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Say then, my friend : Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. January 27, 2025 Note: this is the second post in a series. The first one is here.
Some people believe that wokeness emerged from the progressive counterculture of the 1960’s. Some hold that it has its roots in the 1930's with FDR and the New Deal. Others say that the origins of wokeness go back to the Frankfurt School of economics in 1920's Germany. Whatever wokeness is at its core, and whether it is good or bad, I submit that it is in fact older than any of that -- and, indeed, very old. That is the main thesis of this essay.
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato described a faction whose social and political agenda included moral relativism, lax enforcement of criminal laws, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and the repudiation of their society’s founding principles and traditional values. Plato called the adherents of this ideology dēmokratikoi andres [democratic men]. Plato wrote that a state ruled by such "democratic men" is on the brink of descending into tyranny. Steps along the path to tyranny, as Plato described it, include sexual liberation and equality, aggressive taxation of the rich, expansion of the welfare state, open borders, forgiveness of debts, suppression of dissenting speech, and the confiscation of weapons owned by private citizens. Today, many with a similar agenda refer to themselves as "progressives". Most of them, I suppose, are unaware that they are "progressing" toward a vision of the world that dates back at least two and a half thousand years.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato [Whitehead (1929): Process and Reality]. Whitehead was exaggerating, of course -- but at any rate this essay will consist literally of a series of footnotes to Plato. To the extent that there is truth in Whitehead's witticism, the difference between this and any other work in the Western canon is that I am up front about what I am doing.
Overview of The Republic, Book VIII
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato takes the view that the chief distinguishing characteristics of a person is the set of virtues that person honors. He sorts men into five basic categories, according to the virtues they honor most:
Plato wrote that a nation's form of government emerges naturally from the values of its citizens, and in particular from the virtues they honor. In Plato's view, when the people of a society honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders who exhibit that virtue -- and, conversely, when citizens fail to honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders in whom that virtue is absent. The virtues present and absent in these leaders in turn determine the general character of the government. Thus, Plato writes that in principle there are five basic forms of government, corresponding to the five basic sorts of citizen (though, in practice, any given state is liable to be a mixture of these pure forms):
The five forms government considered by Plato in The Republic are as follows:
Book VIII of The Republic is presented as a narrative relating an archetypal story of how societies can decay over time -- from the ideal form of government, aristokratíā, to the worst form, tyrannía, and passing through the three intermediate forms along the way. At each stage in the process, the regime-change is affected by a change in the values of the public, in terms of the virtues they honor. In other words, for Plato, politics is downstream of culture.
It is easy to see how politics could be downstream of culture in a modern democracy -- because the voting populace consists of the entire adult population, who confer official authority upon whomever they wish. It is less easy to see how politics would be downstream of culture in, say, a timocracy (military rule) or oligarchy (rule by the wealthy), where one class of people has an exclusive hold on official power. The question is why would the class-in-power willingly abdicate that power, or how could it be wrested from them by others with no official authority? One factor in such a transfer of power could be violent revolution or the threat of it -- but it seems that for Plato, this is not the only factor, or even the chief factor. On the whole, the transfers of power from one class to another in Plato's narrative hinge more on moral suasion and perceived legitimacy than on threats or force. The driving force (or the control variable, so to speak) in Plato's theory of political and societal change is what Thomas Paine called the constitution of the people -- that is, the moral character of society. This stands in contradistinction to Karl Marx's theory of dialectical materialism, in which the driving forces of societal change consists in the material conditions under which people live, including the laws they have written on paper.
Plato's Dēmokratía and the Democratic Man
Foreshadowing the Christian doctrine of the “will of the flesh”, Plato argues that men's hearts are naturally home to unclean carnal passions:
He writes that while all men have these beastly desires, they are restrained, more in some people and less than others, by law (nomos) and reason (logos):
When a society is in decline toward disregard of virtue, it will be a mixture of those who have some regard for virtue left (in particular, "oligarchical" virtues such as industriousness and temperance), and those who have little or none. However, the less virtuous citizens may gradually corrupt the more virtuous and recruit them into their ranks. This recruitment proceeds by Orwellian manipulation of language -- by calling good things evil and evil things good -- and has a religious character, as if the target is being indoctrinated into a cult:
Through this process, the recruit is finally transformed into a full blown dimokratikos anēr [Greek: democratic man], who no longer distinguish between clean and unclean desires:
Plato writes that as more and more men within a society are corrupted, the entire society is transformed toward a state of dēmokratía, or virtueless society. Dēmokratía is a challenging word to translate. It is usually rendered as democracy, and its meaning is something like democracy (in the modern sense) in that it entails relatively broad and equal participation in government. In Plato's narrative, however, dēmokratía entails much more: a thoroughgoing ethos of equity, in which people regarded, not only having equal rights of life, liberty and property, but also as being of equal ability, uprightness, and achievement -- regardless of their actual respective degrees of ability, uprightness, or achievement.
According to Plato, the virtueless society has a freewheeling spirit of moral relativism -- and, in that spirit, discards the principles of its national constitution.
Its public officials are often selected on the basis of their professed loyalty, rather than ability or integrity,
or, in some cases, at random by the drawing of lots, presumably on the grounds that "all men are equal" (Strange as this practice may seem to us today, this was indeed the policy of some Greek city-states in and around the time of Plato):
The society that has ceased to honor virtue repudiates meritocracy:
Since all ways of being are held in equal esteem, the people of the dēmokratía are diverse in their norms and values — one might say “multicultural”:
Thus, the society loses its sense of shared national identity and social cohesion:
In addition to discarding its traditional principles and values, the dēmokratía neglects enforcement of the law, allowing criminals to freely roam the streets:
In summary, the agenda of Plato's democratic men includes moral relativism, leniency in criminal justice, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and a loosening of their society's founding principles and traditional values. Sound Familiar?
Plato's Narrative of the Descent into Tyranny
Plato held that a society ruled by "democratic men" -- that is, men who neglect to honor virtue, or to distinguish between clean and unclean desires -- is in danger of degenerating into tyranny. The descent into tyranny is driven by a collection of people Plato calls drones, defined generally as those who do no useful work. The name "drone" is taken from the entomological term for male bees and ants -- who, even in Plato's time, were known to live off of the work of others in their hive, contributing nothing except to reproduce themselves.
Plato's "drones" are a rather curious coalition. He writes that there are two broad sorts: drone followers and drone leaders, which he metaphorically refers to as crawling drones and flying drones. The crawling drones, or drone followers, consist of career criminals and the non-working poor. The flying drones, or drone leaders, are elected officials and government bureaucrats who garner power by catering to the constituency formed by the crawling drones.
The descent into tyranny begins the decline of patriarchy within the home.
Foreigners and resident aliens are treated like citizens:
Children grow entitled and arrogant, and adults cater to them for fear of being labelled as authoritarians. Everyone wants to be the "cool parent" or the "cool teacher".
The decaying society embraces a spirit of sexual liberation and sexual equality.
Plato wrote that as the drones grow more numerous, the more ambitious drones begin to occupy positions of power and influence. Meanwhile, their less capable constituents form mobs to shout down speakers and suppress the political speech of those who disagree with them:
There are some members of society who have retained the virtues of the previous generation, such as diligence and temperance. Theses people naturally prosper, but the drones elect leaders who confiscate their wealth and redistribute it:
The drones use bureaucratic and criminal indictments to harass and immobilize their political opponents:
The redistribution of wealth continues, including the cancellation of debts:
The drones elect a leader who drums up national emergencies as a pretext for expanding the power of government. In Plato’s narrative, the emergency is a war — but a war on poverty, or a war on drugs, or a global pandemic would also do the trick.
To enlarge his constituency, the drone-leaders open the borders and encourage the immigration of more drones from foreign countries:
In the last stages of social and political decay, corruption spirals out of control. Having plundered the wealth of the upper classes, the tyrant begins to confiscate the property of the working class and underclass that elected him, but now they cannot remove him from power. Plato likens the tyrant to a son who steals from the father who has raised him:
Finally, the tyrant turns violently on its own citizens, drones and all, after depriving them of the right to bear arms:
Conclusion
It may be worth mentioning how I came to be acquainted with Plato's account of dēmokratía and the descent into tyranny. I first learned of it in listening to a lecture by Hillsdale College historian Paul Rahe. The lecture was on Plato's Republic for its own sake; Rahe did not make any analogy between Plato's narrative and current day politics, and am not sure whether he intended to. Nevertheless, the analogy was clear to me, and I found it so uncanny that I was incredulous. To be frank, I was pretty sure that Rahe was cherry picking passages from a long text to make it look as though Plato was writing about contemporary politics. So, I read Plato's Republic for myself. In doing so, I found that, contrary to my expectations, Rahe was simply summarizing a section of Book VIII -- and that, if anything, he had undersold the similarity between Plato's "democratic man" and the modern left. I would not insist that you take my word for that, and I do not even believe it would be rational to take my word for it on the basis of the snippets quoted in this essay (for all you know, if you haven't read the text, I am doing what I suspected Rahe of doing). Thus, I invite the reader to examine the relevant sections of Plato's Republic for themselves. The entirety of Book VIII can be read in about an hour, or in two hours for a slow reader like me.
When he spoke of tyranny, Plato was speaking from experience, both personal and collective. At the time he wrote The Republic around 375 BC, Plato's home city of Athens had suffered through four different tyrannical regimes over a two-hundred year period -- including the reign of the so-called "Thirty Tyrants", which Plato himself lived though as a young man, and during which approximately five percent of the population of Athens was murdered by its own government. Summarizing the history of the era, Alexander Hamilton would later write,
So in The Republic, Plato was not speculating about something distant from his experience. On the contrary, like the "Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come" in Dickens's Christmas Carol, Plato had been where we might be going, and hoped to warn us so that we would be less likely to go there. Plato clearly has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his own time, and was probably on the other side from them of whatever political aisle ran through Athens at the time. Maybe they were right and he was wrong. But right or wrong, this faction must have existed, more or less as Plato describes them. If Plato made them up out of thin air, then he was not only a philosopher, but a prophet.
If you haven't, I bet you'd be interested in learning about the state of Athenian democracy—Thucydides is pretty good, especially the Landmark edition.
I'm not sure to what extent I buy that the word democracy is different. Sure, it's different from what we call democracy now, in that we usually mean by that an often large representative republic, where we elect or appoint people to various functions, and they do the actual ruling, but their getting there is in some way dependent on popular appointing. Athenian democracy was far more direct: they had deliberative assemblies that were, if I remember correctly, open to all male citizens (note: citizen≠resident). Their trials were also before enormous juries, with hundreds of people. And this is all in a relatively small city-state. But I would think fundamentally, it mostly just has in view the form of government it has, in which there is (largely direct) popular rule, and the other tendencies you describe are just a result of the usual popular tendencies in such a setting. But yes, I agree that we find many of the same tendencies among people today, and a portion of this probably is downstream from our form of regime.
The setting of the Republic, as with the Platonic dialogues in general, is during the Peloponnesian war against Sparta, which Athens eventually lost. They were briefly ruled oligarchically, due to the Spartans, then democracy was restored, before they were conquered by Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father. During the Peloponnesian war, in most greek cities there were differing factions who sought democratic and oligarchic rule, promoted by the Athenians and Spartans respectively.
If I remember correctly, Socrates describes democracies as making philosophy more possible than most of the other regimes.
One other note: drawing of lots isn't all that crazy! We use random chance, to an extent, in our own jury process. Drawing lots has the downside of not letting you choose the most qualified people, and the upside of avoiding any negative effects from what sorts of people would seek out the position.
This glosses over some things that are worth mentioning, don't you think?
Well, yes.
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