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Plato and Democracy

The Ship of Fools

Anja Steinbauer explains why Plato had problems with democracy.

A lovely boat lazily bobbing up and down on the water, going here and there and nowhere: A nice way of spending a summer Sunday afternoon. But would you really want all of your life to be like this? Well, this is what you get, Plato tells us, if you live in a democracy. What is Plato’s problem with democracy? As it happens, there is more than one problem. Plato has a very powerful formal objection to democracy, which I will discuss later in this article – but there is more, and it all comes to a head in the trial of Socrates. It seems like Plato didn’t like democracy much, and neither did Socrates.

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