# Socrates Athenian philosopher (c. 470–399 BCE), who wrote nothing, is known through Plato and Xenophon, and was tried and executed by a jury of his fellow citizens on charges of impiety and corrupting the young — the canonical case, in the Western canon and on the American right, against direct democracy. He is here for the use that has been made of him. ## The man and the method A stonemason's son and a hoplite who fought at Potidaea and Delium, Socrates spent his life in the agora asking people who claimed to know something — courage, justice, piety — to define it, and showing that they could not. The method (*elenchus*) is the origin of philosophy as cross-examination; the claim behind it, that the unexamined life is not worth living and that he knew only that he knew nothing, is the founding posture of Western rationalism. He was also, by the standards of the democracy, a problem: the teacher of Alcibiades, who betrayed the city, and of Critias, who led the Thirty Tyrants' terror in 404; a critic of choosing officials by lot; and the friend of the oligarchic set. When the restored democracy tried him in 399 — under an amnesty that barred prosecution for the Thirty's crimes, so the charges had to be religious — 280 of 501 jurors convicted, and more voted for death after he proposed, as his penalty, free meals for life. He refused to escape and drank the hemlock. ## The use Plato's *Republic* is the elaboration of the lesson: the demos killed the best man in Athens, so rule by the many is rule by the ignorant, and the just city is ruled by those who know. That argument is the deep ancestor of every American anti-majoritarian institution and of the right's standing suspicion of "democracy" as a word — the Founders' republic-not-democracy, the Electoral College, the Senate, judicial review, the [[Leo Strauss]] school's reading of the classics as a warning against the mob, and the newer [[Post-Liberalism]] and neoreactionary arguments that the people cannot be trusted with the state. [[Athens]] and [[Direct Democracy]] carry the institutional history; [[Philosophy Hub]] the tradition. The counter-reading, which the vault also records, is I. F. Stone's: that the democracy tolerated Socrates for seventy years, tried him only after his students had twice overthrown it, and that the case for elite rule has always rested on forgetting what the elite did with it. ## See Also - [[Philosophy Hub]] · [[Athens]] · [[Direct Democracy]] · [[Plato]] · [[Leo Strauss]] · [[Post-Liberalism]]