ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the major characteristics of Isocrates’ educational and linguistic philosophy, particularly its intersections with contemporary Third World pan—nationalist thought, as exemplified by Che Guevara. Isocrates is more aptly classified as a statesman and an educator. Isocrates’ ideas are potentially liberating; they reinforce certain bourgeois values. Isocrates’ position differed from that of the Sophists who at times appeared to stress success at oratory at the expense of civic arete and who defined politics at times as the pursuit of expediency. Isocrates argued that all Greeks had a responsibility to come together to defend the common good, the common interest. For Che, political activity was a pursuit analogous on the societal level to the physician’s effort to cure disease in the human body. On this point, the parallels to Isocrates and rhetoric are clear: Ideas are to the mind as exercise is to the body.
