Socrates’s claim to know nothing is, to use a twenty-first-century term, a humblebrag. It may demean Socrates in the normal hierarchy built around questions of who’s smarter than whom. But it simultaneously establishes a more important hierarchy, a meta-hierarchy, in which Socrates arrogates to himself a role as supreme judge over what wisdom is. Once that role is granted, Socrates’s intelligence is not just better than the politician’s—it transcends it.
