In 399 BC Socrates, the father of political philosophy, was put to death by the world's first democracy. Ever since, defenders of democracy have attempted to show that the central tension symbolized by that event—between philosophical truth, embodied by Socrates, and democratic whim—could be contained. In The Socratic Citizen, Adolf G. Gundersen addresses this tension in a new way, by recasting Socrates as a model for the democratic citizen.

Gundersen asserts that political deliberation is best thought of as a two-person affair, or a dyad. He proposes this dyadic theory as an intriguing alternative to the present American system, where interest groups define the debate and the average citizen is reduced to simply agreeing or disagreeing with these manufactured positions. A powerful reclamation of everyday conversation as an integral form of political discourse, The Socratic Citizen is an original contribution to political philosophy.