A student of Socrates, ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, generally considered one of the most crucial philosophers of the Western world. Writing in Athens in roughly the 4th Century BCE, Plato philosophized on a broad range of topics including virtue, education, justice, metaphysics, and politics. Plato’s Republic, his main work of political thinking, is still prominent in modern political theory. In this work Plato outlines via narrative an ideal society and the way in which its society and government is organized. After outlining the ideal, Plato recognizes that eventually government will break down slowly – to become degenerate forms of themselves. Two key forms which he examined were the Plutocracy and Democracy. These two styles of government are particularly important because their model can be applied to contemporary American politics. However, before society reached these two forms, there were multiple steps government would have to take to get there.
According to Plato, the ideal society was what he called an aristocracy, or, “Rule of the Best”; the best in this case being the most intelligent. Even though in this society wealth would be minimalized, Plato said that eventually there would be a defined economic divide in citizens. This divide would be perpetuated by spoils gathered by warriors in their raids. Through a gift economy the warrior class would take power creating an honor based society called a timocracy. The economic divide would continue to grow until nearly all wealth was in the hands of the very few in power. To Plato, this was the above mentioned plutocracy, or “Rule of the Rich”. Eventually the impoverished majority would rise and end the Plutocracy creating a democracy ruled republic – the “Rule of Everybody”. The final administrative step, once democracy was instated , according to Plato, despotism. Eventually a single charismatic individual would pander to society and be swept into power. After taking power all actions of the leader would become purely self-serving and society would crumble.
Plato’s notions of the plutocracy and democracy are interesting in this model because of how their ideas work into modern politics. As stated before a plutocracy is a society in which the vast majority of wealth, whether it is currency, land, goods, or something else, is in the hands of very few people; and these people are in turn the rulers. Examples of this can be observed in history – land owning lords and fiefdoms during the middle ages of Europe, for example.
Plato constantly stressed virtue in all things in his philosophies, and government was no exception. The Plutocracy, to Plato, was two steps removed from his virtuous ideal of the Aristocracy. He speculated that when so few have so much, they will inevitably act in completely self-serving ways. With loss of virtue in leaders, he said, comes a loss of unity in society.
When this loss of virtue and unity eventually meets a fever pitch, it was deduced that those without power and wealth will gather together in a unified uprising against the rulers. This is very comparable to Marx’s notion of class warfare; stating that after being treated poorly for so long, eventually the proletariat will rise against the bourgeois.
Contrary to what is typically thought today, democracy, to Plato, was a very bad thing. Plato’s political philosophy stressed order and specialization; something he referred to as “excellence”. To know one’s duty, and to be able to perform it well, was a mark of excellence. In his Aristocracy, all individuals would pursue excellence, whether they were craftsmen, farmers, diplomats, or philosophers. Everyone ruling led to a massive loss of such excelling.
Plato thought of democracy as a kind of “happy anarchy”. With all of society governing themselves, granted they are happy, but there was no order. An individual could spend a day being a tanner, a day being a writer, a day being a fisherman, and so on. With every citizen doing whatever they felt whenever they felt it, Plato identified the fact that they were all behaving in purely self-serving ways. Virtue is essentially gone, and the republic has a massive lack of excellence.
These thoughts put to today’s government are very interesting. Some would argue that we are living in a sort of plutocracy. Americans live in a capitalist run economy, corporations are considered people, and there is regular media coverage of citizens protesting “the 1%”. However, it is likely that Plato would disagree with such an argument. While wealth is poorly distributed in some cases, the instances of subsistence farmers are markedly fewer than in the dark ages.
It is entirely more likely that Plato would see current society as being in a transitional phase between plutocracy and democracy. It is important to reiterate that democracy to Plato was not simply voting, it was in essence anarchy. One can recognize that American society is ruled by a very marginal number of individuals, and while most of them are rich, it is not necessarily their money which gave them power, so the conception of plutocracy does not exactly apply. The citizens themselves are allowed to decide what to pursue professionally, to become excellent in, and this leads to another half developed portion of Plato’s idea.
While many individuals today do act only selfishly, not pursuing major endeavors, content with scraping by in menial work – acting as Plato expected those in a democracy to – many work very hard to pursue personal excellence. This creates a major conflagration of Plato’s model.
This dualist republic that American society has created is very novel when examined through the lens of ancient political theory. The fact that thinkers, such as Plato, came to close to forecasting how world politics would actually play out is staggering. This only applies, however, to a macro view. On a small, nation to nation, basis, their ideas are essentially flawed. Plato would have most likely been pragmatic to the idea of combinations of styles of government. Especially during a transitional period, such as the one, he would be likely to identify with The United States.
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