Thank you so much, David, for this very generous engagement with my piece. I think this is an excellent summary of what I’ve written, and also offers some useful criticisms and suggestions for further thought. I’m also very impressed that you managed to produce something so high-quality by only a few days after I’d posted my article! Anyway, I agree with the great bulk of what you’ve written — and sometimes even where there seems to be disagreement I think that disagreement is less real than apparent. But I will address a few of the issues you’ve raised (especially where disagreement is most substantial), starting with issues relating to my reading of Popper and his place in intellectual history (I’ll do this today), and then going on to larger issues to do with democracy and liberalism (I’ll get to this sometime soon!)

Let me start with a point near the beginning of your piece where I think that we’re actually less in agreement than you might think. You say, ‘it seems as though Kierstead agrees with Popper’s critics that he got Plato wrong on just about every major point and that his interpretations were not even plausible.’ I think this is a bit strong; what I conceived of myself as doing was actually accepting a lot of Popper’s critique, but then agreeing with his critics when it came to some particularly egregious over-reachings on Popper’s part. (The idea that the Republic was a sort of manifesto for Plato as Philosopher-King as Athens is probably the best example of this sort of over-reaching). Granted, some of the things Popper got wrong are ones that he himself emphasized pretty strongly — both the idea that Plato wanted to go back to a tribal society and that he was a historicist are quite central to Popper’s argumentative strategy in Vol. 1 of The Open Society. But that volume also contains a good deal of what I see as pretty sensible Platonic exegesis, both in the text and in the notes — something even some of his critics ceded to Popper. Maybe that didn’t come across very clearly in my essay, but, then (as here), it makes more sense in a discussion to focus on points of controversy!

When you say, near the end, that I claim that ‘in the light of Popper’s critique, it became untenable to defend a central place for Plato in our educational curriculum on the grounds that his ideas had positive value rather than mere pedagogical usefulness,’ I’m not sure that’s quite what I had in mind, either. It’s very close, but I should make clear that I definitely don’t think that we should only teach Plato as a kind of guide to how not to think about things. Nor do I think that his ideas were always taken in the past as an absolutely infallible blueprint to utopia. What I do think, though, is that the kind of uncritical veneration that men like Richard Livingstone had for Plato became much more difficult after Popper than it had been before. That does’t mean that Plato is now seen, or should be seen, as just a teaching tool. I think we see him as having some quite interesting things to say — some of them perhaps true, and some of them very thought-provoking; but we don’t read him anymore with quite the same reverence as he was once read. This is one of the places where I suspect we disagree less than it might seem.

That may also be the case with the final point about intellectual history that I’ll address here. You say that J.S. Mill (as well as George Grote) interpreted Plato ‘in a generally non-doctrinal way,’ a fact which complicates my ‘narrative of non-dogmatic readings emerging primarily in light of Popper’s critique,’ as does ‘the occurrence already in antiquity of similar readings of Plato as a kind of skeptic.’ I think this is a good point to raise, though I think what I’d want to claim isn’t so much that non-dogmatic readings of Plato emerge primarily after Popper, but that Popper’s book made non-dogmatic modes of interpretation seem increasingly attractive. The way I put it in my piece is that the post-war shift in Plato studies ‘was motivated and driven forward partly by the need to find new and better reasons for the continued study of Plato’ — emphasis added. It’s not that Popper brought the reading of Plato in non-dogmatic terms into being, just that he might be seen as a major contributing factor in the post-war boom in non-dogmatic readings in the Anglophone world.

To be continued…