1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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but to reject altogether as unbefitting to such men. 21 Socrates, for his part, introduces
sôphrosunê by invoking the need for ‘each individual [to rul[e] himself’, and says that he
means by this ‘just what the many (hoi polloi) mean: being self-controlled (sôphrona)
and master of oneself (enkratê auton heautou), ruling (archonta) the pleasures and
appetites within oneself’ (491de). 22
This is a strikingly strange locution. Why should Socrates go out of the way to
identify his view of sôphrosunê with that of ‘the many’ or hoi polloi? 23 I suggest that this
may well be a reference to the Protagoras, to the many (hoi polloi) there whose view of
what has come to be labeled akrasia can with its help be better understood. Socrates in
the Gorgias and the many of the Protagoras agree that sôphrosunê is the exercise of selfcontrol,
which is understood as controlling and ruling one’s pleasures and appetites. The
many however, if implicitly here, see it as sometimes overcome by pleasures which rebel
against their master, thus as fragile and as unrelated to the knowledge which may or may
not be present. Callicles, for his part, insists that knowledge is entirely unrelated to selfcontrol:
it is unbefitting for the knowing man so to limit himself. But the Socratic view
departs from the view of the many, as from the view of the elite Callicles, in insisting that
the full virtue (as opposed to mere continence) of temperance or self-control arises from
and through the exercise of knowledge. The virtues are a unity, and that unity is
knowledge, but that does not dissolve the virtues into knowledge. Rather it calls for an
account of how knowledge rules in and through the virtues. 24 Indeed, Socrates goes on to
argue in the Gorgias that knowledge is indeed only fully realized in and through the
virtue of self-control, which is the root of all the other virtues. The failure of virtue arises
not from an absence of knowledge conceived merely as ignorance, but from an absence
of knowledge – the absence of its rule – which is tantamount to its impotence.
I conclude this section with a remark on the contrasting strategies of the
Protagoras and the Gorgias. The many in the Protagoras describe the pollous as
knowing the good, but not willing (ouk ethelein) to do what is good, instead doing
something else. The ‘orators and tyrants’ whom Socrates and Polus debate in the
Gorgias are, by contrast, confident in pursuing what seems to them best (doxê beltiston,
466e and passim). They may not enjoy full knowledge, but they are phenomenologically
fully committed to acting on their belief about what it is good to pursue. In refuting the