Training the Philosopher King: Ancient Models of Political Action in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault

Abstract This article offers a comparative study of Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s “returns” to classical antiquity. I focus on their overlapping readings of Socrates as a “civilization trainer” and their divergent readings of Plato – who is for Foucault a trainer of kings and for Arendt a utopian engineer – to argue that both Arendt and Foucault draw from Greek antiquity a substantively underdetermined but politically choice worthy form of action: a courageous and critical relation to the present moment in which one lives, consisting of the public and philosophical critique of what we are thinking and doing. Without falling into nostalgic narratives about lost golden ages, they nonetheless retrieve Socratic ethical exemplarity for a (post)modern political theory that has lost interest in the game of building perfect regimes. I conclude by exploring the differences and overlaps in Foucault’s and Arendt’s vision of what is needed to revitalize political action today.