Staging Socrates: The Public Intellectual and Democracy in Maxwell Anderson’sBarefoot in Athens

Abstract

Though much lauded as a playwright in his day, Maxwell Anderson was also an outspoken dissident, fired from two teaching posts early in his career for his political views. Barefoot in Athens (1951), staged during the period of McCarthyism and the outbreak of the Korean War, investigates those political events and their impact on free speech, dramatizing the marginalization of the intellectual through parallels with the life and trial of Socrates of Athens in 399 BCE. I draw on critics including Julien Benda and Edward Said, as well as Martin’s Puchner’s discussion of the “Socrates Play” genre, to triangulate Anderson’s vision of the public intellectual as a truth-seeker whose social commitments propel him to interrogate powerful authorities and expose non-democratic principles. In Barefoot, Anderson diagnoses the pathologies of contemporary American democracy through his depictions of the last weeks of Socrates’ life, portraying the great thinker not as an aloof philosopher but as an engaged intellectual. In this way, Anderson leverages the long tradition of the “Socrates Play” to cast a light on the political forces that sought to sideline and silence public intellectuals during his own era while seeking new definitions of and roles for the public intellectual based on the evaluation of past models.