Ruling Bodies: A Study of Coercion and Punishment in Plato’s Republic, Laws, and Gorgias

Ruling Bodies centers around an epochal ontological shift in ideas that changed the nature and the meaning of coercion in modern political thought. It begins with a review of Foucault, Arendt, and Habermas, and points out a discrepancy in the way each thinker understood coercion in modern politics. From here, Varma dives into the works of Plato to provide a framework and context for thinking about this. Through a detailed examination of the Republic, the Laws, and the Gorgias, Ruling Bodies offers us the first comprehensive account of coercion in Plato’s thought. As the author shows, each dialogue is a demonstration of a particular style of Platonic statecraft that corresponds to the amount of power the philosopher holds in a city. The Republic demonstrates how a philosopher would rule as a monarch; the Laws demonstrates his rule when he must share power with other spirited oligarchs; and the Gorgias demonstrates his rule in a democracy where power belongs to the people. In all three dialogues, Varma argues that the philosopher’s logos sought to bridge the passions of man with the heavenly bodies, and coercion was merely a supplementary tool to help achieve this end. When Hobbes recast the cosmos as matter, form, and power, however, the soul gets reduced to a material body, and the aim of logos was not to bridge the passions of man with the heavens, but to make the body obedient to power.