Book Review: Plato as Critical Theorist, by Jonny Thakkar

Date01 October 2019
AuthorChristina Tarnopolsky
DOI10.1177/0090591719835609
Published date01 October 2019
Subject MatterBook Reviews
738 Political Theory 47(5)
much about how we should implement this as a collective. I suspect that
pragmatists and non-pragmatists alike would like to know more of his
thoughts on this and it might be helpful in persuading some skeptics, espe-
cially non-pragmatists.
This suggestion is related to a more general concern I have about contem-
porary political philosophy. Issues of implementation are often seen as
beyond the purview of political philosophers. I question those who make this
claim. At the very least, I believe that pragmatist political philosophers, by
the very nature of their arguments, must necessarily accept questions of
implementation as part of their agenda. In pursuing a pragmatist political
agenda, we must make answers to such questions part of the basic case as we
seek to instantiate ideas like those that Rondel so intelligently encourages us
to embrace.
Plato as Critical Theorist, by Jonny Thakkar. Harvard University Press, 2018, 392 pp.
Reviewed by: Christina Tarnopolsky, Associate Professor, Social Sciences, Yale-NUS
College, Singapore
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719835609
Jonny Thakkar’s book, Plato as Critical Theorist, begins with the observa-
tion that, while ideal theories offering visions of a better future for liberal
democracies have waned considerably in recent years, there is widespread
discontent with our current situation that actually points to a longing for radi-
cal transformation of our political and economic structures (2–4, 16–17).
Thakkar’s ambition for his book is to work out an ideal theory that bears a
relation to our contemporary liberal democratic practices while motivating us
to change the problematic aspects of our current societies in relation to a
vision of the best possible us (16). The daring wager of Thakkar’s book is that
Plato, alongside John Rawls and Karl Marx, offers us such an ideal theory,
and a notion of what it is to do ideal theorizing, that can supply us with a criti-
cal perspective on our current situation, as well as a model of philosophic
citizenship that ought to be practiced by all liberal democratic citizens.
In order to do this, the first half of Thakkar’s book (chapters 1–4) offers a
lucid and original interpretation of the metaphysics of Plato’s Republic,
Plato’s notion of ruling and philosophy and their interconnections, and an
account of how Plato’s ideal theory served as a form of critical theory directed
at altering his fellow Athenians’ perceptions of their society. In the second
half of the book (chapters 5–7), Thakkar proceeds to show how Plato’s ideal
theory can be reconciled with Rawls’s political liberalism to offer a

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