This chapter synthesizes the history of the monarchy in Brazil from the Portuguese court’s 1807 exile to Rio de Janeiro to the end of the Regency in 1840. It addresses the European threats to the Portuguese monarchy, its successes in Brazil, and its adaptation to the Atlantic revolutionary era. It focuses on the actions of two monarchs, João VI and Pedro, João’s heir in both the old Portuguese kingdom and the new Brazilian one, which Pedro made independent and transformed into the Empire of Brazil, in 1822. It goes on to discuss Pedro I’s struggle (1822-1831) for domination against the Brazilian elite, and the results, through the Regency (1831-1840) following Pedro I’s abdication. Of particular significance in all of this are international and social issues bound up with the continued expansion of African slavery and its Atlantic trade. In both the diplomacy between João VI and his crucial English allies, the abolition of that trade loomed large. It was central, too, in the struggles between Pedro I and his parliamentary opposition. Indeed, slavery’s maintenance as foundational to the economy, the society, and those who dominated both, as well as the state, is made clear in analyzing the monarchy’s politics during 1822-1840. Slavery affected the monarchy’s survival, transformation, and the nature of party formation and ideology in the constitutional monarchy that emerged by 1840.

This chapter takes up what Harold Laski has called the most real problem in modern politics, namely, the theoretical defense of the proposition that the people should rule. It returns to the first sustained philosophical engagement with this problem, in Platos Republic, and argues that the Republic remains a vital resource for thinking through the problem of the legitimacy of popular rule. The chapter focuses on the status of knowledge – its presence and absence – with regard both to the evaluation and the execution of political rule. It maintains that the Republic, far from being the epistocratic manifesto it is often taken to be – by both the defenders and critics of the view that not the people but the knowledgeable should rule – in fact expresses profound skepticism about any attempt to claim the right to rule on the basis of superior knowledge about the political good. The chapter then explores how the Republic, so understood, may inform our thinking about the theoretical legitimacy and practical implementation of the principle of popular sovereignty.

This chapter surveys reactions to Plato’s famous proposal in the Republic to allow women to engage in military action and political rule in his ideal city. After a methodological discussion relating this topic to the issues looked at in the volume as a whole, the chapter goes on to set out some of the interpretive debates concerning women in the Republic in modern-day secondary literature. It is then shown that interpreters from late antiquity to the Renaissance responded to some of the same concerns. For example, Proclus was at pains to reconcile the apparently contrary views on women found in the Republic and Timaeus. On the other hand, we find that in Proclus, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Lucrezia Marinella, wider concerns shaped reactions to Plato: for instance Ibn Rushd tries to fit the idea of potential virtue in women into an Aristotelian framework while Marinella offers a reading of Plato on women that brings him into conversation with the Renaissance ’querelle des femmes’.

The Cave analogy in Book 7 of the Republic admits of no single consistent interpretation. It communicates not one philosophical vision but two. One is developed in the initial narrative, which tells its own compelling story, dropping plenty of hints – varying in directness or mysteriousness – on how it is to be read. The other vision is articulated mostly in the philosophical commentary on the Cave that Plato’s Socrates supplies when he tells his interlocutor Glaucon how to decode it. We should take the commentary as enunciating inter alia a set of instructions not on what the narrative means as originally articulated, but on how it is to be reread as an allegory of the trainee philosopher’s education. The Cave as narrated begins as a moral and political allegory of the condition of ordinary people in the city – in the first instance, the democratic city – and of their need for redemption from it. The Cave as reinterpreted in philosophical commentary is an image of the reorientation of the soul which can be achieved by the practice of mathematics. Consistency of interpretation as between original narrative and subsequent commentary is therefore not mandatory.

This volume offers perspectives on examples of key ingredients in Plato’s writing: particularly of argument, allegory, images, and myth, of intertextuality, and of paradox, but also his characterization of speakers he portrays in dialogue, now through narration, now direct dramatic presentation, and his assumed readerships. All the essays included were prompted by perception of something problematic: either in a passage within a dialogue itself, or in the way scholarship had tackled or failed to tackle a topic. First come three approaching the corpus as a whole, three different vantage points. The next group of three focus on arguments and disputants within the overall argumentative structure of three very different dialogues: Gorgias, Cratylus, and Parmenides. A third group contains two studies of celebrated imaginative fictions – the Noble Lie and the Cave – that perform key but unstraightforward roles in the philosophical strategy of the Republic. The final six chapters discuss the Laws. They explore further literary and philosophical dimensions of Plato’s writing in the last and longest of his dialogues, nowadays yielding up more philosophical rewards than was once the case.

The conclusion clarifies the main contribution of the book, which is the seamless transformation of Brazil’s ex-slaves into a captive and criminalized population in the country’s evolving prison system, which defined the terms of freedom for the enslaved and free poor at the height of the slave economy. The author invites the reader to remember the trajectory of different individuals who lived and died within the walls of the Casa de Correção as part of a microglobal history of slavery and punishment in the Atlantic World. The chapter reaffirms that by the time Brazil abolished slavery in its territory in 1888, a robust police and prison system was fully operationalized to punish unruly individuals from the poor, slave and free, especially people of African descent, who violated the terms of freedom. It asserts that the difference in the prison population before 1888 and after was only the diversity of legal status of the convicts during slavery, not race; and that the penitentiary was an important site of racialization of the multiethnic poor as a criminalized underclass.

The ‘noble lie’ is crucial within the political philosophy of the Republic, as the ideology of the charter myth needed to motivate the citizens of the Republic’s good city in general, and the rulers in particular, to care above all for its well-being. I look first at the way lying figured in the Greeks’ imaginary and their political discourse, particularly that of the Athenian democracy; then at ethical dimensions of Socrates’ notion of ‘useful lie’, and his distinction between deception by speech and deception in the soul. What makes the ‘noble lie’ useful is its ability (if believed) to instil in citizens love for their community (not merely calculation that promotion of its well-being is in their own self-interest), through representation of their human identity as membership of a single family, with their core affections and obligations directed to their mother country. It is that sense of basic identity and commensurate obligation, not dialectically based grasp of eternal truth, which will persuade philosophers to take their part in ruling the city. Finally, I tackle the issue – its difficulty highlighted by Socrates himself – of how belief in the narrative is to be secured.

The introduction provides the historical context behind the book. It also introduces conceptual terms that are central to the book – republic, vecino, ciudadano – and whose definitions have shifted since the early modern period. Subsequently, it examines Latin American historiography on race, political participation, and citizenship. Finally, it provides a chapter outline.

The Introduction outlines crucial intellectual contexts and frameworks for thinking about how Cicero's Brutus is a crucial intervention in the the civic crisis and the writing of literary history. It also surveys the scholarship to date and examines how Cicero's project reflects general trends in academic inquiry and civic government.

In this chapter, I turn to an unlikely source for democratic inspiration: Plato’s Republic. I argue that, understood correctly, Plato’s Republic provides insights into what a flourishing democracy looks like and how education can help produce such a democracy. While Plato does not provide an explicit defense of democracy, his criticism of corrupt democracies in Book VIII and his often-ignored advocacy of egalitarian communities in Books II, III, and IV offer contemporary educators insights into a mode of education that could strengthen contemporary democracies. Once this interpretation is in place, I will discuss the ways contemporary democratic educators might use Plato’s ideas to support students in their development as democratic citizens.

This chapter explores the crises of the Roman and American republics. Understanding these crises requires that we view politics as an arena of identity contestation rather than simply interest articulation. What changes in both Rome and the United States is that participants came to see each other as Strangers, no longer sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, nor the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things down turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become distant abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice.

Despite its enduring strength, the Roman tradition has become unreadable in the twenty-first century. Conventional civil war tropes, however, are consistent and clear. While a narrative about citizen armies clashing against each other on the battlefield accords with the Latin concept – civil war derives from bellum civile – Roman literature figures civil discord as a matter of the heart. Fratricide, suicide, rape, rent marriages, incest, falling in love with the enemy all speak to the violence of same on same that makes civil war not just a matter of formal warfare, but a symptom of the collapse of the social bond. Although the protagonists in civil war narratives are male, the women they love or betray threaten to take over their stories.

Vergil’s ambivalence toward the Augustan renewal sets the stage. His overt celebration of an end to civil war and a new age of imperial expansion, which will direct Roman militarism outward, runs counter to the metaphorical register of both the Georgics and the Aeneid. Rome’s history, from the beginning, into the future, is figured as a struggle, only ever partially successful, to contain internal violence. The tension between his integrative and disintegrative gestures is formative for the Roman tradition.

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and unity. Section 2 argues that in the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity.

Plato’s dialoguesespecially the Republiclead us to wonder what the objects of mathematics are. For Plato, no perceptible three is unqualifiedly three, a necessary condition for being an object of knowledge. Aristotle controversially ascribes to Plato the view that mathematical objects are “intermediates,” between perceptibles and Forms: multiple but also eternal, lacking change, and separate from perceptibles. The hunt for or against intermediates in Plato’s dialogues has depended on two ways of understanding Plato on scientific claims, a Form-centric approach and a subject-centric (semantic) approach. Although Socrates does not present intermediates in the Republic, it is difficult to see how the units of the expert arithmetician or motions of the real astronomer could be simply Forms or perceptibles. The standard over-reading of the Divided Line, where the middle sections are equal, further obscures our understanding. The Phaedo and the Timaeus provide candidates for mathematical objects, although these have only some of the attributes ascribed to intermediates. We are left with no clear answer, but exploring options may be exactly what Plato wants.