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Essay on Plato's treatment of democracy
Plato's theory combines two themes already familiar to us: the identification of the state with the individual, the concept that all change is deterioration. What is unique in Plato's treatment is the way these two themes are combined. First, however, let us discuss them separately, as his psychological and his metaphysical interpretations of history. These are only elements, however. They must be seen as parts of one grand psychological-metaphysical theory of history. Plato will treat states and individuals in the same terms. His justification for this procedure is two-fold: states are composed of individuals, so that whatever destroys individuals will also destroy the state they are a part of; further, it is possible to consider individual souls as though they were governments with problems about what part shall rule, and so on. The forces of change ought therefore to be the same for states as for individuals.
Those which make a state deteriorate from a democracy to an oligarchy, and then to a democracy, is the same cluster of circumstances that makes a democratic (honor-seeking) father have an oligarchic (money-seeking) son, and then makes such a money-hungry individual have a libertine for a son. Socrates will therefore consider the four types of bad state: democracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. And after each of these discussions about a specific type of state, he will talk about the relevant type of individual character: the democratic man, the oligarchic man and so on.
He will follow through with this parallelism in a very imaginative way, and at every turn we might find caricatures of ourselves - for instance, societies that begin with a dream of idealistic equality and end up being ruled by a small-time thug whom they cannot shake off. And always, the fault is in ourselves and in the sort of individuals we are...................
