What role do canonical figureheads play in the process by which philosophical ideas gain political substance? This paper explores an interpretive shift in the reception of Plato in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on Voltaire’s Socrate (1759), a three-act play dramatizing the trial and death of Socrates. I advance a reading of the play as an effort to offer a new political extension of a recent epistemological realignment in interpretations of Plato’s philosophy. Plato’s eighteenth-century readers developed an understanding of his epistemology that negotiated a compromise between Neoplatonism and Academic Skepticism. Working out the political ramifications of this compromise, I argue, was central to Voltaire’s reimagination of Socrates’s trial. In turn, Voltaire’s play calls attention to a neglected dimension in which the contingencies of historically situated, idiosyncratic interpretations can bear out in the dynamics of disciplinary canons: how authors’ philosophical receptions interact with their receptions in political thought. At the same time, the play also offers a case study of an intervention in the symbolic meanings of Plato, one in which the deep-rooted associations he accrued in two ancient traditions that claimed him as a figurehead were reshuffled in a distinctly modern, political key.
Tae-Yeoun Keum (Sat,) studied this question.