V's Pick #11: Rereading the Sophists by Susan C. Jarratt

Jarratt sets out on a lofty and admirable attempt - to reread the sophists in order to open up rhetorical scholarship to allow other marginalized voices (like those of women) into the arena. However, she makes a few careless moves (oh, academia) and the result has been a backlash on this book from multiple other scholars (see reviews to come). The sophists are a wholly undocumented and largely ignored categorization of orators that span pre-Aristotle. Most famously, Gorgias and Protogoras, but depending on who you read (and believe) Socrates is arguably the most famous sophists. I read Jarratt before reading her opposition and found myself nodding in feminist agreement with a lot of what she had to say. Hey, here's the group of talented thinkers ("sophists" translates from Greek to mean "person of wisdom") who taught and spoke with grace, who pushed the flowery expressive style of writing I, in 2010, still adore and often write - how dare scholarship ignore them! Admittedly, I've had a soft spot for these guys (yes, only guys, we'll get to that in a later review) since my introductory rhetoric course. However, while Jarratt makes a compelling argument for the removal of binary thinking (we don't need to choose either Plato OR Aristotle), that Aristotle was kind of a stick-in-mud and that celebrating the sophists will bring us closer to a democratic view of rhetoric, she fails to make mention of the fact that group the sophists is in itself, a near impossible task. Her categorization seems to rely on the weak basis of wise thinkers within a certain time period who valued the rhetorical canon of style and who taught people how to be good citizens. Sounds good, right? Too bad it's wrong. 

While Jarratt wants us to believe that the sophists main exigence for speaking and writing was to promote democracy, the problem remains that while they did this, they did it for money (something other orators didn't request from students) and they ONLY taught those who could pay (i.e. the elite). Now, that's not too different from college professors in American pre-1960, but the main difference is that to say that a group of thinkers can bring in voices that have been silenced when they themselves only taught a specific group is a movement rife with problems. Furthermore, as Jarratt herself discusses in Rereading the students were all men, all white, and all from families whose elders paid for their tuition. Again, not so different from some colleges even today...but the main issue I take up with Jarratt's request for sophist-as-hero is that those elders told the sophists what to teach - they wanted their sons and grandsons, their lineage, to learn nomos (politics) and that is what the sophists taught. Good lessons, but hardly the freedom for a democratic voice. Essentially, the sophists were sort of like privately hired teachers for future rulers, responsible for teaching them how to persuade and behave in order to rule. 

In short, there are a lot of problems with this book and I discovered even more as a I read the extended scholarship. I think Jarratt's aim was solid, but her performance in this text was full of gaps. I agree with her mission but have read a handful of other books now that do what she wanted to do without leaving so much out. Poor sophists, foiled again.