Quale Platone per la politica?

Abstract

Plato has been celebrated for centuries as the champion of the contemplative life. Such a description of Plato will be probably striking for most of the contemporary readers of the dialogues. For many, nowadays, Plato is first of all a political philosopher. The goal of the paper is to reconstruct the origins of the political interpretation in Germany and its development in the post WWII debates. This political reading was first developed by the philologist Wilamowitz and then supported by many others writers and scholars of the time. The result was an image of Plato as an erotic, active and irrationalist thinker – the real guide Germany was looking for. This interpretation was then rejected by Popper and many other American scholars, who pleaded for a return to Socrates as the model of the rational and dialectic – but also perhaps too abstract – philosopher.