From the book
Alcibiades II
Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordTarachē is disturbance or confusion; anomia is lawlessness or lack of lawful order.
- In Alcibiades IIThe diagnosis follows the experts’ attempts to give the largest civic share to the craft in which each excels.
- In this editionThe edition renders tarachē as “confusion” and anomia as “lawlessness”.
- A place to readThe commonwealth lacks both governing knowledge and a person able to use its experts.
Meaning
Tarachē is disturbance or confusion; anomia is lawlessness or lack of lawful order. At 146b the imagined commonwealth is full of both. The words name the collective result of misdirected expertise, not an independent analysis of a particular statute, criminal offence or constitutional form.
Use in the book
The diagnosis follows the experts’ attempts to give the largest civic share to the craft in which each excels. Their capacities are real, and the imagined city includes accomplished archers, musicians, athletes, military men and speakers. The disorder therefore cannot be explained by an absence of technical skill. It results from the absence of the knowledge, and the knowledgeable guide, needed to decide the proper use of those skills.
Socrates asks whether it would be right to describe such a commonwealth as full of confusion and lawlessness, and Alcibiades agrees. The description has been prepared by a sketch of rivalry and failure to secure the best, not by a separate proof that every failure of practical knowledge necessarily breaks a law. Anomia adds a normative political judgment to the confusion already pictured.
The positive remedy is stated at a more general level: beneficial action is profitable to the city and self, and both city and soul must hold to the knowledge of the best. The dialogue does not prescribe a legal code, an institution for choosing its guide, or a programme for enforcing the resulting order. Its diagnosis should not be expanded into a constitutional proposal it never develops.
Places to read
- 145e–146aThe commonwealth lacks both governing knowledge and a person able to use its experts.
- 146aEach specialist’s ambition privileges his partial field.
- 146bThe explicit diagnosis is great confusion and lawlessness.
- 146b–e2Beneficial action and adherence to knowledge state the contrasting requirement.
Translation in this edition
The edition renders tarachē as “confusion” and anomia as “lawlessness”. “Full of great confusion and lawlessness” describes the whole imagined commonwealth. It should not be mistaken for another application of the earlier word mania or a claim that all its citizens are clinically mad.