This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you:
He will take your sons.… And he will take your daughters.…
And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your olive yards, even the best of them.… And he will take your menser- vants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.… And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.
1 Sam. 8:11–18
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Chapter 1
Plato and the Invention of Political Science
Ralph Clark Chandler
CONTENTS
Introduction ... 4 The Life of Plato... 5 The Societal Circumstances of Plato’s Thought ... 9 Contemporary Government in the Greek World ... 18 Plato’s Great Works on Organization Theory and Administrative Practice ... 24 The Republic ... 25 The Laws... 31 The Soul in Greek Political Theory... 37 Notes ... 38 References ... 53
The safest general characterization of the European philosoph- ical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead (1929)
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And this which you deem of no moment is the very highest of all: that is whether you have a right idea of the gods, whereby you may live your life well or ill.
Plato (348 B.C.E.), Laws, 888
Introduction
The resurgence of interest in Plato among contemporary scholars may be attributed to at least three factors: the decline in civility, leading one to reflect on Plato’s solution to incivility in one of the most uncivil ages of all, his own; the increasing interest in soul (psyche)1 as a category in understanding human behavior, including behavior in organizations;2 and the renewed attention to things historical in the theory and practice of public administration.3
The deeper reason behind the Plato revival is man’s abiding interest in what Plato called “forms.” In our day, we tend to call forms “principles,”
and they include such things as justice, beauty, honesty, goodness, and courage. Many people feel that these principles are more real than anything we can see, hear, or touch. Despite the flux, change, impermanence, and chaos4 astride the world, there are certain principles that are fixed and do not change. A modern Platonist might say, for example, that justice continues to exist no matter how muddleheaded we may be about its precise nature and no matter how baffled we are in complex situations where equally just principles seem to be in conflict. To support his view of the nature of reality, Plato brought to bear impressive quantities of reasonable and emotional evidence, so that even those who disagree with him are forced to take him seriously. His chapter in the history of human thought is well footnoted indeed.
Plato has not been universally admired. Following Thomas Jefferson’s denunciation of Plato in the early 19th century (see note 64), scholars in the mid-20th century also found reason to renounce Plato. In 1940, for example, Carl J. Friedrich called on the world to stop idolizing Greek political experience. “So deeply rooted in the state-polis was Greek culture,” he wrote, “that any glorification of this particular culture-pattern carries with it an exaltation of the state.” Friedrich warned that the effective secular organization of the community is not the highest value of human- kind, closing his analysis with the words: “Let us beware of the heritage of the Greek polis: it is a veritable Trojan horse, smuggled into our Christian civilization” (Friedrich 1940, 218–25).
The most seething critique of Plato’s political philosophy in modern times was delivered by Karl L. Popper in 1950. Popper viewed Plato’s
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proposal to reconstruct the natural harmony of society with grave suspicion (Popper 1950, 195):
The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppres- sion of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way — we must return to the beasts.
The charge that Plato’s social conservatism amounted to totalitarianism stands alongside the claim by others that, because Plato was the fi rst champion of the division of sovereign power, he was the first Whig. Only one thing is certain: Plato’s description of life in a democratic society remains to this day the most incisive critique of democracy. The buoyant diversity and creative pluralism of the democratic society are its glory, but they are often the path to dissolution and disintegration when its members forget that they are not merely individuals with rights and liberties but also social beings with duties and obligations.
The Life of Plato
Let us try to fix Plato’s place in the development of Greek culture. He was born in Athens in 427 B.C.E.5 and given the name Aristocles, which he later changed. Plato’s father was Ariston, a direct descendant of Codrus, the last king of Athens. His mother was Perictione, a direct descendant of Solon, the lawgiver who laid the foundations for the stable society of classical Athens. Ariston died in Plato’s childhood, and his mother then married her uncle, Pyrilampes, an intimate of Pericles as well as a prom- inent supporter of Periclean policies. Besides Plato, Ariston and Perictione had at least three other children. There were two older sons, Adimantus and Glaucon, who appear as young men in Plato’s Republic, and a daughter, Potone, about whom we know nothing. Pyrilampes and Peric- tione also had a son, Antiphon, who appears in Plato’s Parmenides. Plato tells us regretfully that Antiphon gave up philosophy for horses.6
Plato was born four years after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which ended in the crushing defeat of Athens at the hands of Sparta.
Around him was a brilliant cultural environment. In letters, the arts, religion, and philosophy, the age is unparalleled in the history of the world. The tradition included the Iliad and the Odyssey, the first literary monuments of the life and spirit of the Greeks. Then came the lyric poets,
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followed toward the end of the sixth century and throughout the fifth by the emergence of both tragedy and comedy.
Contemporary with these literary phenomena, philosophy appeared.
A number of speculative thinkers were preoccupied with the problem of the constitution of the external universe. What is its underlying first principle, and what is the nature of being? Their orientation was toward the without, the outer, the outside. Chief among them was Parmenides, who insisted that only being is, and that the world of our senses and the phenomena of motion are illusory. Heracleitus held that the characteristic factors of the external world are flux and change. Nothing is fixed.
Next to the work of the poets and philosophers, we find the sculpture of Pheidias and his associates, and the brilliant architecture illustrated in the buildings on the Acropolis. We see the beginnings of history with Herodotus. A standing mystery is why all of this should have happened in the same 50 years. Heracleitus, Pheidias, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sopho- cles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were all contemporaries.7
And then there was Socrates. His dates, 470–399, are not without significance. He was born ten years after the conclusion of the Persian Wars. He lived through the years of Athens’s breathtaking rise to the peak of its intellectual and artistic supremacy. He witnessed the operation of Athenian democracy at its best and saw it slowly succumb to the blan- dishments of imperialism. Finally, he lived through the last horrible days of the Athenian defeat by Sparta and then suffered execution at the hands of a corrupt and decadent caricature of the great Athenian democracy of his youth.
Plato met Socrates in the year 407 when Plato was 20 years old. It was the decisive event in Plato’s life. He spent considerable time with the master until Socrates’ death in 399. What Plato found was a philosopher who cut radically across the conventional mode of philosophizing and turned its orientation from without to within. Socrates added to the enterprise of philosophy the whole domain heretofore preempted by the epic and lyric poets and dramatists. Since Socrates, philosophy in the West has been concerned not only with the constitution of the external world and the nature of being, but also with ethics, the nature of knowledge, and the relation of the inner man to the outer world. This shift in the orientation of philosophy constitutes one of the most significant events in the development of Western civilization and culture.8
As late as 403, four years before Socrates’ death, Plato was still looking forward to a political career. It was the standing conviction of his family, rich in the tradition of Solon, that it was the imperative duty of the philosopher to devote the best of his manhood to the service of his fellow citizens as a statesman and legislator. It was the age of Pericles, and the close association of Plato’s stepfather with Pericles — elected general
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every year from 443 until his death in 429 — meant that affairs of state were commonly discussed in Plato’s hearing. Plato’s subsequent dislike of democracy was not the dislike of ignorance but that of a man who knew too much.
It was in September 403 that democracy was restored in Athens after a 17-month rule by a group of oligarchs called the Thirty Tyrants. Upon Athens’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War in April 404, the Spartan leader, Lysander, chose 30 men to run the Athenian government and write new laws following the “ancestral constitution” (patrios politeria) of Athens.
Plato’s mother was the niece of the leader of the Thirty, Critias. In a systematic purge of their democratic opponents, the Thirty executed some 1,500 prominent Athenians and alienated the people by stationing a Spartan garrison on the Acropolis. When democrats finally overcame the garrison and killed Critias, amnesty was extended to all who had coop- erated with Lysander except the Thirty.9
Plato was horrified to see that the amnesty excluded the now elderly Socrates, whose circle included not only Critias but Plato’s uncle (Peric- tione’s brother), Charmides, who had fallen with Critias in battle. As one of the presidents of the assembly (ekklesia), Socrates was understood by the democrats to be an accomplice in the illegal arrest and execution of a fellow citizen whose property the oligarchs had wanted to confiscate.
The fact was that Socrates openly ignored an order by the Thirty to arrest the citizen. He was nevertheless charged with impiety, specifically with introducing new gods and corrupting young men. His subsequent con- demnation and execution put an end to Plato’s political aspirations. In politics nothing could be achieved without a party, said Plato, and the treatment of Socrates by both oligarchs and democrats proved that there was no party in Athens with whom an honorable man could associate.
Socrates was 71 and Plato 28.10
The friends of Socrates felt themselves in danger after his death, and a number of them, including Plato, withdrew for a while to the neighboring city of Megara. They lived there under the protection of Euclides, a philosopher who was among the foreign friends of Socrates present at his death. Plato then visited Italy and Sicily, where he was repelled by the sensual luxury of the life lived there by the well-to-do. He finally returned to Athens, watching the public conduct of the city and drawing the conclusion that good government can only be expected when “either true and genuine philosophers find their way to political authority or powerful politicians by the favor of providence take to true philosophy.”
At about the age of 40 Plato founded the Academy, at last discovering his true work in life. For another 40 years he would be the first president of a permanent institution designed to pursue a science that would later be called political science.
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Plato’s contemporary, Isocrates, presided over a similar and older institution, but Isocrates agreed with the man in the street about the uselessness of science. He boasted that the education he had to offer produced expertise in opinions that would provide the ambitious aspirant to public office with points of view that could be expressed with a maximum of polish and persuasiveness. So far was Plato’s Academy from such an interest in rhetoric that the backbone of his curriculum was pure mathematics. The two types of men who would be successfully turned out at the Academy over the next three centuries were original mathema- ticians on the one hand and skilled legislators and administrators on the other. The Academy was the direct progenitor of the state university in its classical manifestation. It was an institution that aimed to supply the state with legislators and administrators whose intellects had been developed in the first instance by the disinterested pursuit of truth for its own sake.
The immediate and perceptible outward sign of the new order of learning in the Greek world was that, whereas in the age of Plato’s birth aspiring young Athenians had to depend on the lectures of peripatetic foreign sophists for their higher education, they could now learn from Plato and his faculty at a university with a fixed domicile and a constitution.11
During the 20-year period from 387 to 367, Plato was mainly occupied with the work of organizing and maintaining his school. Lecturing was part of his work, and we know from his pupil Aristotle that he lectured without a manuscript. Plato’s firmest pedagogical conviction was that nothing really worth knowing could be learned by merely listening to instruction. Learning happened in dialogue as mind interacted with mind, as words spontaneously forced other words, and as the partners in learning discovered things they did not know until they spoke. As long as reason guided their discourse, they would discuss what they had always known but did not know that they knew until they rescued it from their minds and the common store of the race.
The best minds of the Mediterranean world joined Plato. The first mathematician of the time, Eudoxus of Cnidus, moved from Cyzicus to Athens to make common cause with Plato. The academic movement went outward as well. As new Greek settlements were established all over the Mediterranean Basin, representatives of the Academy were called upon to help establish constitutions in the colonies. Aristotle was such a con- sultant and gathered a collection of 158 of these constitutions.12
Most of Plato’s dialogues had been composed by his 40th year. Between the ages of 40 and 60 he labored to stabilize the curriculum of the Academy and establish there a comprehensive inquiry about the nature of political things. Then, in his 60th year, Plato went off on an adventure. In his earlier travels in Sicily he had won the wholehearted devotion of a young
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man of ability and promise, Dion, son-in-law of the reigning tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius I.
Dionysius I died in 367, leaving as his successor Dionysius II, a young man of 30 whose education had been neglected, leaving him totally unfit to take up his father’s task of checking the eastward expansion of the Carthaginians. This trading empire was threatening the very existence of Greek civilization in Sicily. The strong man of Syracuse at the moment was Dion, brother-in-law of the new tyrant, the same man who had been so powerfully attached to Plato 20 years before. Dion thoroughly believed in Plato’s views about the union of political power with science and conceived the idea of bringing Plato to Syracuse to educate his brother- in-law. Plato did not feel the chances of success were promising, but the Carthaginian danger was very real if the new ruler of Syracuse should prove unequal to his task. It would be dishonorable to the Academy if no attempt were made to put its theory into practice at this critical juncture in Greek history. Accordingly, Plato agreed to accept Dion’s invitation.13 Upon arrival, Plato at once offered Dionysius a serious course on geometry. For a while things went well. Dionysius liked Plato, and geometry became the fashion at his court. But the educational scheme wrecked on a double obstacle. Dionysius had limited intellectual capacity on the one hand, and he developed strong personal jealousies of Dion on the other. Dion was therefore banished, and Plato was told to return to Athens. Dionysius kept up a personal correspondence with Plato, however, and Plato did everything in his power to reconcile Dionysius and Dion. His efforts failed. Not only did Dionysius confiscate Dion’s property, but he also forced his wife, Dionysius’s sister, to marry another man. Stubbornly, Plato made another voyage to Syracuse and spent nearly a year there (361–360) trying to remedy the situation. Still a diplomatic failure, Plato eventually went back to Athens to spend the rest of his long life lecturing to his associates in the Academy and composing his longest and most practical contribution to the literature of moral and political philosophy, the Laws.14
The Societal Circumstances of Plato’s Thought
It is important to understand the context of Plato’s personal life. It is equally important to understand the societal circumstances in which Plato invented political science. His ideas about organization theory and man- agement will follow in Part V, with the reader hopefully bearing in mind that Plato’s ideas about these subjects were often contrary to actual Athenian practices. By understanding the practices in the first place, we
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will be able to appreciate more fully Plato’s objections to them and why the debate he instigated continues in our own day.
In the pre-Greek world, advanced peoples had learned to live with nature by wresting secrets from her through patient observation and then applying them to gainful purposes. But such practical knowledge never lost its close association with demons and myths, fears and hopes, and punishments and rewards. The pre-Greek conception of nature viewed physical phenomena as essentially individual, unique, and incalculable rather than general, universal, and predictable. The Greeks were not the first to think about the recurrent regularities in the natural world, but they were the first to develop — going beyond observation and knowledge
— the scientific attitude, a new approach to the world that constitutes to this day one of the distinctive elements of Western life. Classical Greek thought tried to tame man and nature through reason.
Greek inventiveness and originality lay not in this or that political theory but in the invention of the scientific study of politics. Pre-Greek political thought had been a mixture of legend, myth, theology, and allegory.15 If there were an element of independent reasoning, it served as a means to a higher end, usually to be found in the tenets of a supernatural religious system. The contribution of Jewish thought to the political heritage of the world has been the idea of the brotherhood of man, a concept deeply rooted in monotheism. By contrast, polytheism made it difficult for the Greeks to see the basic oneness of mankind, and their religious pluralism reflected their inability to transcend, intellectually and institutionally, the confines of the city-state.
From a social point of view, the Judeo-Christian tradition was opposed to slavery on principle, a unique position in antiquity. It established a weekly day of rest, still unknown in many parts of the world, and it contained a host of protective rules in favor of workers, debtors, women, children, and the poor. The concept of covenant, first appearing in the agreement between God and Abraham, is a frequent theme in the Bible whenever momentous decisions were to be made. The concept was revived centuries later in the Puritan attempt to build a new religious and civil society; when President Woodrow Wilson, a devout Presbyterian, named the constitution of the League of Nations a covenant; and when President Bill Clinton baptized his legislative program in 1992 “a new covenant” between his administration and the American people.
However significant Judaic contributions to Western civilization may be, they never were, nor were they meant to be, political science. They were political and social ethics rather than science, and as such constitute one of the three chief tributaries to the mainstream of Western civilization, the other two being the Christian principle of love and the Greek principle of rationalism.
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