The "Statesman "is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In
"A Stranger's Knowledge" Marquez argues that Plato abandons here
the classic idea, prominent in the "Republic," that the
philosopher, "qua" philosopher, is qualified to rule. Instead, the
dialogue presents the statesman as "different "from the
philosopher, the possessor of a specialist expertise that cannot be
reduced to philosophy. The expertise is of how to make a city
resilient against internal and external conflict in light of the
imperfect sociality of human beings and the poverty of their
reason. This expertise, however, cannot be produced on demand: one
cannot train statesmen like one might train carpenters. Worse, it
cannot be made acceptable to the citizens, or operate in ways that
are not deeply destructive to the city's stability. Even as the
political community requires his knowledge for its preservation,
the genuine statesman must remain a stranger to the city.
Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the
ambiguous reevaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking
feature of the political philosophy of the "Statesman." The law
appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the
inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the
clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state
across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when
they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the
city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to
preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and
especially leaders, retain a "philosophical" attitude towards them.
It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the
laws what is just or good (and yet want to know what is just and
good) that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a
sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of
genuine political knowledge.
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