Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Political Science and the Irrational
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Political Science and the Irrational: Plato’s Alcibiades
C h r i s t oph e r L . L au r i e l l o
Boston College
lauriell@bc.edu
The Persisting Problem of Enlightened
Self-Interest
Plato’s Alcibiades is the classical introductory statement to
the Socratic question of the nature of man and therewith to the question of
the possibility of a political science of mankind. Unlike the modern liberal
tendency to attempt to rationalize the irrational element of humanity via
enlightened self-interest or some derivation thereof, Plato’s Socrates shows
through his examination of this haughty youth the scientific reasons for the
persistent and intractable roots of humanity’s unenlightened political nature.
That examination, which looks to the often contradictory desire for and pursuit
of one’s own personal advantage (as a private good) and public virtue or
respectability (as the just, the noble, or common good; see Addendum 1), can
thus serve as a corrective to today’s undeniably effective though still problematic
account of the relation between and so philosophic importance of
these two often disparate goods.
Such importance, moreover, is hardly in danger of losing
its sense of immediacy, that is, at least amongst political thinkers. For, as
members of a discipline, political scientists have long found and will seemingly
always find the need to justify how politics can possibly be subject to
scientific investigation, if not in every detail, then at least in the essentials.
As both commonsense and experience tell us, political science necessarily
entails the study of the governance of peoples, and yet no person, let alone
people, is simply rational. No one seriously needs recourse to the diatribes of
an “underground man” to know this is so (Dostoyevsky 1993). But then, no
one today seems to seriously need recourse to the imaginings of the political
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