What Is Liberal Education?
Reflect on the enduring value of liberal education and its importance for a free society.
Young people with ambitions often want to lead politically successful lives that are also morally serious lives. Is this possible? Can we both do well and be good? Or do the demands of political life, the needs of the community, and the dilemmas of leadership, make ordinary morality impossible for those who seek power and influence?
In this opening course for the Hertog Political Studies Program, led by Professors Bryan Garsten and Benjamin Storey, students will engage with these questions through a close reading of Plato’s Gorgias. They will reflect on the ethical dilemmas implied by the pursuit of power, in politics and other realms, and on how we should conduct ourselves in a world in which the demands of justice and the demands of political necessity often seem to conflict.
Images: Emanuel Benner, Hercules between Virtue and Vice, oil on canvas | Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Socrates Tears Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure, oil on canvas, 1791
Ben Storey interviews Leon Kass on philosophy, religion, & liberal education
Faculty
Bryan Garsten
Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He writes on questions about political rhetoric and deliberation, the meaning of representative government, the relationship of politics and religion, and the place of emotions in political life.
Bryan Garsten
Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Humanities Program at Yale University. He is the author of Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006), as well as articles and essays on questions about political rhetoric and deliberation, the meaning of representative government, the relationship of politics and religion, and the place of emotions in political life.
He is finishing a book called The Heart of a Heartless World that examines the ethical, political and religious core of early nineteenth-century liberalism in the United States and France. He has also edited Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies (Princeton University Press, 2012), a collection of essays by the Rousseau scholar Robert Wokler. His writings have won various awards, including the First Book Prize of the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association.
He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Yale’s major in Ethics, Politics and Economics and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Political Science. In 2016 he founded the Citizens, Thinkers, Writers program for students in the New Haven public schools.
Benjamin Storey
Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He recently co-authored a book with Jenna Silber Storey entitled Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment.
Benjamin Storey
Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is concurrently a research professor at Furman University, where he previously served as Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs and director of the Tocqueville Program. At AEI, he focuses on political philosophy, civil society, and higher education, and he is the co-organizer of a conference series on the future of the American university.
In 2016–17, Dr. Storey was a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. From 2010 to 2012, he was the director of a National Endowment for the Humanities “Enduring Questions” course development project. He has also taught at the Hertog Political Studies Program, the Tikvah Fund, and the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale.
Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with his wife, Jenna Silber Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on a book titled, The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You For Life.
He has a Ph.D. and M.A. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Download the Full Syllabus
Preview the Syllabus by Week/Session
Socrates & Gorgias
Recommended Reading:
Readings:
- Introduction; Plato, Gorgias, 447A–461B
Questions:
- What is the context of the conversation described in Plato’s Gorgias, insofar as you can discern it from the details of the text? Who are the characters?
- What does Socrates hope to learn from Gorgias?
- What is the power of rhetoric, according to Gorgias?
- Socrates continually refers to “our speech,” in his conversation with Gorgias; what does he mean and why does he insist upon it?
- What are the two kinds of persuasion, according to Socrates?
- What is the relationship between rhetoric and justice?
- How does Gorgias ultimately contradict his own argument?
Socrates & Polus
Readings:
- Plato, Gorgias, 461B–486D
Questions:
- Why does Polus interject himself into the conversation at 461B?
- What does Polus believe to be the source of Gorgias’ self-contradiction?
- How does Socrates define rhetoric?
- Make a chart of Socrates’ analogy of the true and spurious arts of body and soul.
- What does Socrates mean by his distinction between a human being “doing what seems good to him” and “doing what he wants”?
- Upon what, according to Socrates, does human happiness depend?
- What is Polus’ example of Archelaus intended to prove?
- How does Socrates bring Polus to agree that the proper use of rhetoric is to bring accusations against one’s loved ones or oneself, if they are guilty of any injustice, although, as Polus says, “it seems crazy”? Is it in fact crazy?
- Why does Callicles doubt whether Socrates is serious? Do you think Socrates is serious?
- What, according to Callicles, is Socrates’ technique for getting people to refute themselves? Does he accurately describe what goes on in the conversational portions of the dialogue?
- What, according to Callicles, is “just by nature”?
- What does Callicles believe to be the proper place of philosophy in the life of an anḗr, a “real man”?
Socrates & Callicles
Readings:
- Plato, Gorgias, 486D–506B
Questions:
- What characteristics does Socrates attribute to Callicles in describing him as a touchstone upon which to test his own soul? Does Callicles truly seem to possess these characteristics?
- Socrates easily finds examples to disprove Callicles’ argument that “the one who’s greater should carry off the things that belong to the lesser.” What would be the best version of Callicles’ argument?
- What is Callicles’ definition of “virtue and happiness”?
- Callicles likens the life Socrates recommends to that of a “stone or a corpse,” that is, to something that is not alive at all. Socrates likens the life Callicles recommends to the continual replenishing of an urn full of holes. Is there such a thing as a life that is something better than continual succession of filling and emptying?
- Callicles rapidly tires of answering what he calls Socrates’ “shriveled little questions.” Why does Gorgias encourage him to go on?
- How does Socrates finally bring Callicles to admit that the pleasant and the good are not the same thing?
- Is there an art of seeking the human good?
- What, according to Socrates, would be the aim of a healthy art of rhetoric?
- What is Socrates’ critique of the greatest Athenian statesmen—Themistocles, Miltiades, Cimon, and Pericles?
Socrates
Readings:
- Plato, Gorgias, 506B–527E
Questions:
- What, according to Socrates, produces the good of a thing?
- What does Socrates mean when he suggests that the source of Callicles’ error is his neglect of geometry?
- What must one do to avoid suffering injustice in a city, on Socrates’ account?
- Why does Callicles find it “galling” that “someone who’s worthless” can take “a good and beautiful life” from an innocent man? Given his previously stated opinions, shouldn’t he find that state of affairs natural and unobjectionable?
- How, according to Socrates, is rhetoric akin to helmsmanship?
- How does the comparison Socrates makes between rhetoric and medicine at 512D compare to the relation between the two indicated by the larger analogy he makes at 465B–D?
- Callicles remarks that “something about what you’re saying seems good to me, Socrates—I don’t know what it is—but I’m having the experience most people do: I’m not entirely persuaded by you.” Do you share his experience of being divided in your reactions to Socrates? What is the source of this division?
- How can Socrates claim to be “one of a few Athenians, not to say the only one, to make an attempt at the political art in the true sense,” although he famously steers clear of Athenian politics (521B)?
- Socrates concludes the dialogue with a speech he calls a “logos” but says that Callicles will consider a “mythos.” What is the difference?
- What is the nature of the judgment made by Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, and Minos? Why are three dead, naked judges necessary, and why must human souls be judged when naked and dead?
- Where does the conclusion of the dialogue leave Callicles, Polus, and Gorgias?
The Gorgias
Readings:
- Review the Gorgias in its entirety
Questions:
- What happens in Plato’s Gorgias? Does anyone learn anything?
- How does Socrates manage to get people to bear witness against themselves?
- For the last fourth of the dialogue, Socrates speaks almost alone, and Callicles has long since given up on the conversation. Why does Socrates continue? Is he beating a dead horse?
- Throughout the Gorgias, Socrates makes extreme arguments. Are there moderate versions of Socrates’ arguments that seem more plausible? If so, why does he take such extreme positions?
- What can this dialogue, set in a strange context and a distant time, teach us about power, virtue, and the proper use of speech in politics?
