Letters to the Editor
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Simon Blackburn's book about Plato's Republic
Blackburn says that “Plato had certainly aristocratic and elitist leanings.” Plato was actually born an
aristocrat. His father was a descendant of the famous Codrus, the ideal patriotic king while his mother descended
from a brother of the great Athenian lawgiver Solon. Solon believed that the perfectly just state was developed
from the eternal ideals of morality and reason. Plato inherited these ideals from his great uncle and focused on
the problem of getting citizens to be virtuous and obedient to the state’s moral laws.
Plato believed that even a democracy can ruin itself by excess of democracy. Democracy becomes
disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest
courses. “As to the people they have no understanding (knowledge) and only repeat what their rulers (the power
elites) tell them.” Unguided by knowledge, the people are a multitude without order, like desires in disarray; the
people need the guidance of philosophers to act as their guardians. Plato’s guardians were by definition good and
wise and knowledgeable. The more Plato thinks about it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to feeble
minded public the selection of the state’s political officials to rule over them and to guide the State well. Plato was
also aware of the wealthy power elite strategists in ancient Athens who pulled the oligarchic wires behind the
so-called democratic state. According to Plato, Philosophy was a way of living honorably and the state’s highest
virtue is education and justice. So only a philosopher-king was fit to guide a nation: “Until philosophers are kings,
or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and wisdom and political leadership
meet in the same man...city States will never cease from ill, nor the human race.” This is the keystone of the arch
of Plato’s thought.
What is also interesting is that the ancient Jews and modern Zionists also were fascinated by Plato’s “The
Republic.” In “Jewish History, Jewish Religion” Israel Shahak says: “Ben-Gurion did not pretend that the
re-establishment of the kingdom of David and Solomon would benefit anybody except the Jewish state. Using the
concepts of Platonism to analyze Israeli policies based on ‘Jewish ideology’ should not seem strange. It was
noticed by several scholars, of whom the most important was Moses Hadas, who claimed that the foundations of
‘classical Judaism’, that is, of Judaism as it was established by Talmudic sages, are based on Platonic influences
and especially on the image of Sparta as it appears in Plato.
According to Hadas ("Hellenistic Culture, Fusion, and Diffusion" NY 1959), a crucial feature of the Platonic
political system, adopted by Judaism as early as the Maccabean period (142-63 BC), was ‘that every phase of
human conduct be subjected to religious sanctions which are in fact to be manipulated by the ruler.’ There can
be no better definition of ‘classical Judaism’ and of the ways in which the rabbis manipulated it than this Platonic
definition. In particular Hadas claims that Judaism adopted what ‘Plato himself summarized as the objectives of
his program’ , in the following well-known passage: ‘The principal thing is that no one, man or woman, should
ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in
earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility. In peace as in war he must live always with his eyes on his
superior officer...In a word, we must train the mind not even to consider acting as an individual or know how to do
it.’ Plato, The Republic.
It was the above quoted passage which was chosen by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies
as describing the essence of ‘a closed society.’ If the word ‘rabbi’ (master, teacher) is substituted for ‘an officer’
we will have a perfect image of classical Judaism. The latter is still deeply influencing Israeli-Jewish society and
determining to a large extent the Israeli policies.. Historical Judaism and its two successors, Jewish Orthodoxy
and Zionism, are both sworn enemies of the concept of the open society as applied to Israel. A Jewish state,
whether based on its present Jewish ideology or, if it becomes even more Jewish in character than it is now, on
the principles of Jewish Orthodoxy, cannot ever contain an open society. It can become a fully closed and warlike
ghetto, a Jewish Sparta, supported by the labor of Arab helots, kept in existence by its influence on the U.S.
political establishment and by threats to use its nuclear power, or it can try to become an open society. The second
choice is dependent on a honest examination of its Jewish past, on the admission that Jewish chauvinism and
exclusivism exist, and on a honest examination of the attitudes of Judaism towards the non-Jews.”
Professor Blackburn said that The Republic is “a dangerous book (because) if you convince yourself that
you’re amongst the elite or that you alone are privy to the eternal truths...then you can become a very dangerous
person.” Plato never became a “dangerous person” - only the greatest of philosophers. I wonder what Professor
Blackburn thinks if a nation comprised of people who earnestly believe that they have been specially Chosen by
God to be His representatives on earth (and who are all directly descendant from Abraham) and “think of
themselves as among the elite or God’s Chosen people are dangerous?