Introduction: Speech Bonds

Jill Frank introduces Berger’s argument by addressing the ethicalities of Plato’s proposed Klinopolis—his “Couch City”—whether it promises to be the good city, the bad city, or perhaps something else, while highlighting Protagoras’s insistence on teaching a fixed program for making good decisions. Socrates names Protagoras’s stance “the political art.” Performing “political art” virtuously sits in the heart of Berger’s couch city. Although the Protagoras has traditionally been read as a resounding victory for Socrates over Protagoras’s claims of virtue, Berger, as Frank notes, sees the outcome differently. For Berger, Socrates, in “beating Protagoras at his own game,” becomes Protagoras’s double. This doubling of speech, however, fails to produce an ethical resolution from either Protagoras or Socrates; instead, their speeches become “occasions for weaponizing virtue” and evading responsibility for their words. According to Berger, both Socrates and Protagoras fail. But as Frank suggests, their failures prompt “readers of the dialogue to do otherwise”—to “open a different ethics, rhetoric, and politics of responsibility.”