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to be derived from the senses, but is only to be achieved by the intellect. This, in turn fitted in well with Pythagoreanism.
From Socrates he probably learnt his preoccupation with ethical problems, and his tendency to seek teleological rather than mechanical explanations of the world. «The Good» dominated his thought more than that of the pre-Socratics, and it is difficult not to attribute this fact to the influence of Socrates.
How is all this connected with authoritarianism in politics?
In the first place: Goodness and Reality being timeless, the best state will be the one which most nearly copies the heavenly model, by having a minimum of change and a maximum of static perfection, and its rulers should be those who best understand the eternal Good.
In the second place: Plato, like all mystics, has, in his beliefs, a core of certainty which is essentially incommunicable except by a way of life. The Pythagoreans had endeavoured to set up a rule of the initiate, and this is, at bottom, what Plato desires. If a man is to be a good statesman, he must know the Good; this he can only do by a combination of intellectual and moral discipline. If those who have not gone through this discipline are allowed a share in the government, they will inevitably corrupt k.
In the third place: much education is needed to make a good ruler on Plato’s principles. It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato’s point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible. This view implies an oligarchy.
In the fourth place: Plato, in common with most Greek philosophers, took the view that leisure is essential to wisdom, which will therefore not be found among those who have to work for their living, but only among those who have independent means, or who are relieved by the state from anxieties as to their subsistence. This point of view is essentially aristocratic.
Two general questions arise in confronting Plato with modem ideas. The first is: Is there such a thing as «wisdom»? The second is: Granted that there is such a thing, can any constitution be devised that will give it political power?
«Wisdom,» in the sense supposed, would not be any kind of specialized skill, such as is possessed by the shoemaker or the physician
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or the military tactician. It must be something more generalized than this, since its possession is supposed to make a man capable of governing wisely. I think Plato would have said that it consists in knowledge of the good, and would have supplemented this definition with the Socratic doctrine that no man sins wittingly, from which it follows that whoever knows what is good does what is right. To us, such a view seems remote from reality. We should more naturally say that there are divergent interests, and that the statesman should arrive at the best available compromise. The members of a class or a nation may have a common interest, but it will usually conflict with the interests of other classes or other nations. There are, no doubt, some interests of mankind as a whole, but they do not suffice to determine political action. Perhaps they will do so at some future date, but certainly not so long as there are many sovereign States. And even then the most difficult part of the pursuit of the general interest would consist in arriving at compromises among mutually hostile special interests.
But even if we suppose that there is such a thing as «wisdom,» is there any form of constitution which will give the government to the wise? It is clear that majorities, like general councils, may err, and in fact have erred. Aristocracies are not always wise; kings are often foolish; Popes, in spite of infallibility, have committed grievous errors. Would anybody advocate entrusting the government to university graduates, or even to doctors of divinity? Or to men who, having been born poor, have made great fortunes? It is clear that no legally definable selection of citizens is likely to be wiser, in practice, than the whole body.
It might be suggested that men could be given political wisdom by a suitable training. But the question would arise: what is a suitable training? And this would turn out to be a party question.
The problem of finding a collection of «wise» men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.
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CHAPTER XIV Plato’s Utopia
PLATO’S most important dialogue, the Republic, consists, broadly, of three parts. The first (to near the end of Book V) consists in the construction of an ideal commonwealth; it is the earliest of Utopias.
One of the conclusions arrived at is that the rulers must be philosophers. Books VI and VII are concerned to define the word «philosopher.» This discussion constitutes the second section.
The third section consists of a discussion of various kinds of actual constitutions and of their merits and defects.
The nominal purpose of the Republic is to define «justice.» But at an early stage it is decided that, since everything is easier to see in the large than in the small, it will be better to inquire what makes a just state than what makes a just individual. And since justice must be among the attributes of the best imaginable State, such a State is first delineated, and then it is decided which of its perfections is to be called «justice.»
Let us first describe Plato’s Utopia in its broad outlines, and then consider points that arise by the way.
Plato begins by deciding that the citizens are to be divided into three classes: the common people, the soldiers, and the guardians. The last, alone, are to have political power. There are to be much fewer of them than of the other two classes. In the first instance, it seems, they are to be chosen by the legislator; after that, they will usually succeed by heredity, but in exceptional cases a promising child may be promoted from one of the inferior classes, while among the children of guardians a child or young man who is unsatisfactory may be degraded.
The main problem, as Plato perceives, is to insure that the guardians shall carry out the intentions of the legislator. For this purpose he has
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various proposals, educational, economic, biological, and religious. It is not always clear how far these proposals apply to other classes than the guardians; it is clear that some of them apply to the soldiers, but in the main Plato is concerned only with the guardians, who are to be a class apart, like the Jesuits in old Paraguay, the ecclesiastics in the States of the Church until 1870, and the Communist Party in the U.S.S.R. at the present day.
The first thing to consider is education. This is divided into two parts, music and gymnastics. Each has a wider meaning than at present: «music» means everything that is in the province of the muses, and «gymnastics» means everything concerned with physical training and fitness. «Music» is almost as wide as what we should call «culture,» and «gymnastics» is somewhat wider than what we call «athletics.»
Culture is to be devoted to making men gentlemen, in the sense which, largely owing to Plato, is familiar in England. The Athens of his day was, in one respect, analogous to England in the nineteenth century: there was in each an aristocracy enjoying wealth and social prestige, but having no monopoly of political power; and in each the aristocracy had to secure as much power as it could by means of impressive behaviour. In Plato’s Utopia, however, the aristocracy rules unchecked.
Gravity, decorum, and courage seem to be the qualities mainly to be cultivated in education. There is to be a rigid censorship, from very early years, over the literature to which the young have access and the music they are allowed to hear. Mothers and nurses are to tell their children only authorized stories. Homer and Hesiod are not to be allowed, for a number of reasons. First, they represent the gods as behaving badly on occasion, which is unedifying; the young must be taught that evils never come from the gods, for God is not the author of all things, but only of good things. Second, there are things in Homer and Hesiod which are calculated to make their readers fear death, whereas everything ought to be done in education to make young people willing to die in battle. Our boys must be taught to consider slavery worse than death, and therefore they must have no stories of good men weeping and wailing, even for the death of friends. Third, decorum demands that there should never be loud laughter, and yet Homer speaks of «inextinguishable laughter
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among the blessed gods.» How is a schoolmaster to reprove mirth effectively, if boys can quote this passage? Fourth, there are passages in Homer praising rich feasts, and others describing the lusts of the gods; such passages discourage temperance. ( Dean Inge, a true Platonist, objected to a line in a well-known hymn: «The shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast,» which occurs in a description of the joys of heaven.) Then there must be no stories in which the wicked are happy or the good unhappy; the moral
