Word: stoning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unfortunately, the price of applying Stone's journalistic skills to the great texts was a lack of philosophical insight. Treating the ancient texts like modern-day government documents, Stone doesn't seem to have been interested in grappling with the secondary literature written on Plato and Socrates during the past millenia or two. Most egregious of all is his failure to deal with the controversial interpretations made by the man most responsible for the renaissance of classical studies in recent years...
...Socrates, argued Leo Strauss, was that the rule of philosopher-kings was both necessary and impossible. The Republic, by this account, is really a massive excercise in irony, a lesson less in how to construct a utopia than in the limits of what we can reasonably expect from politics. Stone, attributing this interpretation to one "Alan [sic] Bloom", writes that, "Plato could hardly have spent his life spoofing himself...
...other steering committee members are Professor of Law Gerald Frug, Assistant Dean Frederick E. Snyder and Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry Alan A. Stone...
...laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees." One man, not the many; within himself, not among his fellows. Socrates may have been content to contemplate his doctrines in the ivory tower. But if Stone's history can at all be relied upon, these ideas found their way into the hands of those anxious to act upon them. The government set up benefitted the few to the detriment of the many Socrates did not say a word...
Remember the image of the book as an object, as a welding of board, paper, string, glue and ink; remember the pyramids of the Egyptians, built from sand, stone and mortar: They were built to ward off time. Each individual block, though carved to protect a pharoah, was a move by man to withstand wind, water, night and other men. Each book we print adds to the monolith of similar blocks we preserve, that we stack in piles, climb on top of, burn out of fear...