Why Plato Matters Now

PAC would like to express their deepest thanks to Dr. Angie Hobbs and Bloomsbury Continuum for this exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming Why Plato Matters Now.

Dr. Hobbs is an esteemed guest speaker at our forthcoming virtual event Democracy and Tyranny on Saturday, July 26 at 1 pm EDT, where she will be speaking on Plato and his relevance now more than ever.

Reserve your spot

To celebrate, Bloomsbury Continuum are offering members of Plato’s Academy Centre an exclusive 20% discount on Why Plato Matters Now. To claim the discount, just use the code PLATO20 at the checkout when ordering through bloomsbury.com. This code is valid on pre-orders, but cannot be used in conjunction with any other discount.

From Democracy to Tyranny

Plato is only talking of the direct democracy of contemporary Athens, in which adult male Athenian-born citizens vote directly on laws and policies, and take turns (usually decided by lot) at holding the great offices of the polis. Nevertheless, his brilliant satire of the Athens of his day in the *Republic* still offers us much food for thought. It is a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait than the scathing image of the ship (6.488a–489a), in which the fractious crew ignore the advice of the one person who can help steer them to safety – an image followed by the still more hostile depiction of the *dēmos* as a large and dangerous animal (6.493a–b).

In Book 8, Socrates allows that democracy certainly has its charms: it is varied, colourful, exuberant and tolerant, and its focus on individual freedom and equality of political opportunity clearly have their attractions, particularly as the kind of ‘freedom’ on offer here is the freedom to do what you individually feel like (which we have seen contrasted in the *Gorgias* with what Socrates views there as the genuine freedom that stems from reasoned choice). In the short run, it can appear the most enticing option.

There is, however, definitely a darker underbelly to the surface charms: it is claimed that when the poor win power, they begin by killing or exiling their opponents, and Socrates also emphasizes the weaknesses of the democratic city that ensues. It is utterly disrespectful of authority and chaotic to the point of anarchy – in a playful mood, Plato even has animals in a democracy doing their own thing and sauntering about the streets as they please. Moods and allegiances are fickle and change on a whim. The description of the democratic individual that follows also suggests that language is corrupted in a democracy in ways which strongly echo Thucydides’ account of the subversion of moral terms in the Corcyran civil war: licence is called liberty and shamelessness courage, while shame is disparaged as foolishness and temperance dismissed as cowardice. All of this results in extreme fragility: the democratic city is highly vulnerable to attacks from without and, above all, from within, when a cynical and opportunistic demagogue sees a way to manipulate a path towards absolute power, pretending to be the people’s champion.

Socrates delineates the overturning of democracy with care, and we should do well to take note; as he comments, any extreme is liable to produce a violent reaction, and this holds just as true of cities, extreme anarchy yielding to ferocious oppression. The criminal group of parasites (termed ‘drones’ by Socrates) seeks to sow division through lies, turning the mass of the people against the wealthy and the elite. The most successful of these parasites, with a sharp eye to the main chance, manages to get himself elected as a single popular leader, making extravagant promises and intoxicating his supporters with the neat spirit of offers of still greater freedom. Using his demagogic rhetorical skills he creates a cult around himself where his followers believe he can do no wrong. At some point, heady with his own power, he corrupts the legal system by bringing baseless charges against his enemies and commits murder (the verb Socrates uses, *miaiphoneō*, unequivocally means ‘murder’, even though the courts are nominally involved); this first taste of blood initiates his transition ‘from man to wolf’ and from demagogue to tyrant. If the wealthy whose property he is confiscating succeed in these early days in having him exiled, he returns thirsting for revenge, demanding a personal bodyguard to protect him from his enemies (both real and, increasingly, imagined) and to enable him to continue his alleged championing of the people. Indeed, he now identifies himself entirely with ‘the people’: anyone who still tries to oppose him is labelled, precisely, ‘a hater of the people’ (8.566c), and he holds total sway, now the finished tyrant and in the grip of culpable mania.

However, although at the start he smilingly distributes land to the cult followers who raised him to power, their lives very quickly deteriorate under his despotic rule. He continually stirs up wars in order to keep his people fearful and feeling in need of a strong leader; the high levels of war taxation also make them still poorer, and less able to rise up against him. For all these reasons, says Socrates, ‘a tyrant must always be provoking war’. As his popularity wanes, and the bolder openly complain, he starts to purge all those possessed of the courage, intelligence and vision (and indeed wealth) to pose a threat. His effect on the city is precisely the opposite of the doctor: instead of cleansing the body politic of poisons, he cuts out all that is healthy and lets the poison remain. As discontent grows, his bodyguard increases as its morality declines, and when the people protest that this is not why they voted him in, and belatedly start to realize what sort of a creature they have bred, he turns on them completely and enslaves them all.

Prof. Angie Hobbs gained a degree in Classics and a PhD in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and her chief interests are in ancient philosophy and literature, and ethics and political theory from classical thought to the present, and she has published widely in these areas, including Plato and the Hero. She works in a number of policy sectors, and contributes regularly to media around the world, including many appearances on In Our Time on Radio 4; she has spoken at the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Athens Democracy Forum, the Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament and Westminster Abbey and been the guest on Desert Island Discs and Private Passions. Her latest title is the much-anticipated Why Plato Matters Now. (Bloomsbury Continuum)

angiehobbs.com