Eric Voegelin: Review of John Wild and Ronald B. Levinson on Plato (1954)

Eric Voegelin’s September 1954 book review assesses John Wild’s Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law and Ronald B. Levinson’s In Defense of Plato as scholarly responses to an ideological attack on classical philosophy. Its argument moves from the cultural significance of anti-Platonic literature through the distinctive achievements of the two books to a methodological reservation: refuting accusations against Plato is necessary, but insufficient unless the assumptions behind those accusations are also challenged. The review thus concerns both the integrity of Platonic scholarship and the difference between philosophy and political ideology.

Voegelin places the controversy within what he regards as a spiritual conflict over Western civilization:

The warfare on the battlefields was preceded, and is accompanied, by the literary warfare of the ideologists against the classic and Christian substance of Western civilization.

This framing governs his treatment of attacks on Plato by Chapman, Fite, Crossman, Winspear, and especially Karl Popper. Their cumulative importance, he argues, lies less in their individual scholarly merits than in their success in popularizing Plato as a fascist or totalitarian thinker. Voegelin openly qualifies his acquaintance with this literature: he read Winspear, sampled Chapman and Fite, did not read Crossman’s Plato Today, and examined Popper more closely because students requested criticism. His judgment therefore combines a declared polemical position with an account of the educational pressures that made sustained refutation necessary. He attributes the books’ reception to ideological partisanship within universities and to an insufficient firsthand knowledge of the classical and Christian sources invoked by their defenders.

Wild and Levinson matter, on this account, as documents of an intellectual climate as well as contributions to scholarship. Their extensive corrective work reveals how readily educators and students had accepted a caricature. Popper receives the greatest attention in both books because his work brought the accumulated controversy to a head. Yet the two defenses have different structures and ambitions. Wild devotes roughly a quarter of his book to answering accusations that Plato opposed freedom, democracy, and the open society, then turns to a positive account of natural law.

This second part of his book far overshadows in importance the first; we can only regret that the occasion will not allow a detailed examination of the author's position.

Voegelin identifies Wild’s decisive move as the restoration of ontology to the foundations of natural law. Wild returns beyond Stoicism to Plato and Aristotle to recover an understanding of nature capable of grounding a law of nature and, through it, a rational social order. Voegelin recommends this “Moral Realism” to contemporary students of natural law without undertaking a full assessment of it. His qualification is historical and conceptual: even sympathetic readers might find the argument stronger if its foundations reached further back than Plato. He suggests Felix Heinimann’s Nomos und Physis as a resource for that inquiry.

Levinson’s contribution is more comprehensively organized around the accusations themselves. After defining the attack on Plato, he examines charges concerning literary achievement, character, marriage and sexuality, humanitarianism, slavery, attitudes toward foreigners and workers, Sicilian politics, ambition, and totalitarianism. Sixteen appendices treat especially intricate disputes. Voegelin regards the resulting work both as a handbook of ideological anti-Platonism and as a reference work on the Platonic questions implicated in contemporary political debate. Its importance is not simply that erroneous charges are defeated: the process of answering them also clarifies Plato’s own positions. Voegelin emphasizes the labor required to disentangle mistranslations, decontextualized passages, omissions, prejudicial appeals, and interpretations imposed through Marxism, Freudianism, or positivism. Levinson’s scholarship earns particular praise for combining thoroughness with good humor and an urbane presentation.

The review’s central reservation emerges only after this substantial endorsement. Both authors generally accept the accusations as questions to be answered through textual evidence. That procedure is effective in detail, but risks conceding that the accusers’ categories provide an appropriate tribunal for philosophy.

Plato was not a democrat or fascist, not a totalitarian or humanitarian, not a friend or an enemy of the open society, for the good reason that he was a philosopher and not a political ideologist.

For Voegelin, defending Plato against a particular label can still misrepresent his work if it leaves the legitimacy of the label unquestioned. A successful defense against the charge of hostility to the “open society,” for example, may implicitly concede both that Popper’s question makes sense and that his evaluative standard should govern the inquiry. Voegelin does not accuse Wild or Levinson of overlooking this distinction altogether; both recognize it. His complaint is that neither makes it sufficiently central.

The concluding discussion of Bergson supplies the missing conceptual challenge. Voegelin argues that Popper borrowed the opposition between closed and open society while reversing its meaning. In Bergson’s account, mythical authority closes archaic society; prophets, mystics, and philosophers open it by opening their souls to transcendent reality and making spiritual community possible.

And one of the great figures in this liberating opening of society was Plato.

Plato’s philosophical authority thus becomes an instance of liberation rather than its obstacle. Voegelin’s final claim is that recovering this meaning would do more than strengthen a textual refutation: it would expose ideological hostility to spiritual authority. The review’s lasting methodological point is that scholarship must examine not only whether an accusation is true, but whether its premises permit the object of inquiry to be understood at all.