1. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 1 Plato’s Republic: Critique 4 1. Is Plato’s Republic totalitarian? Karl Popper’s (b.Austria, British 1902- 1994) charge in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) –Popper argues that the Republic is the source of all totalitarian systems in the West What features of the Republic might be regarded as totalitarian?

2. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 2 Plato’s Republic: Critique What features mitigate somewhat the charge of totalitarianism? Are the labels “authoritarian” or “paternalistic” a better fit than “totalitarian”?

3. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 3 Plato’s Republic: Critique 4 2. The assumption that a few have a special kind of wisdom and therefore are justified in ruling –Critique Contra Plato, knowledge does not equal virtue. The position is internally self- justifying.

4. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 4 Plato’s Republic: Critique Plato is not aware that power can corrupt. –The famous statement of Lord Acton (John Emerich Dalberg) (1887): “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

5. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 5 Plato’s Republic: Critique 4 3. Plato’s ideal is static This is rooted in the fact that its foundation is the other-worldly realm of Ideas (permanent, unchanging, absolutes). 4 4. Plato’s human nature dualism The evidence of modern psychology and neurology runs counter to such an extreme dualism.

6. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 6 Plato’s heritage 4 The heritage of Plato (a few) – (1) His metaphysical dualism. Arthur Lovejoy states that Plato set up the primary antithesis of other- worldliness & this-worldliness, the belief that the genuinely real and truly good are radically antithetic to anything found in natural human life (The Great Chain of Being, 1936, p. 25).

7. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 7 Plato’s heritage –(2) His dualistic view of human nature The division into soul and body and the denigration of the physical and bodily

8. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 8 Plato’s heritage – (3) The position that intellectual and contemplative activities are superior to manual activities. This was challenged by Christianity in the form of monasticism from the third century onwards, but without much success.

9. Plato’s Republic: Critique - slide 9 Plato’s heritage – (4) The position that things which are permanent and unchanging are more perfect than those which change. A basic assumption in Western thought until Darwin (1859)