Ryan K Balot
Biographic Data
| ID | 1428599 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ryan K Balot |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ryan K |
| FAMILY NAME | Balot |
| SIGNATURE | BALOT R K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5900-1639 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Developing the Citizens’ Thumos in Elections and Courts
The Athenian envisions civic participation as the primary venue for the expression of thumos. The central books develop a novel political system that both involves ordinary citizens and does justice to superior virtue. Through their participation in elections and courts, on the one hand, all citizens play a role in determining what meets the lawgiver’s standards. Ordinary citizens have gifts to offer, and, in participating politically, they devel…
The Rule of Nous
Scholars have either integrated the Nocturnal Council into the regime of law or dismissed it as an afterthought, incompatible with the dialogue as a whole. Engaging with the controversy between “integrationists” and “incompatibilists,” this chapter charts a novel path. The appropriate question to pose is, Why would the Athenian install figures resembling philosopher rulers at the end of a dialogue focused on establishing an ambitious regime of la…
The Athenian’s Theology, Part I
In Book 10, the Athenian addresses the greatest crimes of all—crimes against the city’s gods. He begins with an elaborate introduction of the “young atheist” and his “sociology of the impious,” in order to convince Kleinias of the grave threat atheism poses to the city and to persuade him of the city’s need for philosophical defenders. He also positions Kleinias as his eager ally, a helper whose functions he describes in military language. Surpri…
Warriors into Citizens: The Re-education of Thumos
In addition to addressing the citizens’ ingrained acquisitiveness, the Athenian aspires to transform their attachment to a destructive model of thumos, which is unmoored from intelligence, justice, and moderation. He will cultivate thumos and direct it toward peace and justice. He rendered military exercises less toxic by embedding them within religious rituals. He also proposed to “pacify” common meals and to institute common meals for women, wh…
The Athenian’s Theology, Part II
Although most scholars discover “Plato’s final theology” in Book 10, the Athenian’s three arguments are psychological, ethical, and political in character. They respond to the disorder of Kleinias’ soul and to his belief that chaotic motion characterizes nature. The first argument refutes materialists by presenting the heavens as governed by intelligence. This argument will engage the curiosity of the young atheist. For Kleinias and ordinary citi…
Corrupting the Youth in Plato’s Menexenus
Compared to other extant examples, Plato’s Menexenus presents an unusual funeral speech: an oration delivered by Socrates, embedded within a Platonic dialogue and supposedly written by Pericles’ lover, Aspasia, whom Socrates claims as his own tutor in rhetoric. Nicole Loraux’s The Invention of Athens convinced almost all of the necessity of reading this speech alongside the others, without, however, investigating Plato’s own political and philoso…
Tragedy, Philosophy, and Political Education in Plato's Laws
Thucydides on Democracy and Other Regimes
This chapter argues that Thucydides’ History provides for its readers an opportunity to assess the limits and opportunities of diverse political regimes, particularly democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. In doing so, he offers insights not only into the specific characteristics of the cities that employ those regimes (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes), but also into what is distinctive about those regime types, understood in categorical terms. The c…
The Cambridge Companion to Thucydides
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the earliest and most influential works in the western historiographical tradition. It provides an unfinished account of the war between Athens and her allies and Sparta and her allies which lasted from 431 to 404 BC, and is a masterpiece of narrative art and of political analysis. The twenty chapters in this Companion offer a wide range of perspectives on different aspects of the text, its i…
An American Political Theorist between History and Utopia
Greed, Outrage, and Civil Conflict in Aristotle’s Politics
Scholars generally agree that, according to Aristotle, factionalizers are motivated by a sense of injustice (the ‘first cause’) to redress imbalances in wealth and honor (the ‘second cause’). Recent discussions, however, have offered a misleading interpretation of Aristotle’s third cause, which he identifies as the origin of the factionalizers’ sense of injustice. It involves, most importantly, greed, hubris, and other factors such as fear and ‘d…
Virtue Politics, Ancient or Modern
James Hankins’s landmark study focuses on “virtue politics,” the idea that “soulcraft” was essential to statecraft according to the humanists of Renaissance Italy.1 For Hankins’s humanists, political renewal would result from improvements in character and education, a restoration of ancient virtue, not the prudent reconstruction of institutions and laws. Humanistic culture was “one long, animated seminar on the possibility of imitating ancient Ro…
Epilogue: Identity, Politics, Power: From Classical Antiquity to the 21st Century
An Odd Episode in Platonic Interpretation: Changing the Law in Plato’s Laws
Plato’s Statesman and Laws: Theory, Context, and Method
Polis and Cosmos in Plato’s Laws
Recent scholarship has followed Glenn Morrow in seeking to understand Plato’s politics in light of his cosmology. This essay takes a different tack and interprets the theology and cosmology of the Laws as an outgrowth of the Athenian Stranger’s conversation with Kleinias, which focuses on politics and warfare. In that sense the arguments of Book 10 are closely tied to the context of the dialogue. The Athenian Stranger’s religious ideology is not …
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
This chapter evaluates the arguments and intentions of Leo Strauss’s most ambitious political text, Natural Right and History. Strauss’s stated purpose is to rehabilitate the ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of “natural right”—a term of art by which he referred to the justice inherent in the rational order of nature. His express motivation was to rebut the relativism and historicism that, in his view, characterized twentieth-century political …
Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom
Readers will be disappointed if they hope to find in this book a novel theory of freedom—Thucydides’ theory, that is, which they might contrast with the rival theories of Hegel or the neo-republicans. But they will not be disappointed if they are looking for a fresh, if selective, exegesis of Thucydides’ History. Nichols’ book offers a number of striking arguments and observations that illustrate (even if they do not explicitly articulate) Thucyd…
Introduction: The Persistence of Diversity
Recollecting Athens
Beginning with an analysis of the problematic relation of ‘the particular’ to ‘the universal’ in canonical political texts, this paper explores a variety of frameworks for the study of classical Greek political thought. Specifically, after investigating the influence of Quentin Skinner’s contextualism, the paper examines the ideas, approaches, and methods of Bernard Williams, Leo Strauss, and Josiah Ober. I draw attention to each figure’s distinc…
Isocratean Reflections
Isocrates remains an underutilized resource for the understanding of democratic ideology. Although Isocrates was critical of the Athenian democracy in his time, his writings also offer a searching exploration of democratic possibilities and ideals altogether. This chapter inquires into Isocrates’ presentation of the long-standing rivalry between Athens and Sparta, with a particular focus on Athenian courage, hegemony, and equality. Even if Isocra…
The Courageous Passions of Democratic Athens
Through examining four different types of public speech, this chapter shows that Pericles’ rationalistic model of courage coexisted in classical Athens with other, more traditional paradigms. The co-existence of these different paradigms leads us to appreciate certain ambiguities and instabilities in the Athenian experience of courage during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Court cases, in particular, showed prosecutors and defendants striving …
Athenian Eudaimonism in Thought and Action
This chapter explores the Athenians’ distinctive strategy for bridging the gap between the individual’s good and the community’s good, with particular reference to courage. Courage raises special problems along these lines, because, in making war and in idealizing courage, the city typically asks its citizens to sacrifice their lives, at the limit, for the common good. Is courage, then, good only for the city but positively harmful to the individ…
Cocky Athenian Men?
The Periclean Model
In Book II of his History, Thucydides represented Athens’s greatest leader, Pericles, delivering a funeral oration at the height of the city’s success. Pericles strove to distinguish the Athenians’ innovative regime and lifestyle from the Spartans’ more traditional and more limited way of life. Pericles argued that Athens’s democracy was the basis of the city’s success, and that the Athenians’ specifically democratic practices of courage enabled …
Courage in the Democratic Polis
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Pindar, Virgil, and the Proem to "Georgic" 3
THIS PAPER ARGUES that certain prominent features of the proem to Georgic 3 owe a direct debt to Pindar and are thematically and stylistically distinct from the epinician poetry of Callimachus.1 In 1969, L. P. Wilkinson made the case for Pindaric influence in the proem, but since then Richard Thomas and others have advanced powerful arguments, based on newly discovered Callimachean papyri, to the effect that the proem is colored throughout by all…
The Many and the Few: On Machiavelli's “Democratic Moment
Through an extended critical engagement with John P. McCormick'sMachiavellian Democracy, this paper aims to shed light on Machiavelli's account of relations among the many and the few in theDiscourses on Livy. While we agree with McCormick that Machiavelli should not be too quickly subsumed within the republican tradition, as interpreted by the “Cambridge School,” we reject the idea that Machiavelli's central thrust is prodemocratic. By focusing …
An American Political Theorist between History and Utopia
The Dark Side of Democratic Courage
Ryan K. Balot The Dark Side of Democratic Courage* COURAGE IS THE MOST EXCITING OF THE CANONICAL VIRTUES. ONE r e c e n t student ranks courage alongside love as the m ost popu lar theme in world literature (Miller, 2000: 8-12). By contrast, other virtues, such as justice, patience, or self-control, are the favorite topics of abstract philosophizing, but, on the face of it, they are boring to contemplate (cf. Shklar, 1990: 15-19; Miller, 2000: 8…
Recollecting Athens
Beginning with an analysis of the problematic relation of ‘the particular’ to ‘the universal’ in canonical political texts, this paper explores a variety of frameworks for the study of classical Greek political thought. Specifically, after investigating the influence of Quentin Skinner’s contextualism, the paper examines the ideas, approaches, and methods of Bernard Williams, Leo Strauss, and Josiah Ober. I draw attention to each figure’s distinc…
Pindar, Virgil, and the Proem to "Georgic" 3
THIS PAPER ARGUES that certain prominent features of the proem to Georgic 3 owe a direct debt to Pindar and are thematically and stylistically distinct from the epinician poetry of Callimachus.1 In 1969, L. P. Wilkinson made the case for Pindaric influence in the proem, but since then Richard Thomas and others have advanced powerful arguments, based on newly discovered Callimachean papyri, to the effect that the proem is colored throughout by all…
Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens
Courage in the Democratic Polis
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Dark Side of Democratic Courage
Ryan K. Balot The Dark Side of Democratic Courage* COURAGE IS THE MOST EXCITING OF THE CANONICAL VIRTUES. ONE r e c e n t student ranks courage alongside love as the m ost popu lar theme in world literature (Miller, 2000: 8-12). By contrast, other virtues, such as justice, patience, or self-control, are the favorite topics of abstract philosophizing, but, on the face of it, they are boring to contemplate (cf. Shklar, 1990: 15-19; Miller, 2000: 8…
Greek Political Thought
Abbreviations. 1. Introduction: How to Do Greek Political Thought. 2. Archaic Greece and the Centrality of Justice. Achilles, Agamemnon, and Fair Distribution. Justice as Distinctively Human. Institutions and Values of the Early Polis. What is Justice? The Voice of the Oppressed and the Origins of Political Thought. The Egalitarian Response. The Elitist Response. Case Study: Sparta and the Politics of Courage. A Second Case Study: Archaic Athens …
The Freedom to Rule: Athenian Imperialism and Democratic Masculinity
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought provides a guide to understanding the central texts and problems in ancient Greek political thought, from Homer through the Stoics and Epicureans. Composed of essays specially commissioned for this volume and written by leading scholars of classics, political science, and philosophy, the Companion brings these texts to life by analysing what they have to tell us about the problems of poli…
The Virtue Politics of Democratic Athens
In the past three decades, contemporary Aristotelians have posed effective challenges to liberal theory by stressing the importance of citizenship, political virtue, civic prudence, and the political passions. Without denying the manifest goods made possible by the liberal political order, neo-Aristotelian theorists have argued that we can improve our understanding of political life by directing attention to the resource-rich tradition of Aristot…
A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought
Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship by Susan D. Collins
BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 183 enforcing these rules must have existed, whether by general public attitude or by officials specifically chargedwith the task" (258). This is certainlycorrect,and I would place particular emphasis on the role of informal social practices (such as public shaming of social offenders) in regulation of the moral order of the polis in archaic and classical Greece.4 In one of the best sections of the book, Nagle explicat…
Polybius’ Advice to the Imperial Republic
Polybius’ Histories , written in the mid—second century BC, offers an authoritative account of Rome’s rise to uncontested imperial supremacy. The work has been highly influential among political thinkers because of its theory of the “mixed constitution.” This essay proposes to return Polybius’ mixed constitution to its proper location within the narrative of the Histories. This interpretative approach enables us to appreciate Polybius’ frequently…
STEVEN JOHNSTONE. A History of Trust in Ancient Greece
Journal Article Steven Johnstone. A History of Trust in Ancient Greece. Get access Steven Johnstone. A History of Trust in Ancient Greece.Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2011. Pp. xii, 242. $45.00. Ryan K. Balot Ryan K. Balot University of Toronto [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 5, December 2012, Page 1643, https://doi.org/10.10…
The Many and the Few: On Machiavelli's “Democratic Moment
Through an extended critical engagement with John P. McCormick'sMachiavellian Democracy, this paper aims to shed light on Machiavelli's account of relations among the many and the few in theDiscourses on Livy. While we agree with McCormick that Machiavelli should not be too quickly subsumed within the republican tradition, as interpreted by the “Cambridge School,” we reject the idea that Machiavelli's central thrust is prodemocratic. By focusing …
Epideictic Rhetoric and the Foundations of Politics
At least since the time of Plato’s writings, epideictic rhetoric has been criticized as deceptive, as epistemologically bankrupt, and as politically irrelevant. Aristotle himself emphasizes that the key ‘topic’of epideictic is amplification and stresses that the epideictic orator chiefly adds ‘size’(megethos) and ‘beauty’(kallos) to widely shared memories. This paper reinterprets Aristotle’s statements and argues that Aristotle’s account brings t…
Isocratean Reflections
Isocrates remains an underutilized resource for the understanding of democratic ideology. Although Isocrates was critical of the Athenian democracy in his time, his writings also offer a searching exploration of democratic possibilities and ideals altogether. This chapter inquires into Isocrates’ presentation of the long-standing rivalry between Athens and Sparta, with a particular focus on Athenian courage, hegemony, and equality. Even if Isocra…
The Courageous Passions of Democratic Athens
Through examining four different types of public speech, this chapter shows that Pericles’ rationalistic model of courage coexisted in classical Athens with other, more traditional paradigms. The co-existence of these different paradigms leads us to appreciate certain ambiguities and instabilities in the Athenian experience of courage during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Court cases, in particular, showed prosecutors and defendants striving …
Athenian Eudaimonism in Thought and Action
This chapter explores the Athenians’ distinctive strategy for bridging the gap between the individual’s good and the community’s good, with particular reference to courage. Courage raises special problems along these lines, because, in making war and in idealizing courage, the city typically asks its citizens to sacrifice their lives, at the limit, for the common good. Is courage, then, good only for the city but positively harmful to the individ…
Cocky Athenian Men?
The Periclean Model
In Book II of his History, Thucydides represented Athens’s greatest leader, Pericles, delivering a funeral oration at the height of the city’s success. Pericles strove to distinguish the Athenians’ innovative regime and lifestyle from the Spartans’ more traditional and more limited way of life. Pericles argued that Athens’s democracy was the basis of the city’s success, and that the Athenians’ specifically democratic practices of courage enabled …
“Likely stories” and the political art in Plato’sLaws
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Courage in the Democratic Polis: Ideology and Critique in Classical Athens
Brings together political theory, classical history, and ancient philosophy in order to reinterpret courage as a specifically democratic value, linked to ideals such as freedom, equality, and rationality, and with implications for the conduct of war, gender relations, and citizens' self-image as democrats
A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean
Book Review| August 01 2014 A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean Malkin, Irad, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 304 pp. Ryan Balot Ryan Balot Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2014) 20 (3): 495–496. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2732856 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary …
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
This chapter evaluates the arguments and intentions of Leo Strauss’s most ambitious political text, Natural Right and History. Strauss’s stated purpose is to rehabilitate the ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of “natural right”—a term of art by which he referred to the justice inherent in the rational order of nature. His express motivation was to rebut the relativism and historicism that, in his view, characterized twentieth-century political …
Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom
Readers will be disappointed if they hope to find in this book a novel theory of freedom—Thucydides’ theory, that is, which they might contrast with the rival theories of Hegel or the neo-republicans. But they will not be disappointed if they are looking for a fresh, if selective, exegesis of Thucydides’ History. Nichols’ book offers a number of striking arguments and observations that illustrate (even if they do not explicitly articulate) Thucyd…
Introduction: The Persistence of Diversity
Political science (34 works) · Law (33 works) · Politics (27 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (21 works) · History (21 works) · Art (13 works) · Democracy (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works)