Popper’s Plato
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
It is a simple, massive, and all too common blunder of interpretation to read the Republic the way Popper does.
1where Plato's Socrates takes on the task of refuting himself- a common rhethoric ploy trying limit the power of interpretation to oneself
Further, Popper made it abundantly clear that whosoever thought that Popper's critique of Plato referred only to the Politeia had not read Popper at all. So far so bad. Philosophers as well as there reception can be a sobering experience.
This reverses cause and effect. Plato was a member of the aristocratic class, and that's why he hated Athenian democracy that had deprived his social class of power. His cousin and fellow Socrates pupil Critias was the leader of the bloodthirsty quisling regime of the Thirty Tyrants installed by the Spartans when they defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War.
One of the treaty terms for Spartans allowing a return of democracy in Athens was an amnesty for the Thirty Tyrants. Athens could not try Socrates for treason, so they found an unrelated charge to trump up (disrespecting the gods and corrupting the youth), but everyone in the jury know exactly what Socrates was being tried for, i.e. being the thought leader for the Tyrants.
The most likely outcome was Socrates would have been ostracized, i.e. exiled (as indeed Plato was), but far from showing contrition, he argued in the remedies phase of the trial that a fitting punishment would be for him to be fed for life by the state expense in the house where national heroes were hosted, and an enraged jury sentenced him to death with a larger majority than had voted to convict him.
Plato's role in philosophy gives him no shortage of apologists (not to mention those pandered to with the conceit of philosophers deserving to be kings), but Popper's indictment of him is thorough and irrefutable.
Take away the ability of the public to rid yourself of certain politicians by voting them out, and you take away democracy, even if you maintain the illusion of choice.
That's an old observation. It goes back to George Washington at the end of his term as President, shaking hands with his successor and walking away. That surprised many Europeans.
Let's not forget: Popper wrote this in 1945 directly after the Nazis lost the war – he, like many post-war German thinkers spent a lot of energy on pondering how a new democracy must be designed in order to never allow this quick takeover of democracy never again.
I am currently living in Germany and I grew up in Austria where Popper lived. There is a lot to argue about in these nations, but we have actual choice in our votes (compared to democracies whose models pre-date Popper's thoughts, like UK or the US). I am not very worried about the stability of modern democracies that looked at what happened in the Weimar republic, understood that such a thing could also happen to their democracies and reformed their systems in order to become resilient against such threats.
The US (and the UK for that matter) are not such resilient democracies, and this worries me, just like it would have worried Popper.
I am also concerned about the state of democracy in the US, but it doesn't strike me as being similar to what happened to Weimar. Rather, I see it as a very long, slow process of combining some basic inequities in the political system with deliberate stoking of grudges among the people those inequities benefit. It took decades to get where we are.
I don't believe anything can be done about it -- it's too late, and those inequities have now hardened into permanent, overwhelming thumbs on the scale. But I'd be curious to know what lessons have been learned elsewhere.
I think the problem in the US is that none of the actors that could implement any needed systemic change has the incentives to do so...
I'm put in mind of community organizations, which have the same risks. I've seen several organizations do abrupt turns where one group gains power and then cements it by rule changes. Organizations are different in that you can't just opt out of a country, but it's interesting to see the ways organizations might look to this to protect themselves.
I believe one of the most important things Germany has is its assertion that "Human dignity shall be inviolable". The US does not have that. As written it's too vague to apply directly, but it does imply an ethos of protecting people that isn't usually found in the US Constitution. We resist protections, especially when they interfere with somebody's economic freedom or their freedom to persecute others when not expressly forbidden.
There seems to be an unavoidable paradox here, in that anti-democratic measures can be presented as being in accordance with defensive democracy: take the issue of election fraud, for example...
The Wikipedia article you linked to, however, claims that the US uses defensive democratic tactics frequently. I'm not saying this implies the US has a resilient democracy - I'm not sure about the link between defensive democracy and resilience, and I am not sure this claim about the US can be justified in the first place - but if this claim were true, it would appear to contradict what I take to be your thesis, as outlined in my first paragraph here.
I my second paragraph, I am making the claim that there is a paradox in how the the defense of democracy can, and quite often has been, used to justify acts that do no such thing. In the US, since the 2020 elections, various states have amended voting laws, allegedly to defend democracy against electoral fraud, even though there is no evidence for any threat justifying these particular defensive measures, despite a great deal of effort being expanded in trying to find any.
I agree, but one way in which Germany's democracy differs from America's (and Britain's) is its use of proportional representation (whereas both the US and the UK make extensive use of the decidedly non-proportional First Past the Post). I consider this among the strengths of German democracy, but Popper didn't:
> proportional representation confers, even if only indirectly, a constitutional status on political parties which they would otherwise not attain. For I can no longer choose a person whom I trust to represent me: I can choose only a party. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2016/01/31/fr...
However, Popper use the term "proportional representation" to apply only to closed list proportional representation. I wonder whether even Popper's assessment of that form of proportional representation is still plausible, in light of the increasingly obvious weakness of democracies that use "majoritarian" voting systems compared to democracies using proportional representation (closed list or not).
I don't suppose Germany's relatively healthy democracy is solely due to its use of proportional representation, but it does share many other constitutional virtues (such as federalism, republicanism, bicameralism and a codified constitution) with the United States, so those can't account for differences between the two countries.
It’s maybe a possibility that he secretly felt this way, but there were two or three dialogues on the events concerning the trial of Socrates, the time he spent waiting for his execution, and then his actual death that sort of stand in the way of a reasonable person drawing the same conclusion.
I am not sure I know what Plato envisioned as a society, but his strict division between intellectual and working class seems like a receipe to disaster. Two or three generations in nothing would have been left of the potential advantages of putting the intellectuals in power, because their sons would've taken that power for granted and soon you would've ended up with an ordinary aristocracy.
Granted, those were other times — slavery was totally common for example. But I still think Popper has the better take on how to organize power and who knows, maybe Plato would have agreed if he had the chance to read Popper.
Here’s a description in the context of an analysis of our social predicament[0]. (Whether you agree with the analysis or not, the summary of Plato’s views still stands.)
[0] https://americanmind.org/salvo/woke-ideology-is-a-psychologi...
> Popper argued that Plato had produced a vision of one such closed society. He pointed to the stratification of the social order in Plato’s ideal city, the strict division of labor between the intellectual and productive classes, the absence of social mobility, state censorship of most culture, and, above all, the promulgation of an openly fraudulent myth, the so-called Noble Lie, to legitimize the status quo.
Traumatized is the wrong adjective to describe Plato's reaction (though probably an apt description of Popper's characterization) but Plato was shaped by the trial in respect to his view of the relationship of the philosopher and the (democratic) city.
This is depicted not just in the apology but also for example in the Gorgias where Socrates' death is foreshadowed:
>For as it is, if somebody should seize hold of you or anyone else at all of your sort [philosophers], and drag you off to prison, asserting that you were guilty of a wrong you had never done, you know you would be at a loss what to do with yourself, and would be all dizzy and agape without a word to say; and when you came up in court, though your accuser might be ever so paltry a rascal, you would have to die if he chose to claim death as your penalty.
There is further complexity here, after all Socrates proves himself quite capable of defending himself both in his reply to Callicles here and in the Apology, he was by no means at a loss of what to say. And so the notion that a philosopher cannot defend themselves in the political arena should not necessarily be taken to be Plato's position. Neither is Callicles espousing a particularly democratic position here, in fact the idea that the law can and should be abused like that would never be espoused by an Athenian democrat.
Still, the idea found in the Republic that a wise man would do well to stay quiet in a democratic city was certainly not shared by Socrates (and so may be a reflection of Plato's attitude).
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
There are likely equivalently devastating criticisms of Popper, Marx, and others that are as strong as his of Plato as well, but I think their entire goal was to create an intellectual solvent to dissolve the bonds of reason, thinking, and belief, and not to produce positive models using ideals and principle (like, say, Aristotle). (Article states Popper's intent was to unmoor society from it's great man thinkers) It's just a system for producing neutralizing criticisms, which are sufficient for his purposes, so criticisms of those ideas are why they are met with personal and political attacks today, because the theories aren't designed to withstand anything, but only to dissolve others.
The basic error is that all criticisms based on materialism and power are necessarily predicated on an axiom that the good in the world is both finite and zero-sum. Personally, I reject most marxist and progressive critiques and their descendents because of this basic fallacy. Whereas the only zero-sum thing is stuff you have that they're trying to talk and bully you out of instead of discovering or making their own. The redemption they offer in return is subjugation. It's not a philosophy, it's a fancy bandits hustle.
As I remember just from the few readings I did, Plato's ideas were about the city state, which means their scale is limited and you can leave to find or found another one, and not governing the layered federations of city/state/nations we typically advocate democratic rule for. Scaling a republic out of the city state model may have been a uniquely American innovation, aided by adapting the division of powers I think from the federated model of the Iroqois and other native nations. I'd wonder if Popper had used Plato's city state model as more a straw man and a vehicle for these more generally destabilizing criticisms than as a basis for positive alternative.