Democracy under Fire: A New Interpretation of Plato's Crito

This book argues that Plato’s Crito is a fundamental critique of democracy, presenting Crito as the representative democratic citizen. Initially appearing good, decent and law-abiding, but ultimately revealed as bad, indecent and a lawbreaker, harmful to the polis. Through the dialogue’s three-stage structure—revelation, rectification, and refutation—Socrates exposes in Crito a fatal democratic flaw. This the author calls the “Measure for Measure argument”: the social legitimation of lawbre...