ABSTRACT
The "tradition" of Platonic commentary is rich and time honored and, one might suspect, complete. Thus to venture back to the well-traveled terrain of Plato's polis surely requires an explanation. The reinterpre tation of the Greek concept of politics may in tum hold important implications for the understanding and practice of politics. The difference was that Popper emphasized the political ramifications of the logic rather than focusing upon questions of, for instance, justice and art as matters of abstract argument. Substantively this meant that the dramatists regarded Plato's division between the logical and the dramatic, or between the utopian and the political, or between the "ideal" and the "real," as more complex than it would at first appear. Plato, however, went beyond the negativity of Socrates' teaching in his attempt to depict a polity in which philosophers and philosophy rule. Modern commentators, however, have read greater significance into Socrates' ironic disposition.
