{
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  "oid": 165058,
  "revision": 1,
  "revision_oid": 165059,
  "work": "orthodoxy",
  "edition": "pg16769-r1",
  "title": "Political judgment as a shared capacity",
  "anchors": [
    {
      "unit": "CH04.P003",
      "oid": 68,
      "role": null,
      "edition": "pg16769-r1",
      "paragraph": "CH04.P003",
      "exact": "the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common",
      "start": 194,
      "end": 275,
      "prefix": " principle is merely this: that ",
      "suffix": ". Falling in love is more poetic",
      "url": "/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH04.P003#char=194,275"
    }
  ],
  "body_markdown": "The distinction has a close ancient analogue in the speech Plato gives Protagoras. In *Protagoras* 322c–323a, Hermes asks whether justice and reverence should be distributed like medicine and other specialized arts, which a few practitioners supply to many people. Zeus requires everyone to share in them: cities could not exist otherwise. Protagoras uses the story to explain why Athenians hear specialists on technical matters but admit ordinary speakers when deliberating about political virtue. The comparison is especially useful because it separates a shared qualification for civic participation from an assertion that everyone possesses every technical skill.\n\nThere is also a significant difference. At 323c–324a Protagoras explains political virtue through instruction, correction and effort; his argument does not make civic competence a finished natural endowment. Chesterton calls the common possession an instinct or desire and defends the right to exercise it even badly. Moreover, Zeus's story threatens death for those without justice or reverence (322d), a coercive boundary absent from Chesterton's examples. This is a philosophical parallel, not evidence that Plato supplied the passage. The inspected witness is Benjamin Jowett's English translation at the Internet Classics Archive, rather than a Greek critical edition; Plato's dialogue belongs to the fourth century BCE.",
  "sources": [
    {
      "url": "https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/protagoras.html",
      "title": "Plato, Protagoras, translated by Benjamin Jowett",
      "locator": "322c–324a; the myth of Hermes and Zeus and its explanation",
      "exact": null
    }
  ],
  "citations": [],
  "external_references": [],
  "limits": [
    "No direct influence or allusion established.",
    "The online Jowett witness does not identify its underlying print edition."
  ],
  "metadata": {
    "run": "chapter-04-restart-2026-11-07",
    "paragraph_investigator": "P003",
    "task": [
      {
        "approach": "Philosophical contextualization: then and since",
        "question": "How does the distinction between common political capacity and specialized skill compare with the argument assigned to Protagoras in Plato?"
      },
      {
        "approach": "Interlocutors and historical debates",
        "question": "What contemporary proposal makes choosing wives scientifically more than an invented absurdity?"
      }
    ],
    "model": "gpt-6.1-sol"
  },
  "content_sha256": "sha256:757e4ebae4947bdfcc2e98633f2746cf6419091392b0b3a759df14474ae8b50a",
  "created_at": "2026-11-07T16:59:22Z",
  "is_current": true,
  "url": "/a/a_6g3rcurm",
  "revision_path": "/a/a_6g3rcurm/r/1",
  "cited_by": []
}