Plato (428–347 BCE)

Along with his teacher, Socrates (470–399 BCE), and his pupil, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Plato was one of the three great philosophers of classical Athens. He was an aristocrat, a political visionary, and a metaphysician; his writings on politics have been central to the Western political tradition, and through the ages have attracted extremes of praise, criticism, and puzzlement. Plato was certainly hostile to democracy (which he blamed for the death of Socrates) and has been called the father of totalitarianism; but his writings also include the first great work of utopian political speculation in the Western tradition and defy any simple summary.

Plato's earliest writings on moral and political subjects were a series of so-called Socratic dialogues. These dialogues, written when he was still under the influence of his teacher, attacked the relativism of the Sophists, and they struggle, often inconclusively, with the definition of virtues such as courage or piety. They also defend the doctrines that the virtues form a unity (so that no one virtue can be had without the others); that virtue is a matter of knowledge; that virtue can therefore be taught; and (the Socratic paradox) that nobody ever does wrong voluntarily, but only in ignorance of the truth. Plato's moral philosophy, broadly speaking, attacked two positions that were widely represented in classical Athens: (1) the view that justice represents nothing more than the interests of the stronger, and (2) the more subtle view that people should embrace morality for purely prudential reasons.

Plato's early dialogues are concerned with moral philosophy rather than with politics per se. His undoubted masterpiece of speculative political philosophy is the Republic, written at the height of his powers, and one of the summits of Western philosophy. Here he attempts to describe an ideal state, but grounds the inquiry in his [Page 1110]mature metaphysics and epistemology and psychology. In a search to define justice, Plato draws an analogy between, on one hand, the structure of the individual soul (which he divides into the impulses, the reason, and an in-between element that allows reason to govern the impulses), and, on the other, the structure of the ideal state, in which the lower order of workers is governed by the Platonic Guardians, with the aid of an in-between element of soldiers. To each of these three elements there furthermore corresponds a correlative virtue (both in the soul and in the state): moderation in the workers, wisdom in the Guardians, courage in the soldiers. For the state or the soul to function smoothly, however, each of its elements must work harmoniously with the others to contribute to the common good: this harmony of the parts is the fundamental virtue of justice.

In Plato's scheme, the detailed content of the laws is of secondary importance: what matters for the wellbeing of the state is that the Guardians have a deep insight into the Form of the Good. Only the elite can have this insight, and even then, only after arduous training; accordingly, much of the Republic is devoted to the question of the education of the Guardians.

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