Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:. It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves.
A more practical suggestion came from J. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs.
But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance. In , Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. About fifteen per cent flunked. Indeed, although this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does have a fairly good track record.
The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do.
As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections. First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment. After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority.
Increasing the level of education and political knowledge of the people should be one solution to the problem. However, one should be aware that the right to vote is by no means the only feature of democracy. Actually, it was not even a characteristic feature for ancient democracies that distributed most political offices not through elections but by lot.
Despite the disagreements of modern theoreticians of democracy about the definition of their subject, one should keep in mind that democracy in the modern world also means crucial rights and liberties, the rule of law, pluralism, tolerance, and the separation of powers and thus the protection from the abuse of power. Because of the substantial value of these features modern Western democracy is certainly worth defending despite the recent setbacks.
De Gruyter publishes over 1, new book titles each year and more than journals in the humanities, social sciences, medicine, mathematics, engineering, computer sciences, natural sciences, and law. De Gruyter Conversations - Academic insights on current topics and debates. Politics is an art which requires specific knowledge To begin with, Plato understands politics as a science or an art that requires specific knowledge.
Plato: Elections Are nEither good Nor just Elections and referenda are efficient procedures to deal with political disagreements. Manuel Knoll Antike Griechische Philosophie.
You might also be interested in. The Republic is based on an assumption of a parallelism between the city and the soul. In The Republic, systems of government are defined by the end they most pursue. Oligarchies, for instance, esteem wealth. In democracies, freedom is the highest good.
There are five regime types for Plato and thus five kinds of human characters, each following the other in corresponding order. Trump is the tyrannical soul par excellence.
His instinct is always to stifle dissent. The examples here are endless. During one of the presidential debates, he vowed to jail his political opponent for imagined non-offenses. Almost everything we know about Trump testifies to this need to punish and humiliate.
Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted … Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.
This emotional incontinence is what sets Trump apart as a uniquely tyrannical figure. To watch him on stage is to witness a frenzied parade of inner consciousness.
He has very few actual friends because other people are ornaments for him. He treats women as playthings. He mocks the disabled. This list hardly captures all of Trump fascistic musings, but the point is obvious enough.
This is a man with no respect for democratic norms, no understanding of compromise, no sense of inclusiveness, and, worst of all, no self-awareness. His burning ignorance is matched only by his baseless confidence. Indeed, with Trump we see the transition from democracy to tyranny in real time.
Plato was not a fan of democracy. Plato believed that the key and driving feature of democracy is desire for freedom; this very trait, though, ultimately leads a state to tyranny. A democratic regime involves such a plurality of interests, he believed, that the only way anything can be achieved under it is to have strong leadership that can unite interests.
Though he seems to be living in a glittering palace with wealth and access to all good things, in fact he lives a shrunken existence as a slave to slaves. Rule by philosopher-king gives way to timocracy rule by property owners , which gives way to oligarchy, followed by democracy and then tyranny. As democracy is preceded by rule of the rich, Plato believed that under a democratic regime, there would be considerable resentment against the wealthy; the first step of the democratic demagogue, he claimed, would be to attack these wealthy elites.
Certain aspects of the democracy Plato describes—and which we are now seeing—are not sudden, recent developments.
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