Healing ideas: Body, soul, and body politic in the visions of Plato, Paul, Augustine and Rousseau

Healing Ideas is an examination of important understandings of the soul and body and the place they have had in theories about the just political order. Fundamental political questions---about the nature of justice, about the proper relationship of subordinate collectivities to the polity, about the educative role of politics---have frequently been treated metaphorically, and metaphors that have been used to shed light on such questions have often come from the domain of psychology and biology. These psychological and biological understandings are not prefashioned in an a priori manner, but are retooled and reworked in order that they might be brought to bear on political life. Another way of saying this is that the four thinkers examined in the dissertation do not merely describe politics in terms that evoke images of bodily health, their use of therapeutic tropes is way of prescribing a certain kind of political order.;The critiques that Plato, Paul, Augustine and Rousseau bring to bear on the political problems of their day are very different, and yet I argue that the visions of all four thinkers are politically problematic for some of the same reasons. In the arc that connects all four thinkers we find a strong valuation of inwardness, especially in distinction to an ethics of appearance and competitive excellence. This strong valuation of inwardness is entirely consistent with a second position, a skepticism towards popular opinion, or even a tendency to think of opinion as inherently corrupt and corrupting. This tendency to devalue common judgement, combined with the tendency to value inwardness, makes any sort of truly vital politics difficult.