104
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE TWO REPUBLICS
THE REPUBLIC.
By Charles A. Beard. Viking.
$3.00.
Professor Beard is not the first writer to give Plato the tribute of
work modeled after the wonderful dialogue which, next to the
has been the most read book of the western world. There is no
of Professor Beard's intention: his title and subject-matter are the same
and his
R epublic
is also in dialogue form, presented as the record o
twenty-one informal evening seminars held, all but one of them, around
the fireside at "Hosannah Hill."
However, Professor Beard has not written a Plato in modern dress.
Quite the contrary, his dialogue is not a
neo-Republic
but a counter–
R epublic;
he is not imitating but challenging Plato. Dr. Smyth remarks
scornfully,
"If
we go on this way we shall soon be like the disputants in
Plato's
Republic.
Scholars today cannot tell whether they were concen–
trating on human justice or headed all the time for a consideration of
the immortality of the soul"; and Beard has himself say, " ... I want
to steer entirely clear of both Socrates and Plato. In my opinion, Greek
metaphysics has done damage, not good, to the Western world and to
Christian thought and practice.
If
modern Europeans had devoted to
the study of
The Federalist
the attention they gave to Plato's
Republic,
they would have been far better off in every way."
To challenge Plato at writing dialogues is an act of some boldness.
From every rhetorical phase of the contest I am afraid that Beard comes
off a distant second. There is in the language of his new work little of
Plato's life and wit and frequent magnificence; there is none of Plato's
swift dramatic power-Beard's characters remain only mouthpieces
throughout; there is almost none of the irony, none of the absorbing
indirections, and nothing to put beside the great myths of Plato's 7th
and lOth books or the richly scattered lesser myths and metaphors. But
I am sure that Professor Beard has not meant to compete with Plato in
rhetoric. It is Plato's ideas, and, even more, his method, that he is oppos–
ing. In Beard's implicit estimate, Plato wrote dogmatically, from the
point of view of a dualistic metaphysics that dictated a utopian analytic
treatment of the problems of politics and morality. Plato constructed an
ideal state out of metaphysically acceptable concepts, and had Socrates
declare irrelevant the question whether such a state is possible in prac–
tice. Not until the picture of the ideal state was fully drawn did he return
to possibility.
Beard wishes to reject the dogmatic, the utopian and the metaphysi–
cal, taking as his point of reference not an ideal Form but the actual
United States and its history. The constitution of his state is the actual
Constitution of this nation (the full text is included). Many questions
are left unanswered, many conflicting points of view deliberately unre–
solved. He often repeats that his appeal is to empirical method, to the
records and lessons of historical experience. The words of the Constitution
