Popper on Plato, Social Justice and Political Correctness
I have been reading Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume I and am awestruck with Popper’s scholarship and its relevance to currently percolating issues such as social justice education, political correctness and climate change research. Popper shows that Plato is at the root of totalitarianism. Plato re-defined justice to mean the individual’s existence for the good of the state; conceived of a ruling elite given politically correct indoctrination; and advocated total social control of day-to-day life. Popper argues that Plato bases all of this on his tribalist and naturalist morality, that is, his belief that morals are rooted in nature. Much like today’s environmentalists, Plato favored a return to primitive olden times before the innovation that had occurred in Athens.
Plato defined justice just as social justice educators do, namely, that the just is what is socially good. The guardians, the ruling elite, were to receive a social justice-based education. Plato intensely disliked Athenian democracy and the steps that Pericles and others had made to define justice as equality before the law. Rather, public morality would be defined by the politically correct guardian class. Morality, moderation and justice would mean adherence to one’s place and obedience to authority.
Like Plato, today’s environmentalists believe that the primitive is best and that human innovation is evil. Much as the cap and trade bill attempts to assert nationally centralized authority over day-day-life, overseen by a Platonic “administrator” or philosopher king, so Plato believed that the greatest virtues were to be obedient or to lead others.
The idea that the state’s welfare precedes the individual citizen’s was attributed by Thucydides to Pericles, and even earlier it is found mythologized in the character of Creon in Sophocles’ “Antigone”. So it is quite preposterous to suppose that Plato was responsible for “redefining” justice as Popper imagines.
To understand Socrates’ discourse about the city in Books 2-5 of the “Republic”, you have to recognize that the whole discussion is elicited by his young friends Glaucon and Adeimantus. The latter is particularly concerned that people believe that justice is merely a reputation for justice *because that is what they are taught*, and he has no response other than pleading with Socrates to *teach him* an alternative. In other words, the discussion *begins from the premise* that obedience training is the only kind of education there is (Socrates likens the guardians to dogs–that’s a joke.) The repressive education and legal regime that Socrates describes in books 2-5 is diagnostic of the difficulties in the premises from which Glaucon and Adeimantus began. It is a *critique* of the totalitarianism that Popper naively ascribes to Plato! (Much of it builds on sendups of social and artistic engineering in plays by Aristophanes.)
Plato does acknowledge that something like “social justice” is desirable, but he ridicules any attempt to achieve it administratively, or even to understand it in administrative terms. The “philosopher-king” arrives in the dialogue when the model city is dropped because of its impossibility. This does not simply add an administrative layer to the previous model, it changes the direction of the discussion altogether, because the “philosopher-king” is not a kind of office but a kind of *person*. The philosopher loves wisdom, and thus his desires do not require the meticulous regulation needed to train humans of whom it was assumed that they could only be as good as they were made to be. When Socrates discusses the education of the philosopher (book 7) it is fundamentally a “liberal arts” education aimed at drawing out the person’s capacities of soul rather than putting anything in. The person develops virtue by conversing with the divine in his own soul, not by obedience and certainly not by obedience to the commands of other people.
It is especially distressing to see Plato falsely accused of social engineering, since he is actually its most penetrating critic and the critic most aware of its seductions. Plato spends almost half of the *Republic* describing a model of social engineering because he understands that, given certain common assumptions about what human beings are, *even well-intentioned young men like Glaucon and Adeimantus* might be drawn to an engineered utopia and in any case could not articulate a reason to resist one. The reason that social engineering continues to be a dangerous temptation today is not that some bad person like “Plato” or Marx fooled everybody with it, but because conceptions of the human as consumer furnish no basis for cooperation that is not externally imposed, and posit no autonomy whose loss is to be regretted. Plato’s idea of the human is founded in the soul, and this is why Plato is a great teacher of freedom.
Plato thinks we’re smart. Readers of Plato sometimes act like they don’t need to be. Instead of wishing that Plato were differently-politically-correct, we should tackle his dialogues with the serious work that their problems call for.
Bruce Heiden
Professor of Greek and Latin
The Ohio State University
I just came across a footnote in Guthrie’s (1971) “Sophists” that lists works on both sides of the question that Professor Heiden raises. As of 1971, on Popper’s side were Fite’s “Platonic Legend”, Crossman’s “Plato Today”, Neurath and Lauwerys “Plato’s Republic and German Education”, Havelock’s “The Liberal temper in Greek Politics, Bambrough’s “Plato, Popper and Politics”, and Thorson’s “Plato, Totalitarian or Democrat”? On Prof. Heiden’s side was Levinson’s “In Defense of Plato”. I’m sure much additional careful work has been done by classical specialists.
Perhaps the most wrenching evidence is from Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” when Adolf Eichmann describes himself as a follower of Kant. Guthrie (p. 10) notes “it was indeed disturbing to learn that the aim of the German Nazi Party as described in its official programme, was the production of ‘guardians in the highest Platonic sense.’”
We cannot blame Plato and Kant for the excesses and misinterpretations of Idealism. Or can we?