The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paideía of the American Tech Elite
2nd October 2024
Though much may separate Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Plato, and Aristotle from one another, on this fundamental point they and those who subsequently followed their lead were agreed: that to come to understand a polity, one must be willing to entertain two propositions.
First, one must presume that the form of government, the constitution, the rules defining membership in the políteuma or ruling order is the chief determinant of a political community’s character. Second, one must assume that pa?deía, which is to say, education and moral formation in the broadest and most comprehensive sense, is more important than anything else in deciding the character of a particular pol?teía. In one passage of The Politics, Aristotle suggests that it is the provision of a common pa?deía—and nothing else—that turns a multitude into a unit and constitutes it as a pól?s; in another, he indicates that it is the pol?teía which defines the pól?s as such. Though apparently in contradiction, these two statements are in fact equivalent—for, as the peripatetic recognized, man is an imitative animal, the example we set is far more influential than what we say, and it is the “distribution and disposition of offices and honors [táx?s t?ˆn arch?ˆn]” constituting the políteuma of a given polity that is the most effective educator therein.
…what really matters most with regard to political understanding is this: to decide who is to rule or what sorts of human beings are to share in rule and function as a community’s políteuma is to determine which of the various and competing titles to rule is to be authoritative; in turn, this is to decide what qualities are to be admired and honored in the city, what is to be considered advantageous and just, and how happiness and success [euda?monía] are to be understood and pursued; and this decision—more than any other—determines the pa?deía which constitutes “the one way of life of a whole pól?s.”
—Paul Rahe, The Spartan Regime: Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy, xii-xiv.
I knew Paul Rahe (now at Hillsdale in Michigan) at Yale, when I was an undergraduate and he was getting his PhD, having done his undergraduate work at Cornell. His magnum opus, the three-volume Republics Ancient and Modern, is first-rate. I heartily recommend anything he writes.