The main purpose of this edition and commentary is to enable the learner to read and enjoy Plato's Symposium in Greek, to understand its arguments and to appreciate its artistry. The secondary purpose is to improve the learner's knowledge of Greek in order that he may find it easier to read other texts. In an edition which is meant to be brief and relatively inexpensive, these two purposes compete for space, and the need to increase the reader's speed by telling him the meanings of words rather than making him seek them all in the lexicon is also a claim on space.

My information about the text of the Symposium is derived from the text and apparatus criticus of Burnet's Oxford Classical Text and of Robin's Budé edition, supplemented by some further data helpfully communicated to me by Dr W. S. McD. Nicoll. I have not collated any Plato manuscripts myself, but I have exercised my own judgement throughout in editing the text on the evidence available to me. Textual problems are not discussed in the commentary, nor are variants and emendations recorded in the apparatus, except where they are important. Users of this or any edition are warned that the textual variants presented by citations from Plato in later literature are not yet as fully investigated as is desirable.

The Symposium, like most of what Plato wrote, is about how life should be lived; not just the life of an ancient Athenian, but your life and mine. Since he is a highly original thinker and a writer of remarkable imagination, skill, dramatic power and sensitivity in the use of language, what he says is worth reading, and the minimum requirement of any commentary on any work of his is that it should ask in respect of each passage: what does he mean? why does he say it? does it follow? and is it true? His distinctive values, attitudes, assumptions, cravings and passions are not mine, and for that reason I do not find his philosophical arguments even marginally persuasive. Much that is written about him is marked, in my view, by an uncritical enthusiasm for the abstract and immutable, as if such an enthusiasm always and necessarily afforded better access to the truth about man, nature and divinity than is afforded by a love of the particular, material and perishable.

‘The outbreak of the Second Punic War’, says Eduard Meyer, ‘was the consequence of a deliberate decision by Hannibal; that of the Seven Years War, of a decision by Frederick the Great; and that of the War of 1866, of a decision by Bismarck. All of them might have decided differently, and different personalities would…have decided differently; the consequence would have been that the course of history would have been different.’ In footnote 2 he adds, ‘This is neither to affirm nor to deny that in such a case the wars in question would never have occurred: that is a completely unanswerable and so an idle question.’ Leaving aside the awkward relationship between the second sentence and Meyer's previously discussed account of the relationship between ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ in history, what is most debatable in this passage is the view that questions to which no answer, or no certain answer, can be given are, for that reason alone, ‘idle’ questions. Things would be in a bad way even in empirical science if those deep questions to which it gives no answer were never to be raised. To be sure, we are not concerned here with such ‘Ultimate’ problems: rather, it is a case of a question which, on the one hand, has been ‘overtaken’ by events and, on the other, cannot receive a clear positive answer in the state of our actual and possible knowledge.

In order to grasp the connexions between the fundamental religious ideas of ascetic Protestantism and its maxims of everyday economic life, it is necessary above all to refer to those theological writings which can be seen to have had their origins in pastoral practice. For, in a time when the next world was everything, when the social position of the Christian depended on his admission to communion, and when the influence exercised by the clergy in the cure of souls, in church discipline and in preaching, was of a kind which (as the merest glance at the collections of ‘consilia’, ‘casus conscientiae’, etc. will show) we modern men simply cannot any longer begin to imagine, the religious forces at work in pastoral practice are the decisive influences in forming ‘national character’.

For the purposes of our discussions in this section, as opposed to later discussions, we may treat ascetic Protestantism as a single undifferentiated whole. But since that kind of English Puritanism which had its roots in Calvinism aftords the most consistent attempt to work out the basis of the idea of the ‘calling’, we may, in accordance with our principle, take one of its representatives as the focus of our discussion. Richard Baxter is distinguished above many other literary representatives of the Puritan ethic by his eminently practical and conciliatory attitude, and also by the universal recognition of his constantly republished and translated works.

It has always been the case that, when a class has achieved economic power, it begins to think of its expectations of political leadership. It is dangerous and, in the long run, contrary to the national interest for an economically declining class to retain political dominance. But it is even more dangerous when economic strength and so the hope of political power come the way of classes which are not yet sufficiently mature in political terms for the leadership of the state. Both these menaces threaten Germany at the present time and are in reality the key to the present dangers of our situation. Furthermore, the shifts in the social structure of the East, with which the phenomena discussed in the first part of this lecture are connected, belong in this wider context.

Right up to the present day, the dynasty in Prussia has been politically dependent on the Prussian Junker Estate. It is only in cooperation with it (though admittedly also in opposition to it) that it has been able to build the Prussian state. I am well aware that, to South German ears, the word ‘Junker’ has a joyless ring. Perhaps it will be felt that I am speaking in too. ‘Prussian’ a fashion if I say a word in their favour. I do not know. Even today in Prussia that Estate has many opportunities for achieving power and influence, or for reaching the ear of the monarch, which are not open to every citizen.

What lies at the root of the Liberal Democrats' reservations about agrarian reform is this: there is no doubt that the great mass of the peasants themselves could never be won over to an agrarian programme which was ‘individualistic’ in the West European sense. However true it may be that decisions about the allocation of land can be the product of an extremely bitter class struggle, it is certainly not only economic class interests which influence the administration of the commune but also deeply-rooted conceptions of ‘natural justice’. For it is as obvious as it could be that the necessary decision to reapportion land is not reached only with the votes either of those who hope to better their positions by it or of those who have been intimidated by violence or boycott. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that it is equally certain that this very re-allocation of land, which seems from the outside to be the most important element of agricultural democracy in this form of social organisation, very often exists, insofar as it can be thought of as a piece of effective ‘social policy’, only on paper. The rich peasants lease, alienate or bequeath their lands (naturally, only within the commune), relying on there being no decisions about re-allocation; or, alternatively, they are in a position to control other members of the commune who are in their debt, and the re-allocation serves in practice to increase their power.

If we turn from the socially or economically privileged strata of society, we find an apparent increase in the variety of religious behaviour. Amongst the petty bourgeoisie, and in particular especially the artisan class, there are to be found the most striking contradictions side by side. It is impossible to conceive of greater contrasts between different styles of religion than those between caste taboo and the magical or mystagogic forms of religion, both sacramental and orgiastic, to be found in India, Chinese animism, Islamic dervish-religion, early Christianity, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, with its emphasis on congregational enthusiasm and inspiration, primitive superstition coupled with Dionysiac orgiasticism in ancient Greece, Pharisaic legalism in ancient urban Judaism, the essentially idolatrous form of medieval Christianity which existed alongside all kinds of sectarianism and the various forms of Protestantism to be found in the early modern period. Early Christianity was certainly from the beginning a religion specifically for artisans. Its saviour was a small-town artisan, its missionaries itinerant journeymen; indeed, the greatest of them was an itinerant tent-maker, already so completely estranged from the land that in one of his epistles he makes blatantly absurd use of an image taken from the practice of tree-grafting. Finally, the Christian congregations of the ancient world were, as we have already seen, overwhelmingly urban and recruited mainly from the ranks of artisans, both free and unfree.

We may summarise what has been said in this survey of Asian civilisation (extremely superficial as it has been in view of the richness of the structures considered) in the following way:

For Asia as a whole, China has played much the same role as France has done in the modern Western world. From China has stemmed all gentlemanly ‘polish’, from Tibet to Japan and Indo-China. India, on the other hand, has come to have something of the significance that ancient Greece has had in the West. There is little thought about anything beyond purely practical concerns in Asia whose sources are not ultimately to be sought in India. Above all, the Indian salvation religions, both orthodox and heterodox, have had some claim to be considered as playing roughly the role, for the whole of Asia, that Christianity has played in the West. With one big difference: apart from local, and usually short-lived, exceptions, none of them has been elevated for any length of time to the position of the single dominant ‘church’ in the sense in which this was the case in the West in the Middle Ages and indeed right up to the Peace of Westphalia. Asia was, and remained, in principle the land of free competition between religions, of ‘tolerance’ in the sense of late Classical antiquity – subject, that is, to due reservations for the limits imposed by reasons of state, which, it should not be forgotten, continue even in the modern world to set bounds to all forms of religious toleration, albeit taking effect in a different direction.

The various papers on methodology which Weber published between 1903 and 1917 have had a strong and continuing influence despite the fact that they were largely directed to the writings of others and their arguments cannot fully be grasped except by readers already familiar with the history of the disputes among German philosophers and social scientists to which they refer. The subjects under dispute, however, have remained of central concern to philosophers and social scientists, and Weber's contribution to them anticipates to a remarkable degree the preoccupations of subsequent writers in Britain and the United States. These preoccupations have centred on the three topics of causality, meaning and values on which those who have asserted that there is a fundamental difference of kind between the natural and the social sciences have rested their arguments. The relation between the three is itself a matter of controversy and those who have made this assertion have done so on a number of different and sometimes incompatible grounds. But they have tended to maintain, first, that human actions cannot be explained in terms of law-like relations of cause and effect; secondly, that to grasp the meaning which human actions have to those performing them requires a different method from any known to, or required by, practitioners of natural science; and thirdly, that the social scientist's moral, political and/or aesthetic values necessarily enter into his conclusions in a way that those of the natural scientist do not.