The first concerted attempt to see Plato as a philosopher to whom argument matters was produced by the philosophers of the early nineteenth century that we call Utilitarians. This is quite surprising, since Utilitarian ideas about ethics and metaphysics are almost totally opposed to Plato’s. Nevertheless, it was the circle of John Stuart Mill which revived the idea of Plato as a philosopher for whom arguments are what matter. The Utilitarian philosopher George Grote’s Plato (1865), the first account based on solid scholarship, discussed every dialogue separately with its own theme and purpose, presenting Plato as engaged in an open-ended philosophical search, sometimes dogmatic and sometimes arguing against others without coming to a conclusion himself. Grote disagrees with Plato’s ideas, but sympathetically presents him as following different arguments and directions. In this picture of Plato as essentially an argumentative searcher for truth the Republic appears as just one dialogue among many, containing some political ideas which are not seen as its centrepiece.
The Plato that won out, however, was a third Plato, the Plato of the Idealist philosopher Benjamin Jowett. Jowett translated all Plato’s works (published in 1871) in a readable way that for the first time made Plato accessible to the general public. (We take translations for granted, but the Republic has been translated into languages such as Korean and Icelandic only in the last few years; when readers need to read Greek or to go through another language, Plato is accessible only to an educated élite.) Jowett saw Plato as a systematic thinker who points towards Idealism, and for him the Republic is central for the way in which he sees Plato bringing ethics and metaphysics together with politics. Moreover, he saw the political ideal as central, and in this he was followed by nearly everyone who has read the work since.
Why would Plato’s ideal state seem like a serious contribution to political thought (as opposed to a Utopian fantasy)? By the middle of the nineteenth century political thinking was concerned with issues to which the Republic seemed relevant. Democracy and universal voting, long scorned as undisciplined mob-rule, had come to be a real political option, and the democratic city-states of ancient Greece came to replace the ancient Roman republic as a model in terms of which English and American politicians and political thinkers thought about their own states. Histories of ancient Greece began to present ancient democracy in a positive light for the first time. If the Republic could be seen as Plato’s response to democracy then there were a number of contributions, negative and positive, that it could make to nineteenth-century political debate. And it was so seen.
Jowett made the Republic central to classical studies (a place it has retained ever since) and this idea of it as a serious, challenging and idealistic political text has spread all over the academic world. The nineteenth-century male élite who read the Republic at university were supposed to be inspired by it to adopt an ideal of selfless devotion to the public good, an ideal which was to serve as an antidote to economic ambition, which was seen as selfish. The idea of Guardians was seen as meritocratic: political rule should be earned by education and hard work, not inherited as an aristocratic privilege. Plato’s idea of women Guardians was useful as the expression of an ideal, reflection on which would enable men to absorb the idea of women as political equals in society, entitled to the vote and to education. (Here we And Victorian anxiety about sex entering: Jowett goes to great lengths to separate female Guardians from Plato’s ideas about ‘women and children in common’.) Plato’s insistence on a common system of public education for citizens was seen as an inspiration for the growing movement to democratize and spread education, and to see it as the state’s task to provide it. Plato’s complaints about democracy and his view that governing requires specialized knowledge were taken up in the ongoing debates about modern representative democracy and extensions of voting rights. The Republic provided materials for thinking about contemporary issues, and nineteenth-century concerns lit up Plato’s ideal state as the controlling idea of the book.
Jowett’s interpretation of the Republic has had an astonishingly long life. In English-speaking countries, it has long outlived the vogue for Idealist philosophy, and the political debates, that produced it. Even today it is often assumed that the obvious way to read the book is as an idealist political statement, in which questions of metaphysics and ethics are developed within the framework of the ideal state. Scholars have differed on how ‘practical’ the ideas are meant to be: some have seen them as merely an ideal to inspire, others as a blueprint to put directly into practice. And during the twentieth century the general reaction to the work has changed around completely from respectful to hostile. The political battles of the Victorian era being over, the Republic has been brought into relation with darker, more modern ideas. From the 1930s, the Guardians have been seen as a totalitarian, sometimes fascist idea, and Plato’s insistence on common public education and culture has been claimed to be propaganda and brainwashing. (This idea was introduced to taint Plato by association with pre-war Nazi Germany, but has proved just as serviceable in associating him with post-war Communist régimes. See box, p. 31).
Nowadays, although the wilder and sillier accusations of fascism have been discredited, few teachers put forward the Republic as containing positive ideas to emulate and inspire. It is far more often put forward as an objectionable, élitist and exclusionary set of political ideas which students who are brought up to be tolerant and inclusive can easily criticize without exerting themselves. Still, the underlying assumption remains unchanged, that the main thing the book is doing is putting forward an account of an ideal political community whose structure and organization provide an answer to genuine questions of political debate.
Is the Republic a political blueprint?
‘Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to Plato’s own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the State? . . . Through the Greek State Plato reveals to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of good – like the sun in the visible world; – about human perfection, which is justice – about education beginning in youth and continuing in later years – about poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind – about ‘the world’ which is the embodiment of them ” about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life . . . We have no need therefore to discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable or not . . . For the practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth.’
‘The philosopher-king is Plato himself, and the Republic is Plato’s own claim for kingly power.’
It has been so useful in this role, and productive of so much philosophical engagement, that it is easy to overlook the point that the interpretation of the Republic as centrally political theory is a Victorian one, and that we no longer share the Victorians’ reasons for finding the work an evocative political model. We can see this by reflecting on the wide variety of mutually conflicting interpretations of the book that have been produced since the nineteenth century. The political interpretation has carried on, now partly because, as a work of political philosophy, the work is easy to criticize. Hence it has been treated as a teaching tool, providing an easy target for effortless demolition. But now that evaluations of the work have run the gamut, increasingly many scholars are looking at the foundations of the interpretation itself.