Plato was born into a wealthy, well-connected family of the old Athenian aristocracy (Davies 1971). He and his elder brothers Adeimantos and Glaukon (both of whom figure in the Republic) belonged to the circle of young men attached to Socrates, as did his cousins Kritias and Charmides, who played a leading part in the oligarchic junta of the Thirty which seized power at the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404/3. In the seventh Letter (a sort of apologia pro vita sua by Plato himself or a disciple), Plato claims to have been quickly shocked by the tyrannous behaviour of the Thirty, and equally disgusted with the restored democracy when it condemned Socrates to death in 399; but his chances of playing any prominent part in Athenian politics had in any case been fatally compromised by his close connections with the junta. He settled down to the theoretical life of a philosopher and teacher, which he praises (for example, Theaetetus 172–6) as the highest form of human activity. In 367, however, after thirty years of highly productive theoretical activity, he attempted to put some of the political ideas of the Republic into practice by training the young ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius II, for the role of philosopher-king. Not surprisingly, he failed; one of Plato’s most obvious weaknesses as a political analyst was his neglect of external factors and relations with other powers, which in the fourth century BC constituted in fact the main problem for the Greek cities. While there are problems of detail in dating Plato’s dialogues, one can perhaps say that in his work before the Sicilian episode he is still engaged in a vivacious debate with ideas current in the Athens of his youth, whereas in his later works (Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws) he is addressing himself more specifically to fellow-philosophers, present and future. The philosophical centre he founded in the Academy—a sort of Institute for Advanced Study in rural surroundings—continued after his death.
The influences which shaped Plato’s thought are thus the aristocratic milieu in which he grew up and the political events of his lifetime, the personality of Socrates, and the standards of systematic reasoning associated with the role of philosopher. His contributions to social thought as we would now define it lie mainly in the fields of political and moral philosophy, psychology and education; but these aspects of his thought cannot be detached from his epistemology and cosmology.
Part of the fascination of reading Plato comes from the dialogue form in which he presented his ideas. He was no doubt influenced in this choice by Socrates, who communicated his own ideas solely through argument and left no written works; more generally, the Athenians were used to hearing different points of view upheld by opposing speakers in political assemblies, in law courts and in drama. Socrates takes the leading part in Plato’s earlier dialogues, and this enabled the author both to acknowledge his debt to his teacher and, perhaps, to avoid taking full responsibility for the ideas he was putting forward. Plato never figures in his own dialogues. The dialogue form also suited his gifts as a brilliantly natural and graceful writer, a skilful parodist and master of characterization and light-hearted conversation. The introductory scenes of his dialogues provide the historian with lively sketches of upper-class manners and mores in the late fifth century BC.
The key element in Plato’s thought as it concerned social life was a widening of the gap between body and spirit. This enabled him to preserve an essential core of religious belief from the criticisms which had been directed against traditional religion, to ground Socrates’ argument that virtue is a kind of knowledge in a general theory of epistemology which offered solutions to logical problems raised by earlier philosophers, and to provide a foundation for belief in the immortality of the soul; at the same time it formalized a psychological split between lower and higher elements in the personality, and linked this to a justification of social hierarchy, and to a theory of education in which censorship played an essential part.
Plato’s early dialogues show Socrates attacking a traditional, unreflective upper-class practice of virtue as a routine response of the gentleman to predictable situations. When asked to define courage (Laches), piety (Euthyphro) or moderation (Charmides), his interlocutors give specific examples of brave, pious or self-controlled behaviour, and Socrates then proves to them that such acts would not in all circumstances be considered virtuous. Echoes of the same attitude can be found in Xenophon and Euripides.
Some of Plato’s contemporaries went on from this criticism of traditional conceptions of virtue to deny its existence altogether: in the Republic, Thrasymachus argues that values and virtues are defined by the ruling class to suit their own interests, and Glaukon argues that they represent the interests of the majority. Plato therefore needed a concept of virtue which was flexible and abstract enough to satisfy Socratic criticism but nevertheless safe against relativist attack. His response was the theory of Forms or Ideas, existing at a level of ultimate, abstract reality which was only imperfectly reflected in the material world but of which the human mind could gradually acquire better knowledge through philosophical training.
Coming closer to the world of Ideas thus becomes both the highest aim of human life and the standard by which all kinds of knowledge are judged; it follows that human societies should be directed by philosophers or by laws formulated by philosophers. The human personality is divided into three elements: intelligence, amour-propre (Thumos) and the physical appetites. Education aims to train the first to dominate the other two.
Thumos refers to a set of qualities regarded somewhat ambiguously in Plato’s culture (Dover 1974). It was the basis of the human pursuit of prestige and honour and thus—like the appetites—beneficial when exercised in moderation but dangerous when obsessive. Too eager a pursuit of honour led to tyranny or to a tendency to take offence for no reason. Thus there was a popular basis for the view that even ambition for what the ordinary person in the street considered the supreme good had to be controlled. This point was particularly important for Plato, because his belief that the good society was a society ruled by good and wise men meant that the essential problem of political organization was to prevent the ruling elite from becoming corrupted. This led him to formulate the idea of the ‘mixed constitution’, later to influence Polybius, Montesquieu, and the US Constitution.
Because a philosophical education involved training in subjects like astronomy and mathematics for which not all had equal interest or aptitude, and because philosophers had to detach themselves from activities and preoccupations likely to strengthen the influence of their Thumos and bodily appetites, the hierarchy of faculties in the psyche led to a hierarchy of groups in the ideal city. Philosophers would have supreme authority, semi-educated watch-dogs would act as a military and police force on their behalf, and those who supplied the economic needs of the city would have the lowest status of all. Education was to be carefully adjusted to the reproduction of the system; the lower class were to be trained to obedience and persuaded by a political myth that their status was due to natural causes; poets should represent only socially commendable behaviour; knowledge of alternative forms of society was to be carefully suppressed, except in the case of selected members of the ruling elite.
Such views have in the twentieth century led to attacks on Plato as a proto-fascist or Stalinist (Crossman 1937, Popper 1945). In the Laws the more extreme proposals of the Republic (in particular, the abolition of private property and the family) were dropped; it is interesting to see Plato grappling here with detailed problems of law-drafting, and the text is a key piece of evidence on Greek legal thought. Return to law as a source of authority was a capitulation to the rigid type of definition of virtue which Socrates had attacked (see the Statesman); but the argument which had seemed valid when applied to individuals would not work for collectivities. There was something wrong with the analogy between parts of the city and parts of the human psyche.
