Plato and the Mass Media

Abstract

Book X of the Republic contains a scathing attack on poetry which is still, by turns, both incomprehensible and disturbing.¹ Plato’s banishment of the poets from his model city has always been a cause of interpretative difficulties and philosophical embarrassments, even for some of his greatest admirers. But I am now beginning to believe that the difficulties are not real and that the embarrassments are only apparent, and my purpose in what follows is to offer an outline — I cannot do more than that on this occasion — of my reasons for thinking so. I am convinced that close attention to the philosophical assumptions which underlie Plato’s criticisms reveals that his attack on poetry is better understood as a specific social and historical gesture than as an attack on poetry, and especially on art, as such. But, placed within their original context, Plato’s criticisms, perhaps paradoxically, become immediately relevant to a serious contemporary debate.

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