Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

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.

…