extremes into an organic and undiVerentiated whole. A person will not act
courageously by combining rashness and cowardice. A middle class will not
emerge by aggregating the discrete self-interests of rich and poor. Hitting the
mean calls rather for bringing opposing extremes into conversation with one
another and orienting them in a new way that draws on both extremes but is
reducible to neither. Hitting the mean, in other words, produces a uniWed
whole that preserves the plurality of its diVerentiated parts. This orientation
to the middle is not in any sense an orientation to mediocrity. On the
contrary, requiring ethical and political work over time in the form of trust,
good judgment, and an enlarged sense of self-interest, it cultivates, even as it
depends on, the practice of democratic citizenship.
3 Conclusion
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For the political theorists discussed in this chapter, there is no better
place to seek answers to the fundamental questions of politics than in the
texts of the classical Greek world. That the answer these texts oVer takes
the form of a question should not be altogether surprising. This question is
most familiarly associated with Socrates. It is also the central question
for Wgures ranging from Homer’s Achilles to Sophocles’ Philoctetes to
Thucydides’ Pericles to Aristotle’s Theramenes. That question, both the
subject of political science for the Greeks and also its object, is: What
should I do? To call this the signal question for politics is not to reduce
politics to ethics or to claim that the aim of political science is to answer that
question. It is rather to view politics and theorizing about politics as at once
individuated and collective projects that critically interrogate a complex
ethical and political world at least in part by reXecting the questions it
poses back at it.
The ‘‘What should I do’’ question shows politics to be an individuated
project insofar as it is posed by one person addressing himself and signaling
his preparedness to account for his actions. Engaging that question
involves the person with his immediate and particular circumstances
which are, in important ways, unique to him. The actions he takes distinguish
him from others and exemplify his singularity insofar as those actions
186 jill frank