Where I defend Plato's notion that democracy leads to slavery. Not my best work, but the grade was decent enough.
The Excess of Freedom – How Man Chooses Slavery
“Say then, my friend, In what manner does tyranny arise?—that it has a democratic origin is evident.”
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
In Book VIII of the Republic, Plato’s masterwork of government and justice, it is explained how types of government pass from one form to the other. Of particular interest for this paper is Plato’s diagnosis that a tyranny is the natural outcome of a democracy, due to the excesses of liberty that usually accompanies democratic rule.
States are a reflection of human nature. (Plato) So, each government is merely a reflection of the disposition of the people being governed. According to Plato, there are five kinds of State, which he had ordered according to what is caused by the other. Thus, he places as highest his own favored form of government, which was aristocracy or government by the best. From this height, the other types of government are products of the degeneration of the form that came before it. When aristocracy degenerates, it leads to a timocracy, or government of honor, as was the case in Sparta. This form, in turn, degenerates into oligarchy. Oligarchy degenerates into democracy. Democracy degenerates into tyranny.
A democracy, according to Plato, is born out of oligarchy. An oligarchy is a society dominated by a few rich elite. This kind of government creates tension between the few rich ruling elite and the larger class of the impoverished masses that they rule. Democracy is born when this tension snaps and the wealthy ruling class either withdraws from its position as ruling elite or is slaughtered by the victorious masses. (Plato)
How does democracy degenerate into tyranny? According to Plato, there exists in each state a person he likened to a “drone”, the male bee which produces no honey. These people are spendthrifts, but make no money themselves. They continually slake what Plato calls “unnecessary pleasures”, and it causes them to remain in the city even when they have sold off all their property. In a democracy, such people will be free to pursue anything. For a time, they may reform of their unnecessary pleasures, but in a democratic society they will either fall back into them or find new ones to haunt them, which will multiply for they do not know how to master the new desires. In time, he will pursue these new desires, and will consider all virtues to be equal. He can then live many kinds of lives, and will be emulated by the people around him. He is the culmination of the democratic man.
Democracy, thus, leads to excessive liberty. (Plato) The democratic man will find himself the equal of his superiors and elders, and will chafe at any hint of authority being held over him. When authority collapses, nobody will respect both laws written and unwritten.
As in nature, the excess of one thing will lead to a reaction in the opposite direction. So will excessive liberty lead to excess slavery. (Plato) Where there is excessive liberty, people will flock to the tyrant promising protection, for liberty cannot guarantee mercy or fair treatment. According to English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in a state of nature, man is free to do as he pleases, and this leads to a “war of all against all” that renders human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. (Hobbes) In such an environment, the allure of tyranny would be hard to resist.
And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power; and this is the form of government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
Democracies often have violent beginnings. From the American and French Revolutions to the post-colonial wars of independence, the transition to democracy is often marked by the violent overthrow of a previous regime. This is true even in Western societies in the last century. Of the most notable examples, the German Weimar Republic was established after Bismarck’s Second Reich fell in World War I and the subsequent German Revolution of 1918. The Soviet Union, which began as a “soviet” democracy (Brailsford), was born out of a violent revolution and a following civil war. As with the French Revolution, the ascension to democracy was followed by the execution, or exile, of many members of the previous regime.
What follows is often a period of great optimism and euphoria. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his seminal work Democracy in America, recounts the boundless energy which seemed to animate the American public, where everybody seemed involved in civic endeavor. (de Tocqueville) For some democracies, this period lasts longer than in others. The advent of soviet democracy actually led to economic recovery in the early days of the Soviet Union, where the NEP (New Economic Policy) meant that peasants could actually sell part of their crop either privately or to the state. (Kreis)
Comfort, however, tends to have a deleterious effect on the people who experience it. Plato says as much of the oligarchs, and the democratic man, with his love of unnecessary pleasures, is no different. Eventually, this will create once more that old tension that was present in the oligarchy. (Plato)
And the end is that when they see the people, not of their own accord, but through ignorance, and because they are deceived by informers, seeking to do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become oligarchs in reality; they do not wish to be, but the sting of the drones torments them and breeds revolution in them.
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
How does a Western democracy revert to tyranny? One would do well to remember that “totalitarianism” is a 20th century concept. One cannot assume that modernity will breed out the tyrannical tendencies in man. And since the state is but a reflection of the nature of its subjects, the tyrannical state will also remain a fixture, even in modernity.
The new Soviet Union returned to turmoil after the death of its first leader, Vladimir Lenin. Resentment against those who freely profited from the NEP, as well as against the kulaks (independent farmers), boiled over as ideologues attempted to return to a more pristine communism. (Kreis) Even among the ideologues, rifts pitted factions against each other. The result was a ruling class split and divided against itself, with Leon Trotsky on one side, and Joseph Stalin on the other.
The German Weimar Republic collapsed in a different fashion. Despite some economic success and democratic stability from 1923-29, Germany faced a serious economic crisis during the early 1930’s. The Great Depression swept through Europe as it did the US, and Germany was reeling. (Kaes) Suffering Germans, “deceived by informers”, as Plato would put it, and with no strong state to hold to account, lashed out against the people they believed were responsible for their suffering. The common targets were the Treaty of Versailles, and the Jews, whom they believed controlled the world economy.
The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists, and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, “save us!”…
- Alan Moore, Watchmen #01, 1986
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The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built.
- Adolf Hitler, Proclamation to the German Nation, February 1, 1933
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
The democracy, now in shambles and beset by enemies both real and imagined, recoil from freedom and turn to a protector. They nurse the protector, and confer upon him great power. This protector, once having tasted power, tends to consolidate it around himself. Such was the case when Caesar assumed his dictatorship over the Roman Republic. Western democracy has been known to follow the same path. Where a strong man is empowered, the strong man becomes the only man, and everybody else his subjects.
The Soviet Union turned to Stalin, and Stalin consolidated his power by defeating the Germans, purging the government and the intelligentsia and establishing the infamous gulags. Stalin is estimated to have been responsible for anywhere between 9 million to 20 million deaths. (White) The Weimar Republic turned to Adolf Hitler, who was made Chancellor before being elected President and later given absolute power by the representative democratic German Reichstag. Hitler suppressed the various groups he saw as responsible for the decline of democratic Germany, from the Jews to the Gypsies. Both Stalin and Hitler were involved in destructive wars that claimed thousands of lives. Hitler’s genocidal campaign resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews, along with 3 million Catholic Poles and other ethnic groups. (White)
And he, the protector of whom we spoke, is to be seen, not 'larding the plain' with his bulk, but himself the overthrower of many, standing up in the chariot of State with the reins in his hand, no longer protector, but tyrant absolute.
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
After this he lives on, spending his money and labour and time on unnecessary pleasures quite as much as on necessary ones; but if he be fortunate, and is not too much disordered in his wits, when years have elapsed, and the heyday of passion is over—supposing that he then re-admits into the city some part of the exiled virtues, and does not wholly give himself up to their successors—in that case he balances his pleasures and lives in a sort of equilibrium, putting the government of himself into the hands of the one which comes first and wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another; he despises none of them but encourages them all equally.
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Neither does he receive or let pass into the fortress any true word of advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and chastise and master the others—whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another.
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
And what of the greatest democratic power in the world? The United States has enjoyed an unbroken history of democratic rule. It is the showcase for democracy, with an often exceptional view of their particular form of government. (Madsen) Can the pathologies that infested and overwhelmed the Weimar Republic and Soviet democracy, born out of excess freedom, ever take root in the United States?
One need only look at the counterculture of 1960’s America to see the roots of these pathologies. The 60’s were the decade of the American Civil Rights movement. In that decade, the success of the minority rights, feminist and homosexual causes created a society of unprecedented freedom and license. However, these freedoms clashed with other freedoms extant in democratic American society, such as the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly. In order to protect their own freedoms, these minority causes turned to the State to guarantee their freedoms. The State complied, as the expense of other more fundamental freedoms.
For example, in 1973, the US Supreme Court imposed on American society the right of every woman to kill her unborn child. This right, favored by government, overshadowed whatever right to life the fetus enjoyed.
With the state privileging petty freedoms over fundamental ones, American society experienced a steady erosion of freedoms. This steady erosion is encapsulated in such things as speech codes (Hudson), discrimination laws (Kantor), “hate crime” legislation (Knight), and a pervasive “political correctness” (Atkinson). What the Orwellian language cannot conceal is that the excesses of freedom has produced a society free to engage in its own decline through the indulgence of “unnecessary pleasures”, but without the freedom to arrest that decline.
The result is an ennui-saturated society that is caught up in an economic recession brought about by both unrestrained consumption and a rising infertility that ensures that there will be no future generation to fuel growth and pay for the consumption of the present. (Goldman) Recently, the executive branch of the US government had been acquiring more power, from the right to wiretap and determine torture policy (via the War on Terror) to unprecedented regulation over the US financial sector (via the Obama Stimulus). A combination of fear over the loss of over-indulged freedoms, combined with an ever-growing reliance on the state to preserve such freedoms, have resulted in an American executive empowered like no other American executive before him. One can almost see what comes next.
I pledge to be a servant to President Obama.
- Ashton Kutcher, “I Pledge”, 2009
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When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
- G. K. Chesterton, Daily News, 1905
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The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
Plato’s critique of democracy and the excesses of freedom is the product of a remarkable insight into human nature. Man, at his heart, is fallen. Where man indulges in excess, those who come after him react in excess in the opposite direction. Human concupiscence forbids man his Utopia. Ultimately, it will take more than a form of government to ennoble the human being. In fact, it is man who ennobles the state, and not the other way around.
Unfortunately, it seems that Western democracy has gone blind to this truth, for as Plato pointed out, relativism is another one of the democratic man’s traits. However, truth does not rely on belief to remain true. This truth, that the government is only as good as its citizens instead of vice versa and that when given too much freedom, man will choose tyranny, asserts itself in the pastor arrested for the “hate crime” of calling homosexuality immoral, in the business owner shut down for rewarding merit instead of adhering to a race quota, or in the violent dispersal of abortion clinic protesters. Man is his own tyrant.
I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this [freedom] and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny.
- Plato, The Republic, Book VIII
