On Williams on Plato

This essay is a response to David Lay Williams’ reading of Plato’s political thought, in his book The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx . The review essay asks three questions: Does Williams see among practitioners of contemporary political thinking any sign of a return to the deeper moral and philosophical aspects of political theory and any sign of a move toward expanding on the safer statistical approaches he himself diagnoses as insufficient? Of the two modes of responding to radical inequality, the imposition of practical impediments to acquiring massive wealth versus the re-education of the population toward an attitude that does not value the excessive accumulation of wealth, does Williams see across the canon of thinkers he treats here any general preference for one over the other? And lastly, in response to Plato’s apparent observation of a tendency in human life to lose sight of the whole of the political community one exists in and to focus on smaller horizons of concern, are there any strategies in Plato or in the other thinkers he treats, that Williams would suggest are valuable in combatting this tendency?