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