No Ideals, No Utopias, No Philosopher-Kings
To grasp the political argument of the Republic we need to clear away some unhelpful accretions from its use and abuse in past centuries; we also need to ask afresh what Plato means when he claims a just society is ‘possible'.
Drink Reception in the Ryle Room from 5pm onwards.
Immoralist Politics
The argument of the Republic is best understood as a response to a rival understanding of politics which remains alive and well today: the view that the language of justice can only ever be an instrument of manipulation and domination, and that politics is essentially a struggle for zero-sum goods.
Greedy, Angry, Tribal, Rational: Plato on Human Nature
Plato’s just society is characterised by three principal interconnected features. It is organized around labour, and takes as fundamental the expression of human nature in meaningful and appropriate work. It includes a responsible political class who
are reliably motivated by the good of the whole. And it is marked by an absolute separation of wealth from political power. All three ideas are worth exploring today, and so is Plato’s basis for them in his conception of the structure of the human
psyche.
Guardians
Plato’s solution to the challenge of political immoralism is his idea of the Guardian class: a political class committed to the truth, the discovery of knowledge, and the pursuit of the common good. Mill and other Victorians were excited to find in Plato this conception of government as public service: how far can we reappropriate it today?
The Appalling Argument
Most of the respects in which the Republic has been denounced as authoritarian or totalitarian involve misreadings or gross exaggerations. But there is an exception: Plato’s insistence that a just society requires rigid control of ‘mimetic poetry’, and in general the management of culture by the state. We’ll examine his argument for that conclusion, and attempt to identify the points, if any, at which it goes wrong.
Portable Platonism
How far does the Republic offer an ‘non-ideal theory’, available for use in our own unjust societies? What would it mean to be a Platonist in politics today? A set of modest proposals, with reflections on the points at which Platonism and liberal democracy either mesh or collide.