So actually I would say he is interested not just in an idealization/ethical structure, or in practical application, but in both. So in describing the just city he often alludes to constraints imposed by, basically, what you can get people to do and other material constraints.
Apart from the point I made in the podcast, that the agrarian "city of pigs" (which is obviously not totalitarian) is explicitly labelled as better than the city described in the rest of the Republic, I would say that Plato is always conscious of a distance between the theoretical outlines of a certain type of state, and the way that this state would actually be realized in practice. īut what do you think? Who's correct Annas or Popper? (As pointed out by Simon Blackburn).Īdditionally his class status, family ties, apparent desire to dabble in politics in Syracuse and reason to dislike the democracy which killed Socrates add weight to the idea that he was an an admirer of what today we would call authoritarian forms of government such as the Spartan.Īnyway, you know all the arguments and I'm just testing myself/showing off/ or avoiding ironing my trousers in outlining them here :-). It seems to me that the level of detail Plato goes in to about the organisation of the state, its education, drama and beliefs etc pretty much rule out these points. I believe she also argues that the scale of forms of government that he outlines from his polis to timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyrany are ordered not as a comment on the real world value of democracy but only as a measure of the self-discipline required in the individual in each. This mundane answer would seem to argue against Julia Annas' position that the book isn't about politics and the ideal state at all it is only about defining this word and any resemblance to unpleasant forms of government is purely coincidental. It just struck me that if the answer to the question is "mind your own business" then the question can't be very important! This thought led to the following which wasn't intended :-). If you happen to know of any good online articles on the meaning of the word and its confusions I would be glad to read them. Thanks Peter for your response late at night :-)
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