The idea that the political community ought to be grounded in truth is at least as old as Plato. Keum demurs from Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that the history of Western philosophy is a history of footnotes to Plato, but she nevertheless sees something essential in Plato’s legacy for political theory. Ironically enough, given the theme of her enquiry, Keum’s study is an exercise in demystification, showing the Platonist approach to myth to be more complex – and relevant – than we thought.

Keum takes as a point of departure a manifest contradiction in our understanding of Plato. On the one hand, he is known for his contempt for poets and all images that distract us from the clarity of philosophical truth. Only geometers were allowed in the Academy, after all. On the other hand, even those who have not read a word of The Republic are likely familiar with its main set pieces: the myth of the cave and the myth of metals. Stuck looking at shadows on a wall, we are led to truth as we follow the philosophical path into the sunlight. Once there, our vision is dazzled. We have difficulty readjusting when we return to the cave to spread the good news. Such is the nature of ‘transformative events’ and the disarray they broker. The myth of metals is less congenial to modern sensibilities. Here, Socrates has us imagine that we are born of the soil, and made from different metals – gold, silver, iron, and bronze – that shape our activities in the social order. To many this smacks of Plato’s inegalitarianism, but Keum stresses the ‘as if’ quality to Socrates’s conjecture. It’s a myth that tells us something about how we think as we strive to imagine a well-ordered community.

Keum argues that modern interpretations of Plato’s thought have confused two understandings of myth, conflating a literary device with a deep, often unconscious, schema in our thought. Only by distinguishing these meanings of myth can we understand how they are related in Plato’s example. For Keum’s goal is to show that myth is neither a barrier to philosophical insight nor mere rhetoric, but ‘a form of philosophical discourse’ itself.

Plato is the point of the departure, but the bulk of Keum’s study traces this form through the modern age, with chapters on More, Bacon, and Leibniz, culminating in an account of German Idealism. Keen to provide a ‘sense of unity with history and with one’s own time’, Schlegel, Schelling, and others hoped to yield a ‘new mythology’ that could ground an emancipated and egalitarian community. Evidently, superseding Plato required carrying his tradition further.

The final chapter deals with the twentieth-century neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, a philosopher who is experiencing a revival of interest these days. Cassirer’s attentiveness to the persistence of symbolic forms in modern thought exemplifies the dual understanding of myth that Keum seeks to restore to the Platonist tradition. Her effort also achieves a delicate balancing act. Keum is aware that myth has often been burdened with responsibility for the political horrors of the modern age. Nazism is a case in point, with Heidegger’s appeal to mythic tropes providing philosophical succour to the blood-and-soil mysticism of the regime. But Keum also makes frequent reference to the epochal work of the Frankfurt School, which advanced the notion that, in its attempt to escape myth, modern rationalism (or ‘Enlightenment’) was already myth, and vice versa. Keum is more comfortable with Cassirer’s ambivalent view, as well as that of Hans Blumenberg, whose major study Work of Myth (1979) plays a key role in Keum’s approach.

If Keum’s is a book of the moment, what does it teach us? One lesson is that there is no avoiding myth, and so our task is to develop better myths. It recalls the legacy of Louis Althusser, who advanced the Marxist theory of ideology at the cost of conceding that the exit from ideology is impossible. The problem then, as now, is knowing how to evaluate an ideology or a myth. If all our normative criteria are always already shaped by mythic forms, how do we trust our bearings?

Tae-Yeoun Keum’s investigation into this dilemma is subtle and enriching. Unlike the Althusserian tendency, it suggests that escape from myth is not only impossible but undesirable. The book’s stress on the creative nature of myth nonetheless poses more questions than it answers. For example, her work gives the impression that religion is a species of myth, so what about the roles of myth and allegory within religious traditions themselves? Likewise, her work gestures toward an anthropology in which mythmaking is essential to human activity, but it leaves this common ground unexplored. Yet the persistence of myth leaves us wondering about the place of truth and the desire for order and meaning in our lives. Centuries on from Plato, such a desire still seems central to who we are.