Free Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson Page A

to examine various answers and pick the right one. This denial of independent thought by individuals was exactly the kind of mentality he spent his life in resisting. Of course, by teaching people, especially young men (often from influential families) to think for themselves, Socrates was treading a dangerous path. Athens (for most of the time) was a democracy of sorts and a free, certainly a liberal, society. But its institutions rested on consensus and to some degree were precarious, especially if the consensus was not forthcoming. It was one thing to have the Assembly swayed by rhetoric. Allowance could be made for that. But if each citizen thought for himself, was taught to distrust the received wisdom and even to reject the notion of a correct answer to problems, then getting the consensus, especially the right consensus, would prove to be hard, if not impossible. In my view, this was a powerful consideration, which led to criticism of Socrates’ activities among the young and, in a time of crisis, to his prosecution, conviction, and death.
    But we will come to all that later. What is worth observing now is that, even in the early dialogues, when Plato is producing the real, actual, and historic Socrates and recording accurately what he said, the thought was stirring in his mind that there were dangers in teaching clever young men to be intellectually independent. Perhaps already, even when listening to Socrates talk or when first setting it down, there was stirring in Plato’s mind the idea of his Republic , the utopian state that would be immune to such threats because it was protected from rash and impetuous thinking by a powerful consensus of guardians.
    We can be in absolutely no doubt that Socrates would have disliked and disapproved of the republic Plato wanted to bring into being. Indeed the two men were very different in almost every respect, and it is one of the great paradoxes of history that they came together, the one to found, the other to record, the beginning of true philosophy. In youth, Plato hero-worshipped Socrates; in his maturity, he repudiated him without appearing to do so to the inattentive reader or perhaps without knowing himself what exactly he was doing. Socrates, to begin with, was a conservative radical, while Plato was a radical conservative. Socrates was open to any idea that could leap over the various barriers of logical proof that formed a racecourse in his mind. He was conservative in that he respected old customs concerning gods and heroes and others cherished by the public, for he did not wish to put ordinary people off the essential truths by a foolish desire to demolish inessential myths. He was a conservative radical precisely because he was a moderate, genial, sensitive, and generous human being. Plato, on the other hand, was inclined to transform natural conservative instincts, which sprang from the empirical wisdom of ordinary people, into a specific ideology, which inevitably moved from a humane traditionalism into absolutist dogma. It is no wonder that Karl Popper, in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, identified Plato as the ultimate progenitor of the twentieth-century totalitarian state, even though this argument is open to serious objections. I suspect that if Socrates had been able to read the Republic and to assess its influence through the twentieth century, he might have been even more severe than Popper.
    That there was a widening bifurcation between Socrates and Plato is one of the most obvious facts in the history of philosophy. Exactly when it occurred in the Platonic oeuvre and which dialogues can be described as Socratic or mainly Socratic or mainly Platonic or wholly Platonic has been debated by scholars for generations. I prefer a broad-brush approach that makes a general contrast between the Socratic and Platonic mentalities and then counsels the reader to study the dialogues and make up his or her own mind. This, I think, would be the Socratic