Plato's Republic: a philosophy against the modern world
Of Luca Leonello Rimbotti
Source: Italicum
Literary utopia, or a true manual for building politicians? Criticism of Plato's most scathing and incisive work has often moved between these two poles, considering this capital text from time to time as a rhetorical exercise, or an ontological proof, or instead, something that is to be shared, a true manifesto of universal politics, capable of constituting at any time a code of exemplary social stability. Other times however, as in the case of the liberal Popper, Plato and his “Republic” played the part of public enemy number one, the ideology that, proposing a well-organized society in itself, firm and solid and therefore closed to external dangers and evils, more than others, it endangers the beatitudes of the "open society".
The catalog of positions that the Platonic "Republic" presents is one that is difficult to digest for those with an egalitarian stomach, pacifist and progressive. It is impossible not to see that ancient classicism and postmodern degeneration are in antithetical positions. For bourgeois and moderate eyes, cosmopolitans and "do-gooders", Plato's thought represents the greatest scandal: it outlines the community to the highest degree, and therefore dismisses individualism a priori, which instead is the great refuge of liberal impotence. These are some of the most qualifying points of Platonic politics, which constitute – as rightly so, from his point of view, Popper noted – how much more unassimilable to the mentality of post-modern "democrats".: the rigid and severe paideia, the education and selection to which Plato entrusted in the "Republic" the growth of the ruling classes of the ideal city; the suppression of individualism in the face of the prevalence of community interests; community, really, of women and property; the abolition of private property; the dominance of the "organic" State over the individual, whose rights are unknown, but only duties; the type of government, hierarchical, aristocratic and elitist, in which philosophers participate and not at all the mass of the people. All this scandalises the hypocritical and fraudulent nature of modern "democrats"., who pass off their upper-bourgeois oligarchies as governments "of the people" and exchange their financial dictatorships for services rendered to the majority. Read More
