could teach virtue or wisdom, not as a special ("professional") technique
but as something that ordinary men ("shoemakers or smiths") could learn
because in fact they possessed it. That is, the capacity for engaging in
public life (of not being an *idiotes* or "private person") was universal.

The crime of the Sophists, essentially, was similar to the crime of the
"prison lawyer" from the viewpoint of the Warden and Guards -- they
made knowledge available to the inmates, enabling them to participate
in the governance of the City. They made the worse appear the better
reason -- i.e. they gave rhetorical power to the artisan or peasant,
whose reasons were by definition the worse reason.

I can give you a beautiful example of this attitude from early in the
effort to build an anti-war movement in the '60s. Someone at
Northern Illinois collected faculty signatures around the state on
a full page ad in the Chicago Daily News opposing the war. This
provoked an editorial in the Chicago Tribune to the effect that such
questions should be left to the diplomatic and military experts. That
was to be expected from the Tribune. But a few days later I was
talking to this philosophy professor at Illinois State. He didn't
know I had signed the ad -- and he went on and on how embarassed
the signers of the ad must be at having exposed themselves so.
This is the old Socratic pitch that government is a special art or
craft for only the specially trained to practice.

Or the case of one of my undergraduate friends from the '40s who
became a high school teacher. His district had a real asshole of
a superintendant, and a major battle erupted between the teachers
and the suerintendant, climaxing in a public meeting which many
parents attended. After a long discussion, an M.D. got up and
summarized the situation thusly: The superintendant and the school
board were wrong -- but we (the citizens) had elected the
school board so the democratic thing to do was to accept their
decision, even though the decision was obviously wrong. No one
among the assembled citizens would reject that logic. The worship
of The Expert. This is what the Sophists fought against, and the
reason the aristocratic Plato so hated them.

Carrol Cox