Customer Reviews

Essential reading - By: Nicholas Whyte, 19 Mar 2008
The core of the book is the presentation of the ideal state,in which government is conducted by a specially trained & bred class of philosophers/judges/warriors, but he diverges onto various other topics as well,in particular what the nature of their education should be.

Plato's insistence that educationin philosophy (which for him includes all the sciences) would automatically produce gifted rulers must surely have seemed a bit naive evenin his own day. And yet, of course, you have large parts of society constructed around this: Oxbridge classicists going into the City; the énarquesin France; the Ivy Leaguein the US. On the other hand, I observe that really intelligent people often make poor politicians; few of the skills of political leadership are intellectual. Plato would chide me that this is a problem with democracies & tyrannies, which I admit are the only polities I have particularly engaged with, & he explains why this is soin his chapters examining the problems of democracy & tyranny. I am not completely convinced though.

Striking that Plato insists on the equality of men & women, at least within his ruling classs; striking also that this is combined with a vehement advocacy of infanticide on eugenic grounds, & on the abolition of marriagein favour of a planned breeding programme. I wonder if any sf novelist has ever tried writing a society constructed along Plato's lines. There are echoes of itin a lot of places, but I can't think of any explicit example.

Of course, anyone who did try & construct a society along Plato's lines would run into the problems of the flaws & inconsistencies of the text. In particular, Plato's thoughts on the theory of forms are implicitin a lot of the text, but he is (apparently) rather unclearin his vocabulary so one is never completely sure what he is trying to get at, & the more specific he gets on basic philosophical contexts, the more adrift I felt.