How far is it possible to reconstruct the content of the ‘art of citizenship’ (politikê technê) professed by Protagoras in the dialogue Protagoras? Some commentators have claimed that Protagoras’ statements about the technê are incoherent. Examining this claim, Hussey argues that, while Protagoras can be defended on the charge of incoherence, his exposition of the nature and content of the technê he professes to possess and teach is radically incomplete in several ways. The question then arises whether the Theaetetus can be used to fill in the gaps that Protagoras of the Protagoras left for good practical reasons. If Protagoras’ remarks on truth and wisdom and the ‘changing of perceptions’ in the Theaetetus are taken in a pragmatist way, they imply a conception of a ‘technê of citizenship’ that is capable of improving/transforming human nature, and creating a public political consensus and a stable democratic society. There are many illuminating parallels to be drawn throughout, between the claims of Plato’s Protagoras for his ‘political art’ and the description of the medical art given in the pseudo-Hippocratic essay On Ancient Medicine. (It is assumed, but not argued, that Plato’s Protagoras is a substantially faithful portrait of the historical Protagoras.)

Chapter 5 locates Beirut historically within the geopolitics of revolutionary Third Worldism in the aftermath of the devastating 1967 Arab–Israeli war. It investigates the aesthetic emergence of Palestinian revolutionary struggle in and through the printscapes that marked Beirut’s public culture and street life. It analyses the visual culture that reclaimed the Arab city as a revolutionary nodal site in the imagination of its inhabitants and in networks of solidarities, Arab intellectuals and artists — Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi and Egyptian — who crossed paths in Beirut’s long 1960s. The chapter reveals how Arab artists responded to the 1967 defeat and were radicalized by the revolutionary promise of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It argues that the radicalization of the role of the Arab artist in society at this particular historical juncture was productive of new aesthetic sensibilities that were carried in and through the reproducibility of printed media. The mobility of magazines, posters, mail art and artists’ books lent visibility to the Palestinian struggle and aestheticized its revolutionary discourse in the public realm. It demonstrates how the cosmopolitanism of Beirut as the ‘Paris of the East’ was displaced into the radical cosmopolitanism of ‘Arab Hanoi’ in this revolutionary quest.