The two great Victorian Platonists – George Grote and Benjamin Jowett – are often perceived as championing diametrically opposed perspectives on Plato: utilitarian vs. idealist. This chapter argues that no less important is what they had in common: an ‘atomist’ hermeneutics, in fierce reaction against attempts to make a system out of the dialogues; and a combination of scrupulous attention to the texts as historical documents with insistence that giving Plato his place in the history of philosophy and ‘in the scale of human improvement’ was no less the historian’s obligation. Finally, both men were active in the public sphere, looking for similar ‘modern applications’ of what was best in Plato’s political thought, particularly in the sphere of education.

This chapter offers an account of the inspiration for their active advocacy of political, social, and educational reform that three key figures of the British nineteenth century found in Plato: John Stuart Mill, George Grote (author of the classic three-volume study Plato of 1865), and Benjamin Jowett (whose translation of the entire Platonic corpus of 1871 was to be hugely influential). For both Mill and Grote, the importance of the probing Socratic method portrayed in the dialogues was paramount. Grote contrasted it with the tyranny exercised over the dissenting individual by the conformism of society at large: what he called King Nomos, with his eye particularly on the Great Speech Plato puts in Protagoras’s mouth in the Protagoras. To his mind, the Republic represented a sad betrayal of the Socratic spirit. It was Jowett who was chiefly responsible for making that dialogue’s moral idealism central to the education Oxford provided for the nation’s future elite, and whose endorsement of its radical proposals for equality for women in education and in politics is particularly notable.