Monday 30 January 2012

Music and Morality

By Roger Scruton

“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.” So wrote Plato in the Republic (4.424c). Music, for Plato, was not a neutral amusement. It could express and encourage virtue— nobility, dignity, temperance, chastity. But it could also express and encourage vice—sensuality, belligerence, indiscipline.

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