Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues presents the dramatic order of the dialogues as the narrative arc of Socrates's philosophical investigations. Focusing on the opening chapters of the work, I consider the place in this dramatic order of Socrates's intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology and his famous turn from the study of the heavens to the study of the human things. I examine in particular Zuckert's account of the problem of the cause or causes of the whole that motivated this turn and the doctrine of the ideas in the inquiry that followed it.

Not so long ago, a unified chorus of scholars, politicians, and activists declared that the time had come to move “beyond” toleration. Such an offensive orientation of de haut en bas indulgence towards difference may have been appropriate to warring Christian sects after the Reformation. But in this brave, new, and emphatically global world of unprecedented cultural, racial, and gender diversity, “mere” and musty toleration must give way to something more—to respect, recognition, even acceptance, or perhaps a positive conception of tolerance comprising the better features of all three.

In her magisterial Plato's Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert presents a radically new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. In doing so, she insists we must overcome reading them through the lens of Aristotle, whose influence has obscured the true nature of Plato's philosophy. However, in her works dealing with Aristotle's political science, Zuckert indicates several advantages of his approach to understanding politics. In this article, I explore the reasons why Zuckert finds Aristotle a problematic guide to Plato's philosophy as well as what she sees as the character and benefits of Aristotle's political theory. I conclude by suggesting a possible reconciliation between Zuckert's Aristotle and her Plato, insofar as both the Socrates whom Plato made his hero and Aristotle agree that political communities will rarely direct citizens toward virtue by means of law and that we must instead look to informal means of doing so.

Catherine Zuckert's Machiavelli's Politics offers an unprecedented interpretation of all of Machiavelli's major works. Her interpretation places Machiavelli in his historical context as he understood it and shows Machiavelli seeking a populist alternative in politics. Because her approach and her conclusion have been championed by scholars explicitly opposed to Strauss's interpretation of Machiavelli, she intervenes in the scholarly debates on Machiavelli by drawing seemingly opposed approaches closer together. Strauss acknowledges the importance of Machiavelli's historical situation and understands him as a type of democrat. Nevertheless, in highlighting the functioning of Machiavelli's republic, Zuckert directly challenges Strauss, who, she argues, focuses too narrowly on Machiavelli's war on Christianity to explicate fully Machiavelli's politics. Religion and politics, though, are inextricably linked in Machiavelli's thought, and his treatment of Christianity's ascendency offers insight into his new republicanism. Consideration of Montesquieu's commentary on Machiavelli underscores some of the excesses of the Florentine's political solutions.

Both Zuckert and Strauss take the “surface” of Machiavelli's work as the necessary starting point for their interpretations. Zuckert differs from Strauss, however, with respect to what she takes the surface to be. She focuses more attentively on the literary character of the work, as written or literary, and so is led to a different series of observations and emphases in her interpretation of Machiavelli.

This paper deals with Zuckert's book Machiavelli's Politics. It takes as its point of departure Zuckert's remark that Machiavelli is “surprisingly like Socrates.” The paper begins with a brief discussion of what makes a Socratic philosopher and then charts out the many similarities between Socrates and Machiavelli. Responses are offered to some of the key reservations against terming Machiavelli a Socratic. In particular, the paper points to a less activist and more meditative mode in Machiavelli's writings that allows one to make a more convincing case for a Socratic Machiavelli.