Plato (c.427–347 BC) is one of the earliest great philosophers and political thinkers in the Western tradition, and his works represent the major inheritance by Western political thought from the classical period. In some ways this is ironic; the usual image of classical Greek politics, or certainly the image of what was best about it, is of Athenian participatory democracy. Plato, however, was fiercely opposed to democracy, and his most important political writing, known to us as the Republic, is in part a vicious attack on it and a lengthy and subtle philosophical justification for rule by a small intellectual élite (see aristocracy). Other important works, notably The Laws, are blueprints for just such a society, which he hoped would stimulate the founding of new non-democratic Greek colonies. Indeed the Greek society Plato most admired was Sparta, the traditional authoritarian enemy of Athens.
Plato’s reasons for opposing Athenian democracy can be analysed on at least two levels. For one thing he came himself from an aristocratic family. More important, certainly in his own eyes, was a distaste for the excesses of demagogically influenced masses arising from the execution by the democratic assembly of his friend and hero, Socrates, on a fallacious charge (according to Plato, anyway) of corrupting public morals.
At the more theoretical level Plato opposed democracy because of certain conclusions he drew about the capacity of humanity to understand, and therefore follow, the good life. Briefly, human intellectual capacity is not at all equally distributed; knowledge of moral good is just as much dependent on this capacity as knowledge of any skill; indeed ‘ruling’ is just another skill or trade, as only the very most able are capable of seeing moral and political truth properly, and hence only they (Plato called them ‘philosopher kings’) should have political power. The theory is subtle and rich, and argues for the rule of the philosopher kings on many dimensions, all infused with very complex general philosophical views. He has been seen by some modern critics as tremendously right wing, even as some sort of precursor to fascism or other forms of totalitarianism, but this is crudely to abstract a powerful and complicated thinker from his context in a quite meaningless way. Plato is now among the most studied of political thinkers, and certainly is nowadays more influential than his successor, Aristotle, though this was not always so, for the medieval rediscovery of classical civilization really started with Aristotle, whose views were powerfully formative on the political thought of medieval Christianity (see Aquinas).
Perhaps the most alien element in Plato’s thought is not the undemocratic constitution he advocates, but the way he sees the whole role of the state. To Plato (and here Aristotle followed him) the purpose of the state is to enforce decent living, actively to encourage a morality and religion, rather than to satisfy the demands of the population or even just to keep law and order to allow freedom. For this reason his philosophical arguments about the nature of goodness and our capacity to perceive it are not so much dismissed, as simply not seen as relevant when a modern thinker of almost any political persuasion considers his constitutional arguments.
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