A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic

Description

The problem of tyranny preoccupied Plato, and its discussion both begins and ends his famousRepublic. Though philosophers have mined theRepublicfor millennia, Cinzia Arruzza is the first to devote a full book to the study of tyranny and of the tyrant's soul in Plato'sRepublic. InA Wolf in the City, Arruzza argues that Plato's critique of tyranny intervenes in an ancient debate concerning the sources of the crisis of Athenian democracy and the relation between political leaders and demos in the last decades of the fifth century BCE. Arruzza shows that Plato's critique of tyranny should not be taken as veiled criticism of the Syracusan tyrannical regime, but rather of Atheniandemocracy. In parsing Plato's discussion of the soul of the tyrant, Arruzza will also offer new and innovative insights into his moral psychology, addressing much-debated problems such as the nature of eros and of the spirited part of the soul, the unity or disunity of the soul, and the relation between the non-rational parts of the soul and reason.