Protagoras on How Political Communities Come to Be

This paper discusses Protagoras’ account of how political communities come to be in Plato’s Protagoras. The paper argues against recent readings of Protagoras’ culture story that attempt to assimilate it to Aristotle’s account by claiming that the text prefigures the Aristotelian thesis that human beings are political animals by nature. Instead, the paper suggests that Protagoras’ account is part of a different tradition of political thinking, political conventionalism, that is among others associated with Democritus and Epicurus and his followers and that is known as social contract theory in one of its most fully developed forms. Key characteristics of this tradition are an emphasis on the lack of security in the original condition of humankind and human weakness as the primary reason why human beings decided to live together in communities. However, while Protagoras’ account clearly prefigures a kind of political conventionalism, the paper also points out that this account lacks an important feature of social contract theory, namely, agreements as the means by which humankind transitioned from the original condition to life in communities.