The Perils of UglytownWith characteristic wit, Harry Berger, Jr., brings his flair for close reading to texts and images across two millennia that illustrate what he calls structural misanthropology. Beginning with a novel reading of Plato, Berger emphasizes Socratess self acknowledged failures. The dialogues, he shows, offer up, only to dispute, a misanthropic polis. The Athenian city state, they worry, is founded on a social order motivated by apprehensionboth the desire