Introduction Matthew D. Dinan and Denise Schaeffer THE SCHOLARLY ACHIEVEMENT OF MARY P. NICHOLS Politics, Literature & Film in Conversation is a collection celebrating the scholarly achievement of Mary Pollingue Nichols. The volume features chapters written exclusively by her former doctoral students. A professor emerita of political science at Baylor University, she has supervised more than forty dissertations at Catholic University of America, Fordham University, and Baylor, teaching and mentoring scores of other students at every level. Although she specializes in Ancient Greek political thought, Nichols’s pathbreaking scholarly work spans the entire history of political philosophy, and politics, literature, and film. She has published over fifty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, co-translated an edition of Plato’s Euthydemus, coedited Readings in American Government with David K. Nichols (now in its ninth edition), and published five scholarly monographs (the sixth—a highly anticipated study of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—is underway as of this writing). She has given lectures throughout North America, performed exemplary university service, and tirelessly contributed to the discipline of political science at every stage of her career. One area in which her service to North American political science has been especially influential has been her early contribution to, and support of, the subfield of politics, literature, and film. Not only was Nichols instrumental in the formation of the organized section on politics, literature, and film in the American Political Science Association, but she established the first interdisciplinary minor in that field at the doctoral level in the political theory program at Baylor. She has published widely on literature and film as works of political thought, and her students have become some of the most 1 RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 1 3/5/2021 1:26:47 PM 2 Matthew D. Dinan and Denise Schaeffer enthusiastic contributors to the subfield. It is no exaggeration to say that the book series in which this volume appears would not exist without Nichols’s seminal scholarly work. Nichols received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1975, working under the supervision of Joseph Cropsey, the colleague and literary executor of Leo Strauss. Nichols’s œuvre shows a persistent concern to work through some of the ostensibly intractable problems in the history of political philosophy; in particular, the conflicts between reason and revelation, philosophy and the city, ancients and moderns, poetry and philosophy. Through Nichols’s supple and original interpretations of ancient texts in particular she shows that these organizing categories are more porous than they might seem. She furthermore follows her teacher Cropsey in subtly demonstrating how these thinkers offer viable alternatives to postmodern thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger.1 In particular, her work contains a sustained critique of the potential excesses of rationalism, cautioning against the tendency to abstract from human limitation and necessity. Yet, in this she is not conventionally conservative, alerting her readers especially to the dangers of this abstraction for citizens, families, and the marginalized. Across her body of scholarly work, Nichols practices a theoretically informed political science, showing how such a political science can even now provide guidance about the good life, sustain just regimes, preserve political freedom, and encourage authentic human flourishing. Socrates and the Political Community, Nichols’s first book on ancient political theory, mounts a challenge to Allan Bloom’s influential interpretation of the Republic by way of interpretations of Aristophanes’s Clouds, Plato’s Republic, and Aristotle’s Politics.2 Following Strauss in The City and Man, Bloom argues that Socrates considers political life to be little more than the sleepy realm of conventional opinion—the “cave”—and that ambitious individuals like Glaucon need to be turned toward philosophy as a sort of prophylactic against the tyranny modeled by the city in speech, “to cause the unphilosophic man to be concerned about justice for fear of what will happen to him in another world, and to turn philosophic men to the study of the soul.”3 In such a reading, neither the lives of philosophy nor politics appear choice-worthy for their own sakes; for Bloom, “one can say that the [Republic teaches] us nothing other than the necessity of philosophy and its priority and superiority to the political life.”4 Nichols, by contrast, suggests that Socrates’s activity in the Republic is comparable to that of the legislator in deed as well as in speech. Rather than presenting Socrates as attempting to hoodwink the ambitious Glaucon into pursuing the philosophy for the sake of the city, Nichols sees a Socrates who creates a space for him and the rest of the interlocutors to participate in a “dialogical community.” Such a community affirms the ultimate goodness of RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 2 3/5/2021 1:26:47 PM Introduction 3 the philosophical life, but suggests that, absent the moderating and limiting influence of friends, philosophy itself can embody the tyranny modeled by the philosopher-kings. Nichols links Glaucon’s love of abstraction and precision to the account of philosophy Socrates provides in that text: the problem with the philosopher-kings is then doubled, as their tyrannical political plans are inseparable from their mathematical abstraction from the human things. In Nichols’s reading, politics is not simply a necessary evil, the cynical precondition for providing the best life for the lucky few philosophical souls, but in fact the proper object of study for the philosopher, who remains a limited human being, and seeks self-knowledge. Where Bloom, and to an extent Strauss, view the relationship between philosophy and the city as necessarily antagonistic, Nichols locates the meaning and purpose of the philosophical life in reflection not on abstract universals, but on the embodied particularities of human life: “The Socratic community is a heterogenous one, which comes closer than the politics described in the Republic, whether the city in speech or the degenerative regimes, to satisfying the demands of both Glaucon and Adeimantus.”5 Nichols might then counter Nietzsche’s suggestion that the Western tradition is preoccupied with abstract, otherworldly contemplation of the things aloft with the suggestion that philosophy best understands itself when it finds its purposes within limited, embodied human life. Her account of philosophy and politics in the Republic in this way shows how that dialogue points to the need for an explicitly political philosophy— one which attends to the philosophical meaning of politics as such, defending politics on philosophical grounds. At the end of Socrates and the Political Community, Nichols points to Aristotle’s criticisms of Socratic communism in Book 2 of the Politics as the place where this project of a true politikē can be found. Nichols’ next, and perhaps best-known book, Citizens and Statesmen, expands on the promise implied in the pivot to Aristotle in the final chapter of Socrates and the Political Community.6 In a stunning challenge to the received interpretation of Aristotle’s Politics, Nichols interrupts a scholarly consensus that had long held that Aristotle’s conservative political philosophy defends natural slavery, excludes women from political rule, and describes the best regime as the monarchical rule of the most virtuous man. Nichols presents a lively Aristotle whose politikē complicates rigid hierarchies purporting to be rooted in nature. In Nichols’s hands, we find an Aristotle whose claims are invitations to thought, not dogmatic assertions. By paying attention to Aristotle’s carefully chosen examples and his complex literary allusions, Nichols demonstrates that Aristotle’s Politics is itself a work of statesmanship, designed to gently loosen strong assumptions about the inferiority of women and slaves. As she observes, for instance, Aristotle’s citation of Sophocles’s Ajax to insist that “Silence gives grace to a woman,” RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 3 3/5/2021 1:26:47 PM 4 Matthew D. Dinan and Denise Schaeffer does not in fact support the idea that women lack “deliberative power.” As Nichols puts it: The words are spoken by Ajax . . . when he is maddened by excessive love of honor. And they are spoken to his wife Tecmessa when she asks her husband for an account of his mad activities. It is difficult to see in this story an illustration of the male’s greater deliberative power. It is a madman, Aristotle suggests, who does not listen to the good advice of a woman.7 Nichols thereby shows that rather than recommending despotic rule, Aristotle is alive to the ways in which despotism threatens human flourishing—in politics, the family, and philosophy alike—and undercuts its own attempts at establishing self-sufficiency. True self-sufficient freedom is possible only within the horizon of naturally imposed limitations. To wit, the experiences of women as mothers, and as those ruled by often despotic men, are key to understanding political life as such. The recognition of limits makes us betAQ: Per house style, ter citizens, political actors, and, critically, thinkers, who cannot prima facie assert independence from the divine: “human beings are political animals foreignlanguage who learn this truth about themselves when they rule and are ruled in turn, terms that when they act, proving their freedom and encountering the limits inherent are present in the Merriam- in every action. Aristotle’s politikē, his philosophizing about politics, is Webster Dic- therefore more complete, and more philosophic than a life ‘divorced from all tionary are external things.’ Politikē is both the means to self-knowledge and the activity not italicized. that best expresses it.”8 Against a Nietzschean view of politics as struggle and philosophy as an attempt to escape the human things, Nichols affirms the political realm as one of in which meaningful persuasion—and contemplation of the human things—can occur. Aristotle’s Politics affirms the philosophical goodness of politics and the political goodness of philosophy. Nichols’s Socrates on Friendship and Community makes explicit what had been implicit in her earlier books, as she returns to Plato to challenge the popular notion that Socrates is a fundamentally “alienating” and “alienated” figure.9 Nichols’s interpretations of the Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis depict a Socrates concerned with the well-being of his friends as he discusses love and friendship. More importantly, she shows how for Plato’s Socrates, philosophy finds “meaning and purpose” that saves it from potentially despotic abstraction: “If one pursues the truth because it is one’s good,” she suggests, one “runs the risk of confounding the object of [one’s] search with the good, or the true with the useful.” The philosopher’s understanding must therefore be “informed by an experience of another that resists being reduced to his own desires and needs.” This is the experience of friendship, “an experience of one’s own as another who cannot be assimilated or subordinated.”10 Philosophy thereby becomes fully Socratic not when it reaches RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 4 3/5/2021 1:26:47 PM Introduction 5 beyond the beings or retreats fully into the self, but when, in attending to the other, it experiences a collision of self and other, of familiarity and strangeness. Philosophy inhabits the in-between space of knowing and not-knowing, recognizing that the truth can never be fully assimilated into the self. For this reason, it must also turn to poetry and piety alike as supplements, but supplements which gain something in this friendship: poetry becomes more beautiful through fidelity to the truth; piety becomes more open to admitting its limitations through its encounter with thought. Thus, in her major works on Aristotle and Plato, Nichols dwells on the AQ: Should peripetetery of self and other, showing in ancient political thought atten- “peripettiveness to distinctions—to the given—but also to the ways in which ideas etery” be “ require particularity in order to be known by us. In Aristotle, this leads to peripatetery” a defense of political life understood as involving the heterogeneity of the in the sentence “Thus, city, the contemplation of which allows for the full experience of the life in her major of philosophy; in Plato, this leads to a defense of philosophy which is most works on fully experienced in friendship, a humane basis for good politics. These Aristotle and themes receive a surprisingly fulsome development in Thucydides and the Plato …”? Pursuit of Freedom, a study treating not political theory but history.11 Yet, as Nichols shows, Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War is not a history as is usually understood, but an “artful” history, which shows both Thucydides’s freedom, as well as the possibility of freedom in the lives of those in the poleis he chronicles. Nichols offers original readings of some of the most prominent citizens and statesmen in the Peloponnesian War: Pericles, Brasidas, Nicias, Alcibiades, Themistocles, and Thucydides himself. She orients her analysis of freedom around the paradoxical way in which Athenian freedom makes possible certain virtues, which, in turn, help to preserve that same freedom. At the same time, she notes the limits to the pursuit of freedom, and the ways in which its pursuit—particularly in imperialism—can be undermined by material limitations. Nichols considers the various ways that some of the important individuals in the Peloponnesian War embody Athenian freedom, and the limits to such embodiment: Nicias’s failure, for instance, to be sufficiently free from Athenian custom makes his homecoming impossible; whereas Alcibiades’s polytropism gives him great freedom at the cost of ever making a homecoming. Though she defends both Pericles and Themistocles, it is Thucydides himself, whose “writing up” (xugrapphein) of the war ultimately allows for the most important embodiment of freedom expressed in an individual existence. Thucydides’s ability to transcend his particular context while remaining resolutely “Athenian” is an example of freedom as the conjunction of the desire for “sailing away” with that of “homecoming.” Thucydides in this way might be said to combine Aristotelian politikē with Socratic philosophy, acting as a citizen of Athens and thereby as a statesman, but achieving self-reflection in his grand logos of the war. Thucydides, the RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 5 3/5/2021 1:26:47 PM 6 Matthew D. Dinan and Denise Schaeffer artful historian, gains the freedom of speculation through fidelity to the given; he gains an independence of Athenian nomos which allows him to ultimately defend its peculiar way of life. In this way, his act of friendship to his particular time and place becomes a work for all time. As evidenced throughout her work on ancient political theory, for Nichols, there is reason to doubt the final truth of the harsh dichotomies sometimes used to describe the history of political philosophy. Although she does not attempt a Hegelian synthesis of these antinomies, she shows how conversation, or friendly relations between seeming opposites, can be achieved. The literary character of her reading of these ancient Greek texts, as well as her substantive focus on artistry and poetry as political and philosophical categories, informs her many contributions to the serious study of politics, literature, and film: from her counterintuitive, but compelling, book-length study of filmmaker Woody Allen, Reconstructing Woody, to her many essays of the plays of William Shakespeare; from the writings of William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Jonathan Swift to filmmakers like Stillman, Palminteri, and Ford. Nichols’s championing of politics, literature, and film flows from her engagement with ancient Greek texts.12 Poetry can converse with politics and philosophy alike, expressing the goodness of the concrete particularities of human life. For Nichols, it is a conversation in which literary artists and filmmakers remain engaged, even today. What is more, Nichols’s scholarly contributions can themselves be understood as dialogical or conversational in the deepest sense. Just as for Nichols philosophy must come to resemble friendship, so might we consider her thought and work as a series of conversations with the greatest minds of the Western tradition. As she likes to observe, the Greek word for “dialogue,” dialegesthai literally means “to talk things through.” To “talk things through” gestures toward conciliation and comedy rather than conflict and tragedy. In that spirit, the chapters in this collection can be understood as a series of conversations—and negotiations—with a variety of thinkers, ancient and modern, and between poetry (in the broadest sense) and philosophy about politics. By facilitating these conversations between ancient and modern political philosophy with politics, literature, and film, this volume reflects one of the central theoretical concerns of Professor Nichols’s career. The diversity of works and genres explored in this collection—from poetic readings of Aristotle to philosophical readings of Shakespeare, from the novels of James and Austen to the films of Whit Stillman and Woody Allen—as well as the broadly divergent philosophical evaluations of ethical and political matters contained in these chapters, testifies to the broad scope and influence of Nichols’s scholarship, but also to her expansive generosity as a teacher who encourages her students to their own distinctive forms of excellence as scholars and teachers. RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 6 3/5/2021 1:26:47 PM Introduction 7 PLAN FOR THE VOLUME This collection features chapters in political philosophy that are especially concerned with literature and film as political thought. The volume is divided into three sections which thematically reflect some of the abiding concerns of Prof. Nichols’s career as a scholar and teacher. Part I: Conversations AQ: Referabout Love and Friendship offers a set of chapters thinking about variet- ence to Part ies and philosophical meanings of human connection and affection. Part II: I in text have Conversations between Politics and Poetry considers the political significance been changed of art, but also the ways in which rule is itself a sort of “art” or poetic making to “Conversations about in the deepest sense. Part III: Conversations from Tragedy to Comedy looks Love and at the political and philosophical meanings of the categories of tragedy and Friendship” comedy, and the ways in which these lenses can be used to help us understand as given in the part title the tasks of living together in community. page. Part I: Conversations about Love and Friendship opens with an essay offering an interpretation of the place of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics inspired by Professor Nichols. Stephen Block and Patrick Cain analyze Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, linking this discussion to his treatment of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. They argue that Aristotle’s account of friendship arises from the paradox of the human good that becomes poetically manifest in his account of virtue—the good both reveals our deep neediness that opens us to another, yet it also has the potential to alienate us from others and indeed requires an alienation from ourselves in our longing to possess this good perfectly. Daniel Mahoney’s “Friendship and the Solitude of Greatness: The Case of Charles de Gaulle” explores de Gaulle’s attempts to navigate the demands of the political greatness alongside his recognition of human limitation. Mahoney demonstrates how de Gaulle combined the roles of the magnanimous protector with those of the Christian, and the father. Despite de Gaulle’s commitment to his family, Mahoney finds that he was required to choose character and statesmanship over true friendship in the Aristotelian vein. Lisa Pace Vetter’s contribution, “Love and Friendship in Henry James’s The Bostonians,” uses Aristotle’s understanding of friendship as a hermeneutic for reading The Bostonians. Vetter argues that although James does not depict Aristotle’s “complete” friendship, he demonstrates its felt lack in Bostonians, and nevertheless proves himself a friend to Aristotle through his attempts to think through the complexity of living a good life, especially for women, in the American context. This section closes with Ann and Lee Ward’s “Whit Woody Barcelona: Love and Friendship in White Stillman’s Barcelona and Woody Allen’s Vicky, Christina, Barcelona.” Structuring their analysis in terms of the framework of the “male drama” and “female drama” that is developed in Plato’s Republic, the authors elucidate the ways in which the two films explore RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 7 3/5/2021 1:26:47 PM 8 Matthew D. Dinan and Denise Schaeffer different regime types. Their analysis of this exploration, and the questions it raises, deepens our understanding of what each of the films has to say about European-American relations in the Cold War and post–Cold War contexts in which the dramas are set. Part II: Conversations between Politics and Poetry opens with Kenneth DeLuca’s “Putting Together Courage and Moderation in Plato and Shakespeare.” DeLuca considers the tension between the virtues of courage and moderation as developed in both Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. He examines the role of both virtues in various “republics” as they are theorized, founded, and then degenerate. DeLuca argues that Plato helps us to understand the fundamental difficulty of combining courage and moderation, while Shakespeare illuminates the implications of the failure to do so. Throughout, DeLuca links the discussion of courage and moderation to the human desire to make interpret and make sense of reality by subsuming particulars under universals. Next, Paul Kirkland offers a reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which reads the education of Miranda as an improved version of Machiavelli’s education for political life in The Prince. As the Princess, Miranda avoids the twin dangers of looking for permanent idealized political solutions on the one hand, and of abstracting from politics altogether on the other. Play, Kirkland suggests, is as much “the thing,” politically speaking, as the play is for Shakespeare, the artist. Next, Germaine Paulo Walsh offers a comparison of J. R. R. Tolkien and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in “Reading Tolkien through the Lens of Solzhenitsyn’s Analysis of Ideology: On Art, Responsibility, and Progress.” Walsh puts Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of ideology into conversation with the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. A comparison of these writers may initially strike one as an odd pairing, given the many differences between the two men, both in their literary styles and in their life experiences. However, a deeper look reveals some striking similarities between the two writers, and Walsh analyzes how each writer’s respective view of the nature of art, and the political role of the artist, is exemplified in his own literary work. Finally, Carl Eric Scott examines the surprising prominence of “social dance” in the films of Whit Stillman. Scott makes a compelling case for the place of dance as a part of the social and political commentary in Stillman’s films. Particularly, he shows that by attending to social dance we can not only see Stillman’s critique of the sexual revolution, but, in the character of Violet in Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s self-aware critique of his own excesses as a social critic. Part III: Conversations from Tragedy to Comedy opens with Denise Schaeffer’s analysis of Albert Camus’s stage play adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun. Schaeffer explores the major alterations Camus makes to Faulkner’s original, arguing that they are not simply driven by practical considerations but are subtly congruent with Camus’s own RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 8 3/5/2021 1:26:48 PM Introduction 9 theoretical treatments of the distinctive character of tragedy and rebellion in modernity. Next, Natalie Taylor reflects on the politico-philosophical significance of the literary form of the novel with the help of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen in “A Vindication of Novels: Jane Austen’s Conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft.” Taylor argues that Austen’s Persuasion depicts the virtues required for a more liberal and egalitarian political order as described by Wollstonecraft. Taylor argues that Austen defends an account of marriage that allows for the coming together of both reason and passion, or love and friendship. In so doing, Austen defends the form of the novel as the literary form that could best effect a comedic resolution of “just opinion” with “romantic sentiment” for a new age of liberty. Sara MacDonald’s “From Tragedy to Love: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,” reads that famously odd play of Shakespeare’s as the transition from the account of love and friendship prominent in classical thinkers like Aristotle to the distinctively Christian interpretations of charity and forgiveness found in the modern age. In a way akin to G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, MacDonald’s Shakespeare makes a case for the ultimate victory of comedy over tragedy and shows the political implications of this view for the possibility of actualizing human freedom in community. Finally, Stephen Sims’s chapter, “The Tragic and the Equitable in Aristotle’s Poetics and Ethics,” tracks Aristotle’s use of the story of Odysseus and Penelope as a comedic alternative to the tragic story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in the Poetics. The messier ending of the Odyssey lacks abstract tragic simplicity of the kind demonstrated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic, but the very complexity of human life leaves room for the exercise of prudence and equity, thereby making a case for comedy. NOTES 1. Gregory Bruce Smith, “On Cropsey’s World: Joseph Cropsey and the Tradition of Political Philosophy,” The Review of Politics 60.2 (Spring 1998): 307–341. 2. Mary P. Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987). 3. Allan Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, 2nd edition, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 307–436; 435. 4. Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 435. 5. Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community, 149. 6. Mary P. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 1992). 7. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen, 31. 8. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen, 167. 9. Mary P. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community (New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 9 3/5/2021 1:26:48 PM 10 Matthew D. Dinan and Denise Schaeffer 10. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community, 155. 11. Mary P. Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 12. For a complete list of Prof. Nichols’ publications, please see the Appendix to this volume, pp. XXX–XXX. RL_00a_PONI_INT_docbook_new_indd.indd 10 3/5/2021 1:26:48 PM