Lately I’ve become very interested in the sophists as the first lobbyists and communication consultants. They were professional advocates who believed that persuasion was at the heart of the democratic process and charged (sometimes exorbitant) fees to teach their skills to clients and to advocate on their behalf. They were also derided for not having any real beliefs and for using nefarious rhetorical tricks that played on emotion rather than reason to get their way. Sounds like a letter my grandfather sent to the rest of my family expressing concern about my moral well-being when I started seriously working on political campaigns in the early 1990s.
When most of us think about the sophists, which is rarely if ever, it is in a poor light. The sophists come to us primarily through Plato’s dialogues in which Socrates is something less than kind to them – in Protagoras he accuses the sophists of poisoning the soul.
More recent readings of what the sophists wrote, as opposed to what Plato wrote about what Socrates said about them, paint a more complicated picture.
Sophists were wandering political and policy experts who went from town to town selling their insights and teaching their skills (before talk radio, 24-hour cable news and the internet, political pundits had to go to their listeners). As John Dillon and Tania Gergel write in The Greek Sophists, “Athens became the venue or this kind of travelling ‘expert’ in the arts of discourse and persuasion.” They gave “public lectures, and more importantly, private instruction to those who were willing and able to pay the price…” The fee could be high, as much as the equivalent of $160,000 in today’s prices.
One of the leading sophists was Protagoras, the subject of the Platonic dialogue above. In the dialogue Socrates asks Protagoras what he teaches – painters teach painting, flutists teach flute, so what do sophists teach? “[P]rudence in affairs private as well as public…[a student] will be able to speak and act for the best affairs of the state.” “…is your meaning that you teach the art of politics, and that you promise to make men good citizens?” Socrates asks. “That”, says Protagoras, “is exactly the profession which I make.” Socrates comes down pretty hard at this point – “this art cannot be taught or communicated man to man.” Socrates spends the rest of the dialogue doing his best Lt. Columbo (“I want to ask you a little question, which if you will only answer, I shall be quite satisfied…”) and thumps the sophist like a broken whack-a-mole game.
But Protagoras makes an interesting claim here – that he can teach people how to be good citizens and good advocates. As Edward Schiappa explains in the Fall 1991 issue of The Rhetoric Review"Protagoras is credited with providing the first theoretical defense of democracy.” In the Spring 1989 issue of the same journal, Sharon Crowley explains that Protagoras believed that rhetoric helped “balance alternatives against one another” and through that “point to an appropriate course of action.” Protagoras, for Crowley, is “squarely on the side of democratic politics.”
In this light Protagoras was a committed democrat who made his living telling folks how to be successful advocates. If he weren’t dead he’d be running a firm on K Street.
In “The Case for the Sophists” in the Spring 1993 issue of The Rhetoric Review John Scenters-Zapico quotes Poulakos as defining rhetoric as, “the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible.” This is a pretty good definition of politics – one that presages both the maxim that ‘politics is the art of the possible’ and political scientists who write about policy entrepreneurs and issue framing. And the ability to identify opportune moments, figure out what can be achieved in them and then making it happen is a pretty good description of what a lot of us in Washington do for a living.
