10-25-2019, 09:47 AM
(10-24-2019, 08:57 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Pbrower - do you think Plato's Republic would be a theocracy?
1. The ancient Greek city-states, with polytheistic religion as part of the dominant culture, were not theocracies. Sparta may have resembled a modern fascist state in its militarism, hierarchy, and civic nationalism, but it was no theocracy. The gods themselves struggled for power atop Olympus much as politicians did in Athens, where Plato lived. See also the Norse, whose gods had much the same struggles as did the Norse politicians in what seems even more democratic than Classical Greece. (A paradox: much of the democratic heritage in England and in turn America comes from Norse practice in the Danelaw than from theories from Continental Europe other than Scandinavia). Pagans do not make effective hierachs.
2. All great political theorists reflect the milieu in which they live, even if Karl Marx. Marx' historical view could have hardly have formed except in a Prussian city with Roman ruins (Trier), some waning influence of feudal structure, and recent memories of revolutionary excitement from neighboring France that became mass disgust, and then as a partial pariah as a "Jew" even if he was irreligious.
3. Plato seemed to little mention the gods, and did not show a marked preference that one god take over on Olympus. The Philosopher King, an incorruptible man of great wisdom, was the ideal. Monotheistic cultures seem the only real theocracies. Tibet may have had its hierarchy of priests, but those priests were exempt from the delights and powers of capitalism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.