For anyone who has read Plato’s The Republic this is for you. I have read this book, however find many of Platos conclusions fundamentally wrong. I have decided to compose a counter-thesis to these issues, otherwise known as “The new Republic”. If anyone would like to debate any issues relating to this, or if anyone simply has any suggestions, please respond.
Thank You
Well, I think not many people agree on what Plato puts forward in Republic. A magazine on philosophy in my country, for example, listed Republic as one of the five most dangerous philosophical books!
And I think that anyone who disfavours totalitarism doesn’t like the kind of state Plato promotes in this book. I mean, he might be saying for example that dictators are the most unhappy people since they are a slave to their own slaves, but along the same lines, he seems to be reinventing dictatorship in a way that it favours the philosopher kings. And just because philosophers have the ability to think things through, they wouldnt at some point become a slave to their followers? I’m pretty certain that every form of state eventually ends up being an oligarchy…
Can you share some specific, controversial aspect of your New Republic? If you’re lucky, one of us will bother to challenge it. – Locke
Plato’s Republic is all about enslaving the mindless but keeping them happy with simple pleasures like the arts (Plato was a pretentious, arrogant little SOB, but funny with it) so that the rational may rule and control everything of significance.
Sounds like modern day capitalist democracies…
Bill Gates: Plato’s descendant?
Dunno, ask him
demosthenes8907,
Debate away! Sounds like an interesting project. I should probably audit the thread, being myself a semi-quasi-neo-Platonist. Some of my best thoughts at one time were reflections on those books.
Hi Sado,
That is so ironic. Throughout much of history, it seems conservatives considered liberal books dangerous, and there liberals find conservative books dangerous! Whatever books are percieved to be a danger to the current state, it seems.
(By the way, as to your footer, it’s been said that, “Science only studies that which is already dead” – Scheler). 
Sounds like modern day capitalist democracies…
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You sound a little hostile to Plato. Don’t Plato’s rulers lead with an eye to the good of the state?
And it seems nothing like a capitalist democracy, where individual choice reigns, and people in government are elected by the masses. Plato’s government is more like some sort of Fascism or Socialism, no? And by “the arts” do you mean technae (the arts of artisans) or poetaes (the arts of poets)?
Should we see the soul-state analogy as primarily one advocating a political regime, or a personal regime? Going beyond Plato, is the hope for a democracy to be one in which the people are individually just, so as to have all three tiers ordered in themseves?
Regards,
mrn
(self-apponted resident neo-Scholastic on ILP)
More than a little, though if given the opportunity to be a philosopher king I’d obviously take it…
Of course, but that good of the state can involve keeping the majority happy (or at least occupied) with trivial things like the arts (I don’t think the arts are trivial, incidentally) while the rational elite get on with ruling everything.
Individual choice reigns - i.e. the masses sit around squabbling over petty notions of individuality (see the ‘modern philosophers’ thread here) while the rulers get on with ruling. The political spectrum in the US is very narrow - that people are elected by the masses (who, remember, are too obsessed with individuality to form any kind of consensus) is conjecture, there isn’t an awful lot of choice and hence you just get this vague binary swing (not at all unlike the UK).
The structure of the governments may be different but the essential dynamics are as old as the moon.
To the second question - the former.
And that is different from the modern democracy, how? What’s voter turnout like over there? Television is the opiate of the masses.
But I suppose that might mean not educating everyone to be out of the cave. Which makes me think Plato’s Republic is more an image of the soul than serious politics – although it provides a rough sketch of political forms as well. (It’s my reading of Plato that he often speaks with a twinkle and a wink in his eye.)
I think Plato wants as little swing as possible. Democrats allow as much swing as possible. Maybe that’s why democrats are so threatened by the thought of an absolutist government. But democracy is great for moderate existentialism. Maybe it’s just an idea who’s time has come.
(Actually I didn’t get your point, I just thought I’d say something so as to avoid embarrassment. Hope it was pertinent.)
mrn
Dear MrN
No, people being stupid and being aggressive/defensive about their spurious understanding of individual freedom is the opiate of the masses. The masses will never unite because they’d have to compromise too much to be able to reconcile their unity with their ‘sacred’ notions of freedom.
Voter turnout - for European elections it’s about 27% (I know, if over 70% of people aren’t voting then the outcome means nothing democratically) for local elections it’s a little higher. General elections tend to be between 50 and 60%.
He was a dramatist, somewhat ironically.
That’s the lie. One cannot reconcile statist Socialism (Leninism, loosely) with democracy, therefore one cannot be that sort of party in a democratic election…
Though saying that a few countries have voted in national referendums to convert from a democracy into a oligarchy. Literally people voting away the vote.
Democracy is the great leveller. I’m all for collective voting (household suffrage, essentially) and for elitist government.
The point I was making is that the notion of individual freedom as it is popularly conceived is actually crippling to any attempt at political progress. Are you familiar with Francis Fukuyama?
Am I being aggressive/defensive? It’s probably the picture of Tony Soprano looking at me.
Some parties unite under liberal notion of freedom (Democrats), some unite under a unity of a more classical liberal form of freedom (Republicans).
One could certainly be a Fabian socialist. But take the “statist” part off of Socialism, and don’t you have much of democratic-socialist Europe?
I think I have heard of Francis Fukuyama. Is he a contemporary Rightest Hegelian?
What do you consider “political progress”, might be a good question for me to ask you, Mr Soprano.
mrn
Dear MrN
Sure, but I’m not talking about the two mainstream parties in the narrow spectrum of US politics, I’m talking in general across the western world. The notion of workers uniting these days is absurd - it simply won’t happen. Too much infighting and backstabbing among the union-forming classes…
I don’t think that you are being aggressive or defensive, but when you hear people claiming that it is their ‘right’ to drive a car as far as they like and to own a mobile phone and to spend as much money on credit as they like, all in the name of individual free will, and even reject criticisms using the old ‘who are you to tell me what to do?’ I think that it’s fair to call their attitude towards their notions of freedom ‘aggressive’ and ‘defensive’.
Not these days. Now we have ‘social democrats’ like the ruling Swedish party or arguably Blair’s Labour Party…
Sort of. He claimed that liberal democracy was the ultimate political system and that the fall of Soviet communism represented the end of ideological struggle. I think he’s wrong about just about everything, but he is nonetheless a great influence on my perspective.
It is a good question. I just mean progress in the sense of moving towards an aim held collectively. By ‘collectively’ I don’t mean ‘by everyone’. I don’t mean some univeral standard of progress, I mean a human-created standard of progress.
Getting back to the new Republic, we might ask how government should respond to human nature. I think we have a universal nature and we have a particular character as well. The former concept is ancient, the latter, more modern and existential. We might be able to find a politics that addresses both…if humans are to “create” a standard of progress.
mrn
postscriptum: By the way, what happened to demosthenes8907 ? Didn’t he have any questions for us? Or he handling that through private mail?
Dear MrN
I don’t think that humans have a nature. Any politics that seeks to manifest some or other notion of human nature (i.e. any political humanism whatsoever) is simply using ‘human nature’ as a rhetorical device. Whether you are a communist claiming that all men are born equal or a capitalist claiming that man in by nature greedy and full of latent desires you are playing the same game.
‘Existential’ just means ‘pertaining to existence’. All concepts pertain to existence, to dasein. Or at least it makes no sense to talk of a concept not pertaining to this.
I think you’ve got a dubious distinction on our hands, as 'twere. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Nature = a principle of movement and rest in that in which it occurs primarily.
Man is rational animal…among similar definitions.
Well, we exist as individuals. I think I’ve heard the term used in that context.
Concepts, however, I must insist, are universals which cover things which exist as particulars.
Isn’t it strange that epistemology should affect politics?
mrn
Dear MrN
No offence but grammatically that sentence is tortured. Again, I feel you are using ‘human nature’ as a rhetorical lever rather than a logical conclusion…
Definitions, especially of the ‘rational’ shift over time. While I’ve nothing per se against you saying what you’ve said I’d point out that to say it today is different to saying it in the time of Aristotle…
No, we believe that we exist as individuals. We perceive as individuals, yes. I perceive therefore I am? Perhaps not…
No, ‘concepts’ are just another bit of rhetoric. As a comedian I was listening to today put it ‘the war on terror is somewhat flawed: historically, it has proven difficult to bomb abstract concepts’.
To me, not at all. Politics is little more than a power game to see who can promote their notion of humanity in the most effective manner. Well, these days it is, I’m not sure that definition would hold for all politics…
dear threshold enlightener,
I might know what you are talking about. Logical argument does seem to stem from rhetoric (or is it the the other way?), except that logic tries to address reason, in other words a link of knowledge or causality, instead of addressing passion in rhetoric. But not everything reasonable is a conclusion, for you would never get to conclusions from nowhere.
So my question is, what is unreasonable about belief in human nature(dialactically)? We still use “rational animal” today as a measure of humanity – for example, when speaking of animal intelligence. viz. Some want to give rights to animals based on their demonstration of and potential for intelligence in their species.
mrn