Sebell’s book offers a modest surface concealing a profound interior. Promising to examine a small portion of one work of Xenophon ( Memorabilia 4.1–7), a portion that presents a seemingly dumbed-down education of Euthydemos, a less-than-promising youth, Sebell opens up that education to an altogether more comprehensive, genuinely Socratic one. As his title indicates, Sebell, through his remarkable and thorough analysis of this apparently half-baked education, reveals the education that Xenophon himself received, albeit indirectly (as all we readers perforce must do), from Socrates. As he suggests, insofar as the Memorabilia is Xenophon’s “most defensive or apologetic” Socratic work, it would “make sense for it also, in places, to be his most daring” (p. 16). Moreover, as his subtitle indicates, Sebell’s study promises a consideration of the fundamental question or questions of political philosophy: To what extent can politics be guided by reason? To what extent by religion? Do their respective modes of guidance somehow “limit” politics? Can they align or does the quarrel between the two itself somehow limit politics? And why does Sebell speak (in his subtitle) of the limits only of politics? As we discover in the course of his study, there might appear to be limits to both reason and religion as well, not least in their apparent inability to refute one another (Sebell insists Socrates acknowledges “the very real possibility of superhuman wisdom”; p. 203, n. 29).
Richard S. Ruderman (Wed,) studied this question.