Why Plato Hated Democracy
By: Arc Ninian
Tags: Politics, Ideas, Philosophy, Life Lessons, History

Why Plato Hated Democracy

The Republic’s clues about modern leaders and their popularity

Ancient Greece is famed for both it’s democracy and philosophy. Despite this, the seminal Greek philosopher Plato was much opposed to his city’s democratic governance.

Plato’s ‘Republic’ is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of Western philosophy and the first great examination of political life. Written around 375bc, ‘The Republic’ still holds insights into ethics and political life that can teach the modern world many a lesson. Such has been the impact of Plato on Western thought that Alfred Hitchock Whitehead claimed:

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.

European political thought became dominated by appraisals to democratic values in the 20th century, as democracy swept the continent. But this is not quite what the great philosopher had in mind. Plato uses The Republic to deliver a damning critique of democracy that renders it conducive to mass ignorance, hysteria, and ultimately tyranny.

Democracy in Ancient Athens

Plato witnessed democracy begrudgingly in his city of Athens. Ancient Athenian democracy differs from the democracy that we are familiar with in the present day. Athens is a city-state, while today we are familiar with the primary unit of governance operating nationwide. Consequently, governance of a smaller population enabled more ‘direct’ forms of democracy rather than the ‘representative’ forms accorded by contemporary constitutions.

All citizens (with the pertinent qualification of their being free men) were permitted the opportunity of equal political participation: Important decisions were made by the assembly, where each citizen had the right to speak and the majority of offices were assigned by lot.

Professional prosecutors and judges did not exist in Ancient Athens. Instead, it was left to the ordinary citizen to bring indictments, act as jurors, and deliberate on the outcome of trials.

Nineteenth-century painting by Philipp Foltz depicting the Athenian politician Pericles delivering his famous funeral oration in front of the Assembly. (Source)

The Death of Socrates

Socrates, another of Ancient Athens’ great philosophers, was Plato’s respected mentor and friend. Plato’s Republic is written in a series of dialogues in which Socrates is given a starring role — Socrates himself never wrote his work down. As a result, there is some ambiguity as to whose opinions are being posited in the Republic but it is commonly thought to be Plato’s.

Socrates was largely a nonentity in Athenian public life but he was an enthralling character who dedicated his life to conversations with promising young men and leading intellectuals. But it was not only his life that had an extraordinary impact on Plato; but also his death.

In 399bc Socrates was put on trial by a small group of fellow citizens acting as democratic citizen-prosecutors. He was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and introducing new gods, neglecting those of the city, which existed as an object of civic patriotism. Socrates was convicted of these charges, before being imprisoned and finally executed. Plato was repulsed by his city’s failure to benefit from Socrates and the execution influenced his conclusion that democracy is antithetical to philosophy.

Democracy — Rule by the Ignorant

Plato believed that expertise is the critical attribute of a leader; He criticizes democracy of seldom producing such characters. Rather, it elects popular spinsters who are effective in manipulating popular opinion.

To depict this, Plato uses an analogy of ship navigation in Book VI of ‘The Republic’. He contests that in order to select the appropriate captain, a popular vote is ineffective because people can be swayed by characteristics as irrelevant as their appearance. Instead, we should seek out only the most knowledgeable candidate as it is he who holds the required expertise.

Plato illustrates the ignorance that democracy yields in producing a captain:

… the true navigator must study the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all the other subjects appropriate to his profession if he is to be really fit to control the ship…[the electorate] think that it’s quite impossible to acquire the professional skill needed for such control and that there’s no such thing as the art of navigation.

Ship of Fools by Hieronymus Bosch

Plato, therefore, believed that philosophers should rule — philosopher kings. A true philosopher is someone that is in love with knowledge and the search for true reality. Those who seek reality are those best qualified to guide as they have the greatest knowledge at their disposal.

‘Philosophy’ can be interpreted from Greek as the love of wisdom, thus a true philosopher is a person who seeks pleasure purely of the mind. According to Plato (in Book VII), this unencumbered love of wisdom negates the possibility of the love of falsehoods, physical pleasures, material pleasures, meanness, and cowardice. All desires and tendencies that threaten to corrupt leadership.

In a democracy, however, leaders are prone to ignoring the inconvenient truths. During the Brexit campaign, a leading UK politician Michael Gove refused to name any economists who back Britain’s exit from the European Union, saying that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. In different sections of Plato’s Republic, this hostility towards philosophy (true knowledge) is predicted.

In his famous Allegory of the Cave (Book VI), Plato illustrates a moment in which a man discovers the reality of the world is different than perceived by prisoners in a cave. As he returns to the cave to reveal this, he is met with violent rage. As well as being symbolic of Athens’ treatment of Socrates, it suggests that knowledgeable leadership cannot survive in democracy as it will be ‘warped and estranged’ by the need to remain popular.

Democracy is Hysterical

The excitability and emotion of people and their mass mobilization incites democracy to acts of hysteria according to Plato. The whimsical nature of public support defies sound reason and produces fatal inconsistency over time.

The ‘Mytilenian Debate’ in Athens, 427bc, stands as a flagrant example of this hysteria. Reported in Thucydides’ book the History of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian assembly, scared of further revolt, hastily sentenced all of the male citizens of the rebellious city-state Mytilene to death, while the women and children would be sold into slavery. Realizing the unprecedented brutality of their decision, it was overturned the very next day.

Aside from inconsistency, Plato also insists that the hysteria of democracy leads to its demise in other ways:

“An excessive desire for liberty at the expense of everything else is what undermines democracy and leads to the demand for tyranny”

In this society awash with liberty, there is no distinction between citizens, immigrants, and aliens. Teachers fear pupils, the young do no respect the old. Everything is full of the spirit of liberty and even animals walk the streets with rights. Aspects of the liberal society illustrated here are today celebrated. In fact, Plato’s apparent denunciation of immigrants holding citizenship and animal right appears draconian in the setting a present-day liberal-democracies. But rather than denunciating these substantive realities, the great philosopher was concerned this society would cause a greater conflict; a political conflict yielding hunger for a single, strong leader — a tyrant.

Incredibly, issues that Plato mentioned 2,400 years ago are very much still topical — often sources of political dispute. Across the Western political discourse, immigration and citizenship remain a source of political tension. Donald Trump’s ascent to power appears indicative of this revolt against libertarian politics that yearns for strong leadership, in light of these insights in Book VIII of ‘The Republic’.

Elsewhere, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s revocation of citizenship from the Muslim minority, as Muslims are murdered on the streets, evokes tyrannical sentiment in what is heralded the world’s largest democracy. Plato would likely attribute this despotism to the hysteria surrounding the Hindu nationalist stance that has delivered Modi two convincing victories at the ballot box.

Historically, the most famous demise from a democracy into tyranny happened in Germany between the First and Second World Wars. At the end of the First World War, a condition for armistice decreed that Kaiser Wilhelm was to give up his monarchy. The German Reichstag assumed the responsibility and offered to usher in a democracy, fearful of the rising communist appetite. Here became the Weimar Republic.

When the Weimar Republic was formed in 1919, there were hopeful signs that democracy would take root in Germany. The new democratic constitution with its expanded bill of rights was one of the most progressive in the world. Historians have offered a number of explanations as to why it failed. Among them is the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versaille, burdening generations of Germans with economic scarcity and so-called “guilt clause” attributing sole responsibility of the war to Germany.

German football supporters giving the Nazi salute during the international match against England in 1935. (Source)

The guilt and economic collapse enraged the German population, feeling it a huge mark of shame on national pride. Such emotion, a Platonic viewpoint may claim, is conducive to political hysteria enabling a well-timed tyrant to capitalize on the will for strong leadership and violent retribution. We all know what happened next.

Criticism of the Plato’s Ideal State

In Plato’s ideal state, groups are divided into their social utilities such as a warrior population and an agricultural population, without the ability to willfully change professions. With this system of functional specialization, there is little possibility of any full development of human personality. Suggesting that the state should wield such control over the livelihoods of its citizens is an affront to human liberty as we understand it now.

Plato fails to condemn the institution of slavery and regard it as fundamental evil, which reflects the social construct in neighboring Sparta — a militaristic oligarch with a large serf populous. His careful organization of society by a detached philosopher-king rids his ideal state of the self-determination that provides human liberty in a democracy. A final irony is that Plato’s advocacy of censorship of art, poetry, and bad characters (Books III and X) could perhaps prohibit The Republic from existing in his own ideal state.

Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher who was a student and admirer of Plato, criticized his teacher’s purely theoretical approach. Aristotle pursued political knowledge with a historical appreciation and practical sensibilities which reflected the epistemological divide between the two great thinkers — Plato a rationalist and Aristotle an empiricist.

Ignoring the lower class population was dangerous according to Aristotle, and likewise, notions such as a frequently idle warrior population were simply impractical. Kings should take advice from philosophers and they should also benefit from the advice of their citizenry. This mode of the constitution is thought to bring more unity than one preventing political dialogue between the ruled and their rulers.

While there have been instances of tyranny arising from democracy, as noted in the previous chapter, democracy has been widely successful. An article from the Economist claims that populations have turned on autocrats for good reason:

Democracies are on average richer than non-democracies, are less likely to go to war and have a better record of fighting corruption. More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s futures. That so many people in so many different parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for this idea is testimony to its enduring appeal”.

The affluence, liberty, and peace arising from the spread of democratic values in the 20th century would afflict damage to Plato’s testimony for what appears to be an autocratic rule of dissonant philosophy.

But while Plato may have sought to heal tyranny with medicine that tastes a lot like the disease, The Republic still carries its important messages. In 2018, Freedom in the World recorded the 13th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The reversal has spanned a variety of countries in every region including long-standing democracies like the United States.

There is a lot we can learn from Plato and his work in The Republic. Perhaps where democracies are concerned, we must remain wary of the ignorance and hysteria that Plato forewarned us of, to halt regression into tyrannical practice.