Free The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World by Daniel J. Boorstin Page A

age. “I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic,” in 1814, in his mellow seventieth year, he wrote from Monticello to his friend John Adams. “I am wrong in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” Adams responded gladly that Jefferson’s reflections “so perfectly harmonize with mine.” Despite Plato’s “bitter Satyre upon all Republican Government,” Adams reported that he had learned two things from Plato: where Benjamin Franklin had “borrowed” one of his popular ideas, and “that Sneezing is a cure for the Hickups. Accordingly I have cured myself and all my Friends of that provoking disorder, for thirty years with a Pinch of Snuff.”
    Modern critics, after the rise of fascism, imperial communism, and Nazism, have found Plato’s ideas less amusing than menacing.
The Republic,
according to the eloquent Karl R. Popper, reveals Plato as the historic enemy of the “open society” and a kind of anti-Christ of democracy. Plato’s idea of destiny and the inevitable decay of political forms makes him for Popper the patron saint of “historicism,” the destructive belief that history is governed by its own iron rules and man is not free to shape his own experience. Our somber retrospect from the totalitarian governments of the twentieth century has made it hard for us to enjoy Plato’s playful speculative spirit.
    Yet the speculative spirit of the dialogue is stifled in
The Republic
itself—Plato’s grandest dialogue and his most un-Socratic. Here Plato offers insistent answers to the problems that Socrates preferred to leave as questions. En route the dialogue offers conversational byplay on the meaning of Justice and the Good, and the relation of sensible experience to reality. Now Socrates himself is the narrator, recounting to his friend Timaeus on the next day the offerings of the participants.
    What most troubles modern liberal critics are two features of Plato’s ideal community: its absolute and static character and its hierarchical class structure. “Although all the rulers are to be philosophers,” Bertrand Russell objects, “there are to be no innovations; a philosopher is to be, for all time, a man who understands and agrees with Plato.” The state arises, Socrates explains, “out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.” Division of labor then provides the needed services, while allowing each person to do what he is best fitted for. So the community has farmers, weavers, builders, merchants, shoemakers, and all the rest. And as the state expands to meet multiplying wants, it must have a standing army. Yet, until the refinements of culture have been added, this is no better than a “city of pigs.”
    In another of his great myths, adapted, Plato says, from an old Phoenician tale, he offers one of those “necessary falsehoods” that hold the community together—“just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city.”
    Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, therefore they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God