Conflict of interest report: Thakkar and I went to graduate school together. So, I'm inclined to rage with fury, envy, and self-loathing that he has published this book, while I have published lots of goodreads reviews. Nonetheless, I tried to stay objective, and on reflection think this is pretty good, though it tries to do too much. Which is basically the best case version for a dissertation-turned-book, since most of them are pretty good, but don't try to do anything at all.

Thakkar's reading of Republic is an interesting one, and his suggestion that we should take from it the idea of informed citizenship (rather than informed kingship) might well be productive, but at times it's hard for me to get into the argument. The main interlocutors are other Plato scholars (fair enough), as well as various political science people who dispute the usefulness of 'ideal theory.' Coming from a very different way of thinking, I'm inclined to suggest that nobody cares what those political science types say, and that such arguments are precisely what makes much political science unbearably stupid. Thakkar himself knows this, but the audience is political science people, and so one must go through Sen, Rawls, and so on.

Another way of phrasing the argument, for those of us more to the left, is to ask about the relationship between theory and society, and this comes up a little towards the end of the book, in a chapter that rehashes much of Thakkar's essays for The Point Magazine. This seems to me a stronger analysis of society than anything we can get in Plato, and this points to the most obvious difficulty in the book: stitching together the Plato scholarship and the Marxian social theory. It's not clear to me, at least, that adding Plato does Marx any good (or Plato, for that matter).

Smaller complaints include the pointless numbering of paragraphs, and the attempt to make Plato into Aristotle--something that I complained about when this book was just a gleam in Thakkar's eye.

But this book is extremely well-written, ambitious, and fascinating in the details. I read it for two reasons, first, because I know Thakkar, and second, to help me prepare to teach Plato; it was extremely helpful in that. Had it not filled me with regret over my wasted education, I would have given it five stars. ( )