Music and Politics in the Ancient World

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

Organizers: Rebecca LeMoine (Florida Atlantic University) and Nina Valiquette Moreau (University of Chicago)

Thanks to the invention of the iPod, the smartphone, and streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, music has become a ubiquitous feature of most citizens’ daily lives. Contemporary political theorists have largely ignored this development, however, despite the fact that several major thinkers in the history of political thought emphasize the importance of the relationship between popular music and politics. Showcasing original work by an interdisciplinary group of senior and junior scholars with a range of interpretive approaches, this roundtable seeks to re-focus attention on the role of music in political life by considering the centrality of mousikē (the art of the Muses) in ancient political thought in particular. How did the ancients think about music and its relation to ethics, both private and public? How did their views on the power of music shape their ideas about civic identity, justice, and democracy? How might these ancient understandings of music contribute to, or challenge, the foundations of modern democratic politics? Participants will pre-circulate their remarks and present for 7-8 minutes before opening the floor to discussion with the audience.

This roundtable will be chaired and introduced by Lee Trepanier (Professor of Political Science, Saginaw Valley State University; author of Tradition v. Rationalism, Lexington Books 2018, and The Socratic Method Today, Routledge 2017) who will speak about the goals of the roundtable in light of growing scholarly interest in music and politics in the ancient world.

Kirk Fitzpatrick (Professor of Philosophy, Southern Utah University; author of “The Imitative Arts Will Tear Us Apart in the Republic,” Expositions 2017) turns to the Republic’s widely neglected discussions on musical modes and meters to illuminate the dialogue’s ranking of constitutions of state and soul. By examining the nature of each constitution in light of its corresponding musical modes and meters, we can better understand Socrates’ ranking of soul and regime types.

Marcus Folch (Associate Professor of Classics, Columbia University; author of The City and the Stage, OUP 2015) puts pressure on the consensus view that Plato's criticisms of mimetic poetry in the Republic and of musical performance in the Laws consist not only of assessments of art and aesthetic activities but also (and more importantly) a critique of Athenian democracy. Instead, there are strong reasons to think that what modern commentators have often construed as political was for Plato primarily ethical.

Jeremy Geddert (Associate Professor of Political Science, Assumption College; author of Hugo Grotius and Modern Theology of Freedom: Transcending Natural Rights, Routledge 2017) explores how the modern physics of sound might support Plato’s approach to musical education, and shows how modern polyphony (musical harmony) serves as a physical manifestation of unity amidst particularity, thereby illuminating the continued debate between Platonic idealism and Aristotelian empiricism.

Rebecca LeMoine (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University; author of Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity, OUP forthcoming) reads the Republic’s censorship of music as a practice of the self, whereby individual reflection on music and its attendant pleasures awakens the rational part of the soul and habituates the person to the activity of reasoning. The Republic shows that if citizens are not in the habit of practicing mindfulness towards something they take pleasure in as much as music, they are less likely to do so with something as fraught with tension as the political sphere.

Nina Valiquette Moreau (Lecturer, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, University of Chicago; author of “Musical Mimesis and Political Ethos in Plato’s Republic,” Political Theory 2017) recovers via Plato’s Minos and Laws the ancient worldview in which law and music were understood to share in the same intrinsic properties of order, establishment, and restoration: nomos as both song and law. For Plato, the aesthetic attunement and cultivation of the soul via the musicality of the law is meant to ensure that citizens love justice in its comprehensive sense.

Sophie Pangle (Ph.D. candidate in Department of Government, Harvard University) argues that despite the apparent purging of poetry and music from the educational curricula of the ideal city of the Republic, Plato reveals an opposite educational phenomenon on the level of the dialogue: in its support for and subversion of lawful ideas about justice, poetry provides Adeimantus with a powerful impetus to search for the truth about that virtue. This success in the dialogue and the contrasting limitations in the education in the Kallipolis in fact reveal the capacity of uncensored music and poetry to prepare individuals for philosophy.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Chair

• Lee Trepanier Samford University

Presenters

• Rebecca LeMoine Florida Atlantic University

• Nina Valiquette Moreau University of Chicago

• Kirk Fitzpatrick Southern Utah University

• Marcus Folch Columbia University

• Jeremy Seth Geddert Assumption College

• Sophie Pangle Harvard University