What makes a
competent political decision-maker or leader in the eyes of Rousseau and Plato?
Barry
Gilheany ©
This essay compares the criteria for good political
decision-making prescribed by two towering figures in political theory – Plato
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It looks at the approaches towards good
government that both enunciate in their respective classic political tracts: The Republic
and The Social Contract. The points of departure for my analysis of
their discussions of good law-making are quotes from each author: in the case
of Plato “Philosophers make the best rulers” and for Rousseau “The People being
subject to the laws ought to be their author”.
The paper examines whether their respective philosophies of political
leadership are reducible to these maxims.
Plato and Rousseau are often accused of laying out blueprints for the
various totalitarian regimes which blighted 20th century history and
politics. It examines these claims and
concludes that both bodies of doctrine are considerably more nuanced than that.
Extensive use is made of both original texts throughout.
To start with Plato first, The Republic is commonly regarded as the culminating achievement of
Plato as a philosopher and writer. An
academic discipline has developed around readings of the book with specialist
chapters on philosophy, religion and literature (Blackburn, 2006). It was written around 375BC when Plato was in
his early fifties.
The Republic proceeds as a dialogue led by Socrates, who was
Plato’s teacher. Across ten books Socrates
responds with potent logic to the questions and counter-arguments posed by
Glaucon and Adeimatus, older brothers of Plato, and Polemarchus whose home in
Piraeus (the port of Athens) is where the dialogue occurs. Other interlocutors include Thrasymachus, an
orator, Polemarchus’ brothers Lysias and Euthydemus and Cephalus, his father
(Butler-Bowdon, 2012).
Plato’s ideal state is society as characterised by
wisdom, courage, self-discipline and justice; qualities that a well-balanced
person should also develop. Conversely
his discussion of reason, spirit and desire (the “three parts of the soul”)
shows how personal mental harmony is not just good for the individual, making
them “just” but good for their communities too As a sort of early behavioral psychologist
Plato believed that environment is the main shaper of people, and therefore the
question of what is just could not simply be a private one, but was necessarily
political (Butler-Bowden: p.xii).
Plato arrived at his ideal Republic through his
critiques of the other forms of government of his time: Timarchy (essentially a
military dictatorship which prevailed in ancient Sparta), Oligarchy, Democracy
and Tyranny. In relation to his
criticisms of Democracy, it is important to acknowledge that Democracies in
Plato’s time were not the representative governments of our current age. His problem with the Athenian mode of direct
democracy in which a popular assembly of free male citizens met regularly to
vote on particular issues and devolved administration to a Council of Five
Hundred was that it invariably generated poor decision-making. Complex issues to do with economics or
foreign policy were subject to the irrational whims of the day and there was
little long-term strategic thinking to guide the state because membership of
the Council was restricted to a year and also no citizen could be a member no
more than twice. The “freedom and
plainness of speech” which democracy facilitated led to “…a pleasing, lawless,
various sort of government, distributing equality to equals and unequals alike”
(Butler-Bowdon: pp.xiii-xiv).
This disenchantment with existing political systems
forms the background to Plato’s ideal state and his veneration of “philosopher
kings” whose sole purpose is to work for the good of the state. A state can only be run properly by those who
have the best general overview of what constitutes the good in society. Plato enunciates
in reply to Glaucon that “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and
princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political
greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either
to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, … and then only
will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day”
(Plato: Book V pp.199-200).
Thus only the properly educated generalist, trained
over many years in abstract subjects can govern well. The basic condition of superiority and
fitness to govern is knowledge of the essential spiritual Forms of Justice, the
Good, Beauty, Temperance, which manifest themselves in actual circumstances. “In as much as philosophers only are able to
grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the
many and variable are not philosophers”, Plato asks Glaucon the rhetorical
question “which of the two classes should be the rulers of our State?” (Plato:
Book VI: p.212).
So the just
state is divided into two; Guardians and Workers. The ruling class of Guardians is comprised of
the afore-mentioned philosopher-rulers, and a military class called “auxiliaries”
which defend the state and implement the administrative functions mandated by
the rulers. The working class keeps the
state going in a material way (Butler-Bowdon: pp.xiii-xv).
In what could
be interpreted as a “blank slate” analogy, when asked “how will they [the
philosopher-kings] will draw out the plan of which you are speaking?”, Plato
replies that “They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from
which, as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean
surface … no easy task … but… herein will lie the difference between them and very
other legislator, - they will have nothing to do either with individual or
State, and will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves,
made clean surface.”(Plato: Book VI: p.233).
To summarise, in accordance with Plato’s beliefs in
the specialization of vocational functions, the “guardians, setting aside every
other business, are to dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom
in the State, making this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not
bear on this end… they should imitate from youth upward only those characters
which are suitable for their profession – the courageous, temperate, holy, free
and the like..” (Plato: Book III; p.96).
The most serious charge against The Republic and its schema for leadership is that it embodies a
totalitarian vision of how societies should be governed. This view was most famously articulated by
Karl Popper in his The Open Society and
its Enemies published in 1945. He
reads off Plato the same type of subordination of the individual to the
collective that characterised Nazism and Stalinism. Popper also sees him as a dangerous utopian
social engineer, whose blueprints for improvement disregard the messy and rebellious
nature of the human material with which he has to work. (Blackburn: p.54).
To assess the justice or otherwise of Popper’s
charge-sheet, it is useful to look at how the Plato scholar Christopher Taylor
approaches the issue of totalitarianism in The
Republic. He identifies three types of totalitarianism: in the first
kind the purposes and well-being of individuals are totally subordinated to the
state; in the second ideological kind, the good of the individual is identified
is their contribution to the state, the individual is essentially part of an
organic social unity and the third type is a paternalistic one in which the aim
and function of the state is simply to promote the welfare of its citizens and
citizens are subjected to totalitarian authority for their own good due to their
inability, whether individual or collective, to attain this good for
themselves. (Taylor, 1999).
Although Popper does not specifically allude to this
typology, for Taylor it is clear that he regards Plato as a totalitarian of the
first type due to what he sees as his basic anti-humanism. He asserts that for Plato ‘The criterion of morality is the interest
of the state’ (his italics), that the interest of the state is ‘to arrest
all change, by the maintenance of a rigid class division’ and that ‘the individual
is nothing but a cog [sc. In the state machine]’ (Taylor: pp.284-85). It is
noteworthy that Popper does not refer directly to any single passage in The Republic to support his case.
Taylor refutes the extreme totalitarian interpretation
of Plato’s work by arguing that the whole structure of his theory requires that
the polis is an organisation devised
with the paramount aim of promoting individual eudaimonia; a concept which at its most basic level is to be
understood as a materially tolerable life and which develops into psychic
harmony i.e. of the fully worthwhile life as consisting in the integration of
the personality in the pursuit of the most intrinsically desirable goals
(Taylor: p.290). Plato’s theory is best
seen as paternalist as he makes no serious attempt to show that an adequate
conception of a good life includes any substantial measure of autonomy. He does
at least in intention subordinate the perfectly organised state of to the happy
community. But arguably Plato is no more
successful than his successors in distinguishing paternalism from tyranny
(Taylor: pp.295-96).
Finally in relation to Plato, he never poses the
problem of who should govern, nor
does he name regimes by reference to one person who wields power. In the Republic,
political competence is determined finally, and teleologically, by its
function. The leaders of the city must
be chosen from amongst the guardians who must prove themselves, through trial
and error, to be the most ‘useful’ to the city (Pradeau, 2002).
On the surface, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceptions of
political leadership as laid out in Of
The Social Contract stand in polar opposite to the philosopher-kings of
Plato’s fancy. He is often cited as an
archetypal theorist of direct participation in politics (Qvortrup, 2003)
because of his advocacy of plebiscitary mechanisms.
His central aim in Of
The Social Contract is to explain how the freedom of the individual can be
reconciled with the authority of the state and the concept with which he
attempts this reconciliation is the general
will (Bertram, ed., 2012) However lack of clarity around this concept has
led his critics to accuse him, like Plato, of being a forerunner of
totalitarianism.
Rousseau believes that freedom is essential to our
nature and is a condition of our having moral responsibility (in contrast to
the paternalism of The Republic). He argues that citizens who live in a state
governed by the general will obey only themselves: freedom and obedience to law
are thereby combined. In one
interpretation of the general will, it is simply what a people, voting as a
body of sovereign legislators in their assembly, decides the law to be. The general will is thus the expression of
popular sovereignty, of collective democratic choice. Yet at other times Rousseau seems to adhere
to a view whereby the general will corresponds to a fact of the matter
concerning where the common interest lies, which may diverge from what the
citizenry actually believe or decide.
This latter interpretation has been used as ammunition by those who
claim than Rousseau gave carte-blanche for dictatorial elites to speak in the
name of the people (Bertram, ed. xxiii-xxiv).
In the first two books of the Social Contract, Rousseau is principally concerned with the ideas
of sovereignty, law and the general will.
He expounds on the need for the figure of the Legislator, necessarily “an
extraordinary man in the State… by virtue of his intelligence, and ... just as much by virtue of his function’”
(Rousseau, Book II p.43) in order to lead to “the union of understanding and
will in the social body, leading to exact cooperation of the parts and
ultimately the greatest strength of the whole” (Rousseau, p.41). This function “is not magistracy, nor is it
sovereignty (Rousseau, p.43). For Rome
degenerated into Tyranny “because she had united legislative authority and
sovereign power on the same brows”. One
of the most convincing rebuttals to the allegation that Roussean governance
would facilitate tyranny is his quotation from the Decemvirs or the ten man
decemvirate set up in 452BC to draw up a code of administration for Rome: Romans, be yourselves the authors of the
laws that are to ensure your happiness (Rousseau, p.43).
It is in Book III that Rousseau lays down his rubric
for government. Government is “an
intermediary body established between the subjects and the Sovereign for their
mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of laws and with the maintenance
of liberty, both civil and political… The members of this body are called
Magistrates or Kings, in other words Governors, and the whole body
bears the name of Prince.” (III:
p.58).
Rousseau advocated an ‘aristocratic system’ in which
the representatives should propose the laws; merely another name for
parliamentary or representative government. (Qvortrup: p.58). He writes “There are three kinds of
Aristocracy: natural, elective and hereditary.
The first suits only simple peoples; the third is the worst of all
Governments. The second is the best: it
is Aristocracy in the proper sense” (III: p.68)
Rousseau wanted these aristocrats to be elected by the
people. “For in popular Government all Citizens are born as magistrates, but
this system limits them to a small number, and they become so only through
election; a means through which probity, enlightenment, experience and all the
other reasons for preference and public esteem are so many new guarantees that
you will be governed wisely” (Book III: p.69).
In his proposals for Corsica, he recommended “a mixed government, where
the people assemble by sections rather than whole and where the repositories of
its power are changed at frequent intervals” (Qvortrup: p.59).
In all his
political writings he emphasised that the power of any political institution
should be constrained. He had an
interest in policy failures derived from the epistemological view, which
stresses the fallibility of human knowledge and, consequently, the most
unplatonic view that no one has access to the general will. Contrary to the claim that Rousseau’s
political philosophy would sow the seeds of authoritarianism (as the rulers
would claim exclusive access to the general will while the ordinary citizen
should be ‘forced to be free’ by the benevolent, yet autocratic rulers), he
flagged up this danger by stating that ‘any man can carve tablets of stone, or
bribe an oracle, or whisper in his ear, or discover some vulgar means of
imposing himself on the people.” He thus
foresaw the Hitlers, Stalins and the Pol Pots of the 20th century.
(Qvortrup: p.59). Unfortunately not all of his followers have understood this,
most notoriously Maximilian Robespierre who invoked the general will to justify
his Terror regime which developed out of the French Revolution (Qvortrup:
pp.14-15).
Contrary to much received wisdom, Rousseau’s political
theory can be read as a contribution to constitutionalism. The constitutional tradition rests on the
widespread assumption that no group or individual should have absolute
power. This view is founded on the
epistemological dictum that no one has access to the truth – in the Popperian,
essentialist meaning of the term – so no one entity should be entrusted with
absolute power. This essay has shown two
consistent themes in Rousseau’s political works: the necessity of placing
limits on executive power and the impossibility of direct legislation by the
people. (Qvortrum: pp.50-57). In his Discourses on Inequality he pointed to
how “self-interested and ill-conceived projects… as finally ruined the
Athenians” as the reason why “each man should not be at liberty to propose new
laws at pleasure… “and why “… that right should exclusively belong to the magistrates”
(Qvortrum: p.57).
In conclusion, both Plato and Rousseau political
leadership as specialized competencies despite their seemingly contrasting
visions of what constitutes the ideal polity; in the case of Rousseau unity of
the social body through the general will and Plato’s analogy between justice in
an individual soul and justice in a city (Fine, 1999). Both saw rule by the philosopher kings and
magistrates respectively as a way of providing a firewall against fanciful and
intemperate decision-making by the populace at large, or, more crudely, the
‘tyranny of the mob’. Both agreed that
the people ‘lacked the necessary experience to judge what constitutes good law’
and that the task of the legislator involved finding a representational mode through
which to communicate ‘a thousand kinds of ideas’ ‘impossible translate into
popular language (Inston, 2010). Possession of polymath-type, if not
esoteric-type knowledge by both Guardians and Aristocrats was seemingly
essential. Both Plato and Rousseau have
been unfairly accused of detailing chronicles of totalitarianism foretold but
neither were advocates of 21st century style Western liberal
democracy. Plato’s philosopher king
state represented an authoritarian vision but in a positive paternal sense
(Butler-Bowdon: p.xv); Rousseau had a constitutionalist vision closer to that
of Locke and Montesquieu than the revolutionaries who later adopted him as
their talisman.
Bibliography:
Fine, G Introduction
pp.1-34 in Fine G. (ed.) (1999) Plato 2.
Ethics, Politics, Religion and the Soul Oxford Readings in
Philosophy Oxford: Oxford University Press
Inston, K (2010) Rousseau
and Radical Democracy. Continuum Studies in Philosophy. London: Continuum
Plato The
Republic of Plato (1908) Translated by Benjamin Jowett with an Introduction by Tom Butler-Bowdon
(2012) Chichester, West Sussex: Capstone Publishing Ltd
Pradeau, J. (2002) Plato
and the City. A New Introduction to Plato’s Political Thought Translated by
Janet Lloyd. Exeter: University of Exeter Press
Qvortrup, M. (2003) The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Impossibility of Reason. Manchester:
Manchester: Manchester University Press
Rousseau, J.J.(2012) Of The Social Contract and Other Political Writings Edited by
Christopher Bertram, Translated by Quintin Hoare. Penguin Classics. London;
Penguin
Taylor, C. Plato’s
Totalitarianism pp.280-296 in Fine, G (ed.) (1999) Plato 2 Ethics, Politics, Religion and the Soul. Oxford
Readings in Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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