A critical inquiry on the transformation of Socratic ethics in Plato's political philosophy

This study aims to carry out an investigation on the paradoxical nature of political power and discuss the projection of the Platonic ethics on the contemporary political philosophy. Plato understands this paradox as a relationship between persuasion (peitho) and force (bia) in the Book I of the Republic, which also reveals the complex dynamics of political power, founded on law and violence. While the Republic defines the paradoxical nature of the political power as a problematic, it aspires to conceptualize the originary violence of the founding power from an ethical perspective. This work claims that Plato's Republic points out a normative difference between law (nomos) and justice (dikaiosunē) in order to overcome the paradoxical nature of political power. Moreover, according to Plato, the ontological difference between law and violence also requires an ethical examination of the political regime. Thus, the Republic defends a constitutional constellation (politeia) in the city (polis) to transform the embedded violence in the political power. This constitutional regime goes towards both the construction of the tradition once again and a normative idea of critique and the future. To put it another way, while the Republic brings the question of law to the center of its discussion in order to purge the political from violence, it particularly develops a critique against political power by examining the idea of justice as a norm. Moreover, this normative critique in the Republic advances as a dialectical examination, which will be referred and examined as hermeneutical and speculative ethics respectively. In this regard, the Republic structures both the hermeneutical ethics by re-interpreting the tradition of the city and the speculative ethics by founding a normative utopia towards future. As a result, this study will emphasize the role of Platonic ethics as a political capability to overcome the paradoxical nature of political power. Furthermore, we will re-investigate and sicuss the status of the Republic within the modern political theory canon by comparing the rival accounts of the dialogue. What this study refers as "Thinking with Plato against Plato" seems to have a critical role first in Hegel's legal philosophy in 19th century and later in the political philosophy of Schmitt, Arendt, Derrida and Habermas, deliberating the relationship among law, violence and justice in the context of constitutional republicanism.