Plato’s antipathy may have run deeper than that. His stepfather had been heavily involved in Periclean politics. In the house where he had been raised, Plato must have witnessed some of the sordid behind-the-scenes deal making and clubhouse politics that permeate every democracy, even ancient Athens. Having seen how the democratic sausage was made, Plato was in no mood to sit at the feast. Instead, his impulse was to start over, more or less from scratch.
This is what we get when we open the pages of his most important and influential treatise, the Republic. It is a blow-by-blow account of what the world might look like if it were run by men of knowledge and virtue instead of ignorant, grasping politicians—that is, if a true philosopher like Socrates came down from the sunlit mountaintop back into the cave and set about straightening out the mess in front of him.
So not surprisingly, Socrates is the Republic’s main character, and on this all-important topic for the first time he speaks to the reader in the first person. He describes to his listeners the outline of an ideal government that, although unrealizable in reality, can serve as a model for implementing future change. “It makes no difference whether it exists now,” Socrates says at one point, “or will ever come into being.” By studying the laws of an ideal state, Plato argues, men will learn how to order their lives better in the real ones.5
The ten books of the Republic are the centerpiece of Plato’s vision, both politically and (as the Myth of the Cave shows) philosophically. But there is a kind of prelude in a much earlier dialogue, the Gorgias, where he shows us what he saw as the bleak alternatives to his visionary brand of politics. In it Socrates meets a visiting teacher of rhetoric, Gorgias of Leontini. Gorgias preens himself as a teacher of virtue because he teaches men how to speak persuasively on “the most important of human concerns,” as he calls it—namely, politics. However, harried by Socrates’s polite but relentless questions, Gorgias has to admit that as a political consultant, he is concerned only with presenting a persuasive message, even if that message is evil rather than good.
“On Gorgias’s own admission,” as A. E. Taylor explains, “oratory is a device by which an ignorant man persuades an audience equally ignorant” as himself, especially in democratic Athens.6 It is precisely this kind of political circus and its inherent dangers that a true Platonic science of politics strives to rise above, whether it’s in Plato’s hometown or later in revolutionary Paris or St. Petersburg.
Socrates’s other antagonist is the younger and more sinister Callicles. Instead of Gorgias’s moral evasion, Callicles offers a chilling version of might makes right. “Philosophy, Socrates, is a pretty toy,” he tells the older man dismissively, but the real world is governed by power and power alone. Conventional notions of right and wrong are drawn up by the weaklings who form the majority of mankind in order to bamboozle their stronger betters. The only truly free man is the one strong or ruthless enough to do as he pleases, Callicles concludes.
Still, Callicles is forced to admit under questioning that might makes right still presupposes that some people know better how to rule than others. Even a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein has to know how to do some things that a wise and just ruler would do, like policing the streets and making sure there is food on the shelves, if only to hold on to his ill-gotten power. Likewise, even an out-and-out hedonist—and Callicles is a proud hedonist—soon realizes that not everything that gives pleasure is automatically good (smoking crack cocaine, for example).
So, Socrates says, when talking about what’s right and wrong, we are still operating in the realm of knowledge. Indeed, he insists, we never left it. What ultimately makes for the good life is not power or money or the pursuit of pleasure, but knowledge—knowledge of what harms and what benefits us (for example, knowing that courage is useless if it leads us to risk our lives needlessly); knowledge of what harms or benefits others; knowledge, finally, of good and evil.
“Let us then allow ourselves to be led by the truth … which teaches that the best way to live is to practice righteousness and virtue. And what is true for the individual, his listeners are forced to concede, must be equally true for society.7
Moral relativism, nihilism, hedonism: In the Gorgias, Socrates takes them all one and demolishes them one by one. It’s a spectacular tour de force. What emerges from this demolition is Plato’s secure foundation on which a good society can be built: the pursuit of virtue based on knowledge of the good. Politics is as much about applying that knowledge of the good to the state, as a doctor’s job is administering medicine to the body. (It’s not clear what Aristotle, the doctor’s boy, might have thought of this formula the first time he encountered it at the Academy.) And just as “badness of soul is the very greatest evil to which a man is exposed,” so true justice consists of using our knowledge to guide men to virtue, so that they do good instead of evil.
“Ought we not then,” Socrates concludes, “to set about our treatment of the state and its citizens on this principle, with the idea of making the citizens themselves as good as possible?”8
Plato composed the Gorgias when he was just beginning to think about alternatives to the politics of his day. The Republic, by contrast, was written when Plato was at the height of his powers. It is by far the richest of all his works, with plenty to appeal to many different kinds of readers. It is Plato’s masterpiece, and the most influential of his works, with the exception of the Timaeus. At the same time, moralists can admire the Republic for its rout of ethical relativism in Book I, where Socrates demolishes the “might makes right” arguments of Thrasymachus (the Republic’s updated version of Callicles) and concludes once again that it is better for our soul’s sake to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
Ancient Pythagoreans and medieval astronomers were enraptured by his description in Book X of the music of the celestial spheres, with angels guiding the orbits of the seven planets so that each sustains one note in a perfect harmonic scale.9 Modern historians enjoy pointing out how many features of Plato’s ideal republic—its community of property and dormitory living for its Guardians, its ban on all forms of art and poetry (these being, after all, illusions based on illusions)—reflect those of actual Sparta.
Likewise, Socialists can take pleasure in Plato’s insistence that the perfect political community must have no private property: the Republic is in effect the first Communist state. Feminists can point to the fact that his class of Philosopher Rulers makes no distinction between men and women. “We must pick suitable women to share the life and duties of Guardians with men,” Socrates tells his listeners, “since they are capable of it and the natures of men and women are alike.”10
Meanwhile, Book VII sets forth the original Myth of the Cave, while Book X offers Socrates’s dazzling vision of the afterlife drawn from Pythagorean as well as Orphic sources, and heaven as the final dwelling place for the soul’s contemplation of the Forms.
One big question about the Republic remains. Was it intended as a blueprint for creating the perfect society or (as some have argued) as a blueprint for totalitarianism? It is unlikely its author meant either one. Instead, the Republic is Plato’s answer to a single question, “What is justice?” meaning, how are we to regulate our dealings with others? A more colloquial way to put it would be “Why should I be good?”
His short answer is that no one is an island unto himself. Our ethical choices, such as whether to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong, all have social consequences. If we live in a society in which people consistently do evil to themselves (like the crack addict) and to one another, eventually we end up with no society at all. A society that has fallen into this position, as he believed Athens had, is sick, in Plato’s sense almost literally so. It desperately needs a doctor to restore it to spiritual health.11
Like a medical doctor, the political healer must wield absolute authority, at least at the start. “When one is advising a sick man who is living in a way injurious to his health,” Plato asks, “must one not first of all tell him to change his w
ay of life and give him further counsel only if he is willing to obey?”12 The idealized society he offers us in the Republic is in effect Plato’s master prescription on which all future real-life cures of social ills should be based.
The first step is establishing a clear division of labor. Plato’s ideal republic is divided into three distinct groups. There are the common householders of farmers, tradesmen, blacksmiths, and other craftsmen, who are essential for the services of the city and who make up the majority of the population (we need to remind ourselves that Plato’s ideal commonwealth probably numbers no more than five thousand people). Then there would be the Guardians, or soldiers, who are trained to defend the republic from foreign enemies.
Finally, there is the class of Rulers, who are also the city’s philosophers, the moral and administrative keepers of the state; the people who make sure everything else in society works. This third class is, not surprisingly, the main focus of the Republic. Socrates tells his listeners how the Rulers will use their knowledge (he carefully describes the mental and physical training they will undergo, including a thorough grounding in mathematics) to harmonize the other two parts of society, just as reason keeps the other two elements of the soul (courage and the appetites) in check.
The class of Rulers are above all a class of legislators and lawmakers. Through good laws, even the lowest and least-educated citizens will be able to learn to be just and virtuous, even if they do not understand justice and virtue themselves. In this way, an ideal society and even an ideal people will result—especially since Plato’s plan includes a rudimentary form of eugenics, with the Rulers making sure the best breed with the best.13
At this point, Socrates’s listeners get a bit skeptical. Does Socrates think such a society could ever be set up in reality? No, Socrates admits, he does not. But at least it can serve as “the ideal pattern” (the word he uses is paradeigma, or paradigm), which the more closely any society approximates it, the happier and more virtuous it will become.14
At this moment, two-thirds into Book V of the Republic, an important impulse for Western culture is born—and a clever Greek pun. It is the utopian impulse, after the Greek word utopia, which can mean either the best place to live (eutopia) or nowhere (u-topia), since experience (and Aristotle) will teach us that they are one and the same. Still, in various guises over the centuries, in settings large and small, men and women will try to bring their version of Plato’s Republic to fruition. Some, like Sir Thomas More (who first coined the term utopia) and Sir Francis Bacon, will confine their efforts to paper. Others will take up the task more literally with varying and sometimes hilarious, and sometimes horrifying, results. From New Harmony, Indiana, to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, they are all efforts to create a brand-new society according to Plato’s basic premise, that through laws based on the highest and most certain knowledge, we can create if not the perfect society, at least a pretty fair copy.†
Indeed, without a model of perfection, Socrates affirms, “there is no other road to real happiness, either for society or the individual.”15 Of course, Plato’s own formula involves what we would see as excessive regimentation. It abolishes private property and marriage for Rulers and Guardians alike. Instead, the Rulers will decide who will breed with whom, in order to produce the best specimens for each class. Plato dictates what kind of food each class will eat and even what kind of music each group will be allowed to hear (stirring martial music for the Guardians and serene, contemplative tunes for the Rulers).
However, the purpose of all these rules and regulations was to end what Plato saw as the worst aspect of normal Greek politics: the bitter class conflict and clashes among competing factions. In the average Greek city, rich and poor were literally out for each other’s blood, as historian Michael Rostovtzeff has pointed out in his description of what politics was like in one city-state, the home of the philosopher Thales:
At Miletus the people were at first victorious and murdered the wives and children of the aristocrats: then the aristocrats prevailed and burned their opponents alive, lighting up the open spaces of the city with live torches.16
In his stepfather’s household, he had seen the typical Athenian politician who sought to exploit rather than end these ancient antagonisms. The mission of Plato’s Philosopher Ruler was to end this kind of madness.
On his mother’s side he had an ancestor who could serve as his model statesman. This was the legendary legislator Solon, whose laws ended the civil strife that had divided Athens in the sixth century BCE. Solon’s reforms, which embodied “his preference for an ordered life, with its careful gradations giving its class its proper place,” earned him pride of place among the Seven Wise Men of Greece. They also made Solon the real-life paradigm for Plato’s Philosopher Rulers in the Republic, where “those we call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy come into the same hands.”17 A truly utopian hope, we might say—but amazingly, Plato got the chance to try it himself in 367 BCE, when he was nearly sixty. Twenty years earlier during his trip to Italy, he had visited Syracuse, Sicily’s largest city-state, and made fast friends with the brother of its ruler, a man named Dion. Two decades later Dion invited him to return as political adviser to Syracuse’s new ruler, Dion’s nephew Dionysius II.
The offer seemed irresistible to Plato. He had just finished the Republic, or was nearly finished. What better opportunity to transform his theory into action—to see the principles of law, virtue, and justice he had set forth achieved in reality? “Now is the time to try,” Plato told himself, so he set off by ship for Syracuse, hoping he might be following in the footsteps of his illustrious ancestor Solon.18
As soon as he landed and met Dionysius II, however, he learned that legislating perfect justice is not so easy. His friendship with Dion went back twenty years. “I imparted to him my ideas of what was best for men,” Plato later tells us in one of his letters, “and he listened with a zeal and attentiveness I had never encountered in any young man.”19 Dion now encouraged Plato to cleanse Syracuse of her luxuries and vices “and put on her the garment of freedom,” along with laws to make the citizens orderly and virtuous. Plato may even have contemplated abolishing private property as he had in the Republic, or at least imposing limits on wealth. Certainly he hoped to train the young Dionysius to become the kind of conscientious ruler a true Platonic state would need to maintain order: in short, a living Philosopher Ruler.
Plato’s hopes were quickly dashed. Dionysius II had every gift except good sense; he was also an incurable alcoholic. He soon lost patience with his two would-be political tutors and threw them out. Stuck in exile in Athens, Dion devoted himself to raising money and troops to liberate his native land and expel Dionysius. Many Academy students joined in, possibly with Plato’s encouragement, and sailed with Dion’s expedition to Syracuse. Although outnumbered, they managed to topple Dionysius’s tyranny. Now it was Dion himself who seemed poised to realize Plato’s dreams.
However, as the people of Syracuse soon observed, “we have only exchanged a drunken tyrant for a sober one.”20 Dion proved to be just as corrupt as his unlamented nephew, and eventually he, too, had to be driven out by force.
Plato watched the unfolding of these events from his Academy in Athens. They also made him sadder and wiser. When some of Dion’s former friends asked Plato for advice on a future constitution for Syracuse, he gave them far more modest advice than the grandiose vision he had set forth in the Republic. It involved a mixed constitution of democratic and monarchical elements, with a warning: “Do not subject Sicily or any other state to the despotism of men, but to the rule of laws; this at least,” he adds timidly, “is my doctrine.”21
The vision of a perfect commonwealth united in virtue and justice that seemed so dazzling in theory proved much messier in practice. The utopian impulse requires some regard for reality. And thanks to the Syracuse experience, Plato’s late political writings like the Statesman and the Laws make more concessions
to reality than his earlier masterwork.
All the same, they are animated by the same beliefs. Good laws will make good men, and the best laws are forged not in the heat of crisis or the give-and-take of ordinary political debate, where men’s appetites take over, but through the exercise of knowledge and reason. Self-interest must learn to yield to the common interest; and men must be united if they are to be free. Taken together, that remains Plato’s most important political legacy.
Here, the final word belongs to Socrates. “The society we have described,” he says in the Republic, “can never grow into a reality or see the light of day.” Nonetheless, “there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, until philosophers become kings in this world.”22
As we might expect, Aristotle’s approach is very different. Aristotle’s Politics, like his Metaphysics, turns Plato’s system upside down. For Plato, we find our true freedom only when we find our proper place within the political community. Aristotle, by contrast, concludes that community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around. Plato’s Republic celebrates a communitarian ideal based on men’s dreams. It will give us Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, but also Martin Luther King. Aristotle’s Politics, by contrast, will give us Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson, as well as Boss Tweed. It marks the birth of a democratic individualism that draws its pragmatic principles from sometimes hard-won experience.
This is because Aristotle’s philosopher is always an observer of reality, not the creator of it. Instead of laying out the perfect blueprint, then turning reluctantly to the real world, Aristotle starts with the real world itself.
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