Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame by Christiana H. Tarnopolsky (review)

Reviewed by: Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame by Christiana H. Tarnopolsky James Stuart Murray Christiana H. Tarnopolsky. Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame. Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. XIII + 218. US $35.00. ISBN 9781400835065. This is a well structured, clearly laid out, transparently argued, and nicely written book, which deals with some very complex issues. The author engages with a broad spectrum of important secondary sources, provides a fulsome and delightful series of informative footnotes, and does not pretend to be writing a commentary on the Gorgias. As is clear from the Introduction (1–26), Tarnopolsky situates her understanding of shame in Plato’s Gorgias firmly in the middle of a larger framework of current discussion of shame in democratic life and politics— an approach which she recognizes will “strike some readers as odd” (9). And it would be a challenging project from the outset, if for no other reason than because the Gorgias has traditionally been read as Plato’s personal, blazing criticism of Athenian democracy. Nevertheless, Tarnopolsky is convinced that “their [Socrates and Plato] concerns about the corrupt forms of ... democratic ideals actually do have very direct relevance for our own current political situation” (15). As she herself sees, the notion that Plato’s Gorgias has something significant to offer in the discussion of an emotion like shame may be relatively uncontroversial. What is not, however, is an interpretation of the Gorgias in which Socrates’ criticisms of Athenian democracy turn out to be Plato’s best efforts to call readers back to a democratic ideology which shares ideals with his own philosophy. And so, Socrates’ refutations of Polus and Callicles are “meant to recall his fellow citizens back to the true practice of democracy” (16). What is more, in Tarnopolsky’s Gorgias, Plato—now the true democrat—moves to correct his own teacher in matters elenctic, by having Socrates adopt an approach which would be “more sympathetic to the perspective of Socrates’ democratic audience” (16). Indeed, she maintains Plato’s use of myth at the conclusion of the dialogue is a deliberate move to fashion a Socratic/Gorgias hybrid teaching tool which would have more success with his readers than the ironic Socrates had with his interlocutors. In sum, her studies of Plato’s view of shame as an emotion in the psyche and in the polis have led Tarnopolsky to espouse novel interpretations of several major topics in the dialogue. After the Introduction, the six chapters of the body of the book are organized in two parts. Chapters 1 to 4 comprise “Part One: Plato’s Gorgias and the Athenian Politics of Shame” (27–140); 5 and 6 make up “Part Two: Plato’s Gorgias and the Contemporary Politics of Shame” (141–196). Part One will attract more attention from students of classics and ancient philosophy [End Page 451] than Part Two, which focuses on the application of a Platonic perspective in debates among modern theorists, and on the development of an appreciation for shame as a useful emotion in democratic life and politics based on the notion of “Platonic respectful shame” developed in this book. Part One, on the other hand, attends to the dialogue itself and contains a number of fascinating discussions, some of which I have noted below. Chapter 1 (“Shame and Rhetoric in Plato’s Gorgias,” 27–55) maintains, quite rightly in my opinion, that Plato accepts a proper and noble use of rhetoric, and that he tells us so first in the Gorgias, not in the Phaedrus, as many suggest. I agree that the Gorgias should not be read as a blanket criticism of the art of persuasion, but Tarnopolsky pushes farther. For her, the development of a noble rhetoric reflects Plato’s “corrections to the problematic intersubjective relationship that he himself had witnessed between his own teacher, Socrates, and the Athenian democratic polity” (54). Chapter 2 (“Shaming Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles,” 56–88) demonstrates more fully what Plato saw as the limitations of the Socratic elenchus. Tarnopolsky’s refusal to reduce explanations of some exchanges with Polus and Callicles to a bare analysis of the logic of...

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