Recognition and politics within the dialectical tradition

the Athenian, Marx and Lenin

Abstract

This article aims at drawing attention to a series of inquiries that may and, in our view, still should be asked about a supposed, unique and definitive political doctrine of Plato. Then, initially, the following question is raised: The Republic, one of the most famous and commented dialogues written by Plato, would be in fact the only moment of “his” work in which this author would express “his” political theory (communist)? Supported by Hector Benoit’s immanentist reading and interpretation of the Platonic dialogues, we hypothetize that Plato, not being Socrates, exposed -through a character called Athenian – in his last dialogue, The Laws, in the temporality of the lexis, a project of city radically different from that on The Republic. Such a project is based on the unity of contradictories for the educational formation of the inhabitants of a city composed of friends who really had all things in common; city that should be put into practice, and not just in the metaphysical soul of the philosopher, as Socrates idealistically proposed in The Republic. Thus, far from having abandoned, as some interpreters argue, his youthful communist positions, Plato would have in fact found them, at the end of his life, in a more rigorously determined way. At the end of our article, Marx and Lenin take on the leading role, which suggests that political theory is one of the guiding threads of the millennial dialectical tradition.