Building the Beautiful City

2026 Eric Timewell Memorial Lecture for the Platonic Academy of Melbourne

Last week, I gave the Eric Timewell Memorial Lecture for the Platonic Academy of Melbourne. Here’s the introductory material, followed by the full video.

Building the Beautiful City: The Possibility of Actualizing Plato’s Philosophy at the Level of Politics

In the Republic, Plato describes a “beautiful city” in which philosophers become kings and kings become philosophers. Many readers treat the beautiful city as an impractical fantasy. Often it is alleged that the beautiful city is a pedagogical device, introduced to caution Glaucon against the luxurious life. But what if the beautiful city is something we are actually supposed to attempt to build? Plato himself is said to have gone to Syracuse seeking to persuade a tyrant to take up philosophy. Neoplatonists even attempted to divinize the Roman Empire. How can we make sense of Plato’s political interventions? And how did the Neoplatonists understand their political activity to be meaningfully Platonic? In this talk, Benjamin Studebaker will explore the possibility of taking the beautiful city seriously as the basis for a practical politics. He’ll discuss historical attempts to actualize Plato’s politics, contemporary political readings, and the consequences of a more political interpretation for our understanding of the rest of Plato’s corpus.