The Politics of Platonism: Voltaire’s Socrate and the Dynamics of Canons

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.