industrial and institutional systems with which perestroika sought to solve the
problems which had allowed its own acceptance were proved to have been too
little, and to have been introduced too late.
Plato
Plato (c.427–347BC) is one of the earliest great philosophers and political
thinkers in the Western tradition, and his works represent the major inheri-
tance by Western political thought from the classical period. In some ways this
is ironic; the usual image of classical Greek politics, or certainly the image of
what was best about it, is of Athenianparticipatory democracy. Plato,
however, was fiercely opposed todemocracy, and his most important political
writing, known to us as theRepublic, is in part a vicious attack on it and a
lengthy and subtle philosophical justification for rule by a small intellectual
e ́lite (seearistocracy). Other important works, notablyThe Laws, are blue-
prints for just such a society, which he hoped would stimulate the founding of
new non-democratic Greek colonies. Indeed the Greek society Plato most
admired was Sparta, the traditional authoritarian enemy of Athens.
Plato’s reasons for opposing Athenian democracy can be analysed on at least
two levels. For one thing he came himself from an aristocratic family. More
important, certainly in his own eyes, was a distaste for the excesses of
demagogically influenced masses arising from the execution by the democratic
assembly of his friend and hero, Socrates, on a fallacious charge (according to
Plato, anyway) of corrupting public morals. At the more theoretical level Plato
opposed democracy because of certain conclusions he drew about the capacity
of humanity to understand, and therefore follow, the good life. Briefly, human
intellectual capacity is not at all equally distributed; knowledge of moral good
is just as much dependent on this capacity as knowledge of any skill; indeed
‘ruling’ is just another skill or trade, as only the very most able are capable of
seeing moral and political truth properly, and hence only they (Plato called
them ‘philosopher kings’) should have political power. The theory is subtle and
rich, and argues for the rule of the philosopher kings on many dimensions, all
infused with very complex general philosophical views. He has been seen by
some modern critics as tremendously right wing, even as some sort of
precursor tofascismor other forms oftotalitarianism, but this is crudely
to abstract a powerful and complicated thinker from his context in a quite
meaningless way. Plato is now among the most studied of political thinkers, and
certainly is nowadays more influential than his successor,Aristotle, though
this was not always so, for the medieval rediscovery of classical civilization
really started with Aristotle, whose views were powerfully formative on the
political thought of medieval Christianity (seeAquinas).
Plato