PLATO IS APHILOSOPHER KING

INTRODUCTION:

Plato Is Aphilosopher King

Philosopher king, idea according to which the best form of government

is that in which philosophers rule. The ideal of a philosopher king was
born in Plato’s dialogue Republic as part of the vision of a just city. It
was influential in the Roman Empire and was revived in European
political thought in the age of absolutist monarchs. It has also been more
loosely influential in modern political movements claiming an infallible
ruling elite.
In Plato’s Republic the leading character, Socrates, proposes the design
of an ideal city as a model for how to order the individual soul. Such a
just city will require specialized military “guards,” divided subsequently
into two groups—rulers who will be “guards” in the sense of guardians,
dedicated to what is good for the city rather than for themselves, and
soldiers who will be their “auxiliaries.” Already at this stage of
the Republic it is stressed that the guardians must be virtuous and
selfless, living simply and communally as do soldiers in their camps, and
Socrates proposes that even wives and children should be in common.
At the outset of Book V, Socrates is challenged by his interlocutors to
explain this last proposal. In response, Socrates expounds three
controversial claims, which he acknowledges will expose him to
ridicule. The first is that the guardians should include qualified women
as well as men; thus, the group that will become known as “philosopher
kings” will also include “philosopher queens.” The second claim is that
these ruling men and women should mate and reproduce on the city’s
orders, raising their children communally to consider all guardians as
parents rather than attach themselves to a private family household.
Those children, together with those of the artisan class, will be tested,
and only the most virtuous and capable will become rulers. Thus, the
group to become known as “philosopher kings” will be reproduced by
merit rather than simply by birth. Finally, Socrates declares that these
rulers must in fact be philosophers:

Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and
leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until
political power and philosophy entirely coincide…cities will have no
rest from evils…there can be no happiness, either public or private, in
any other city.
Socrates predicts that this claim will elicit even more ridicule
and contempt from his Athenian contemporaries than will equality for
women rulers or communality of sex and children. Many Athenians saw
philosophers as perpetual adolescents, skulking in corners and muttering
about the meaning of life, rather than taking an adult part in the battle for
power and success in the city. On this view, philosophers are the last
people who should or would want to rule. The Republic turns this claim
upside down, arguing that it is precisely the fact that philosophers are the
last people who would want to rule that qualifies them to do so. Only
those who do not wish for political power can be trusted with it.
Thus, the key to the notion of the “philosopher king” is that the
philosopher is the only person who can be trusted to rule well.
Philosophers are both morally and intellectually suited to rule: morally
because it is in their nature to love truth and learning so much that they
are free from the greed and lust that tempts others to abuse power and
intellectually because they alone can gain full knowledge of reality,
which in Books V through VII of the Republic is argued to culminate in
knowledge of the forms of Virtue, Beauty, and, above all, the Good. The
city can foster such knowledge by putting aspiring philosophers through
a demanding education, and the philosophers will use their knowledge of
goodness and virtue to help other citizens achieve these so far as
possible.
Thus, the emphasis in the Platonic notion of the philosopher king lies
more on the first word than the second. While relying on conventional
Greek contrasts between king and tyrant and between the king as
individual ruler and the multitudinous rule
of aristocracy and democracy, Plato makes little use of the notion of
kingship per se. That he had used the word, however, was key to the
later career of the notion in imperial Rome and monarchical Europe. To
the Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161–180), what
mattered was that even kings should be philosophers, rather than that
only philosophers should rule. To François Fénelon, the Roman
Catholic archbishop charged with the moral education of Louis, duc de
Bourgogne, the grandson of Louis XIV, the crucial issue was that kings
should possess self-restraint and selfless devotion to duty, rather than
that they should possess knowledge. The enlightened despots of the 18th
century, such as Frederick II the Great of Prussia and Catherine II the
Great of Russia, would pride themselves on being philosopher kings and
queens. But philosophy by then had left behind Plato’s focus on absolute
knowledge, signifying instead the free pursuit of knowledge and the
implementation of reason.
Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, the medieval philosopher Abū Naṣr al-
Fārābī had championed the notion of a religiously devout philosopher
king. More than 1,000 years later the notion of such a figure acting as
the interpreter of law inspired the Ayatollah Khomeini and the
revolutionary state that he shaped in Iran. Finally, and more broadly, the
notion of the philosopher ruler has come to signify a general claim to
domination by an unaccountable, if putatively beneficent, elite, as in
certain forms of Marxism and other revolutionary political movements.