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Plato’s Medicinal Politics and Its Hippocratic Entwinement

Illness, Paideia, and the Decline of an Ideal City

Expected online publication date:  31 August 2026

Wenjin Liu
Affiliation:
Duke University

Summary

This Element argues that Plato's medical language in political contexts is not mere metaphor but a medical model of political analysis. Centering on the Republic, it shows how Plato adopts, critiques, and reworks Hippocratic ideas to diagnose, explain, evaluate, and treat political conditions. The payoff is a solution to a central puzzle: how the ideal city can be exceptionally stable yet liable to degenerate into vice. Its stability, I argue, consists in a robustness and resilience analogous to bodily health, sustained by protective institutions and practices; its fragility lies in the inevitable fallibility of those protections, which cannot indefinitely prevent, arrest, or reverse corruption over time. The Element then identifies a corrupt paideia-understood as a city-wide system of acculturation-as the singular, foundational cause of political degeneration, and closes by drawing lessons about the limits and prospects of genuine reform.

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Plato’s Medicinal Politics and Its Hippocratic Entwinement
  • Wenjin Liu, Duke University
  • Online ISBN: 9781009732222
Available formats No formats are currently available for this content.
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Plato’s Medicinal Politics and Its Hippocratic Entwinement
  • Wenjin Liu, Duke University
  • Online ISBN: 9781009732222
Available formats No formats are currently available for this content.
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Plato’s Medicinal Politics and Its Hippocratic Entwinement
  • Wenjin Liu, Duke University
  • Online ISBN: 9781009732222
Available formats No formats are currently available for this content.
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