Meeting Plato’s challenge?

Abstract

We can regard the history of Political Philosophy as a sequence of responses to a challenge that Plato left behind as a—somewhat poisoned—legacy of his political thoughts. In a nutshell this challenge consists of two assumptions: 1. People have to confer political power on political rulers who are authorized to make collective decisions about the public welfare according to their personal convictions and insights. 2. People have to trust their political rulers, and society has to ensure that trustworthy persons are enthroned as such. Both assumptions are closely related: political rulers in Plato’s view do not merely act as simple “representatives” who just do what they are told by the people or what the people would otherwise do themselves. Political rulers have to decide on the basis of their own knowledge and judgment which is not comprehensible to ordinary people. Therefore it is not possible for the people to evaluate and control the decisions of their political leaders and they thus have to trust in their leaders’ political wisdom and moral commitment to promote the common good. Plato’s own answer to this challenge is well known: we have to educate a societal elite in a manner that ensures that they acquire the knowledge and attitudes that qualify them as political rulers in whom people can trust. It is not an answer that has triggered many affirmative reactions; on the contrary, starting with Aristotle, it has evoked a long chain of attempts to refute Plato’s assumptions and conclusions in one way or another—and this chain has created much of the tradition behind the modern views on politics and political systems. These attempts question the need for autonomous political leadership by defending the ability of people to rule themselves in the form of direct democracy or via political representation, and/or they deny the necessity of genuine trust in political rulers by referring to institutionalized control and incentive mechanisms to prevent the misuse of power. Does the The Calculus of Consent belong to this tradition, and does it produce innovative and convincing arguments to take up Plato’s challenge? I will discuss these questions by first digressing and referring to a quite different approach to contesting Plato’s views. In