Lexington Books
Pages: 208
•
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-4985-9097-6 • Hardback • September 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-9099-0 • Paperback • April 2023 • $39.99 • (£30.00)
978-1-4985-9098-3 • eBook • September 2019 • $38.00 • (£30.00)
Peter J. Hansen is lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I. Reading Plato
II. Thrasymachus’ Attack on Justice
III. Socrates Refutes Thrasymachus
IV. Callicles’ Attack on Justice
V. Socrates Questions Callicles
VI. Callicles Retreats
VII. Socrates Concludes
VIII. Other Tough Guys
Peter J. Hansen's, Plato's Tough Guys and Their Attachment to Justice is without question a valuable contribution to the literature on Plato's moral psychology. His reflections on Thrasymachus and Callicles are excellent. I commend this book to the intermediate or advanced student of Plato, especially if they are familiar with the core concerns that motivate the Straussian approach.
— Polis
In Plato’s Tough Guys and Their Attachment to Justice, Peter J. Hansen opens with a short chapter explaining his approach to reading Plato and then begins a close examination of Socrates’s conversation with Thrasymachus in book 1 of the Republic. He moves on to an even more fine-grained reading of Callicles in the Gorgias. He closes the book with a short chapter on Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Gide’s Michel, and Shakespeare’s Richard III, and a brief synoptic conclusion.
— The Review of Politics
“Peter Hansen’s remarkable book demonstrates how much we can still learn about ourselves by reading Plato well. Plato’s Tough Guys suggests that we are more complicated beings than our own theories usually acknowledge: we are more attached to the idea of justice than we realize, and more unsettled by this attachment than we care to admit.” — Bryan Garsten, Yale University
“Plato's Tough Guys and Their Attachment to Justice is an engrossing examination of the human concern for justice, the power of which is revealed by showing that it continues to move even those ‘tough guys’ who claim to have abandoned it. Hansen’s interpretation of Plato is careful and perceptive, but, most important, it serves to illuminate an enduring aspect of our humanity.”— Devin Stauffer, University of Texas at Austin
"Plato's Tough Guys and Their Attachment to Justice is a lucid and penetrating study of the strange power of justice to inspire those who want to deny it. And Peter Hansen makes his point—where better than in Plato?”— Harvey Mansfield, Kenan Professor of Government, Harvard University and Hoover Institution, Stanford University