The Later History of Plato’s Political Theory
*
§ 1. For a thousand years the Republic had no history: for a thousand years it simply disappeared. From the days of Proclus, the Neo-Platonist of the fifth century, almost until the days of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, at the end of the fifteenth, the Republic was practically a lost book. It is said of Proclus that he used to assert that ‘if it were in his power, he would withdraw from the knowledge of men, for the present, all ancient books except the Timaeus and the Sacred Oracles’.1 His wish was fulfilled. What the Middle Ages knew of Plato came from a Latin translation of a large part of the Timaeus, made by Chalcidius in the fourth century, and from the references in Aristotle, Cicero, St Augustine, and Macrobius, in Apuleius’ De Dogmate Platonis, and in Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophi, the great cornmonplace book on which so many generations drew.2 Something of the Republic was contained in Cicero’s De Republica. Along with the praise of the mixed constitution, which Cicero had borrowed from later Greek writers, the De Republica contains a translation of Plato’s sketch of democracy, an imitation of his picture of tyranny, and, above all, in the Somnium Scipionis, an adaptation of the myth of Er, which greatly influenced later thought, and was the foundation of Petrarch’s hopes of heaven.3 St Augustine, though he had but little acquaintance with Greek literature, quotes largely from the De Republica in his own De Ciuitate Dei (a picture, like Plato’s Republic, of a city in the heavens); and he helped in this way to preserve the Platonic tradition. The De Consolatione Philosophi of Boethius is as much inspired by Platonism as is the De Civitate Dei by what may be called Hebraism; but, though Boethius quotes the Republic occasionally, and especially the text ‘on kings becoming philosophers or philosophers kings’,4 the theme of his book comes from the Timaeus. And, partly because it was the one treatise of Plato which they possessed, partly because it was ‘something craggy to break their minds upon’, the thinkers of the Middle Ages continued to cling to the Timaeus. The legend of Atlantis became a great ‘matter’, and Bacon’s New Atlantis is a relic of its influence.1
During the thousand years in which the Republic slept, its influence was not dead. The Realists who believed in uniuersalia which were realia ante rem, if they drew directly from the Tirnaeus, were also unconsciously indebted to the Republic. And there was still more of Plato alive in the Middle Ages than his Ideas.
‘Great part of the educational furniture of the Middle Ages … may be found already in the Republic of Plato. The Four Cardinal Virtues of popular doctrine in the Middle Ages, familiar in preaching and allegory, are according to the division and arrangement adopted by Plato.… It might be fanciful to derive the three estates – oratores, bellatores, laboratores – from the Republic, though nowhere in history are the functions of the three Platonic orders of the Sages, the Warriors, and the Commons more clearly understood than in the medieval theory of the Estates as it is expounded, for example, in the book of Piers Plowman. There is no doubt, however, about the origin of the medieval classification of the Liberal Arts. The Quadrivium is drawn out in the Republic in the description of the studies of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music, though Plato does not allow the medieval classification of Dialectic as a Trivial Art along with Grammar and Rhetoric. Furthermore, the vision of Er the Pamphylian is ancestor … to the medieval records of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.’2
The analogies between Platonic doctrine and medieval theory and practice go still deeper. The communism of the Republic had not only its parallel in the communism of the monastic system, under which a farming class of villeins paid part of their produce for the common consumption of monks who protected them by their prayers: it was part of the doctrine of the Church, and affected the canonical theory of property. By nature, Gratian taught, all things are common to all men; and though, since the Fall, the law of nature has had to yield place to positive law, and positive law recognizes private property, as a necessary concession and remedy to the sinful passion of greed entailed by the Fall, it still remains true that no man should take more property than he needs, and that all men have only a title to possession so long as they make a right use of what they possess. To prove that communism is ideal, Gratian refers not only to the practice of the primitive Church in Jerusalem: he also cites Plato. ‘Hence it is that in Plato that State is said to be ordered most justly, in which each member is ignorant of any private affections’: ‘it was one of the wisest of the Greeks who said that the goods of friends should be in common’.1 A still deeper affinity between Plato’s theory and medieval life is to be found in the analogy between the whole ideal State of the Republic and the medieval Church. Alike in organization and in function the two touch and blend. If Plato organized the State of the Republic in three classes, and set the highest class of philosopher-kings to control the rest, the medieval Church organized her members in the three classes of clerici, regulares, and laici, and she set the clergy, and especially the Pope as the head and fountain of all clerical power, to control the other classes.2 If Plato required his philosopher-kings to control every reach of life in the light of the ideal principle of the Good, the medieval Church set herself equally to control, in the light of Christian principle, each and every activity of her members – war and international relations; industry and commerce; literature and study. Last, and deepest perhaps of all the testimonia animae naturaliter Platonicae which the Middle Ages furnish, are the analogies, to which reference has already been made, between the polity of the Laws, in the development on which it enters at the end of the dialogue, and the general medieval polity. It was said above3 that the end of the Laws is the beginning of the Middle Ages. When we remember the religious doctrines, and the religious persecution, of the tenth book; when we remember the nocturnal council conversing with heretics in the house of reformation for the salvation of their souls, we may see that the saying is not without justification. And yet, even while we remember these analogies, we must remember another thing. They are spontaneous analogies. The Middle Ages were not following Plato: they were following their own way. That way coincided, at many points, with the way Plato had trodden before; but the coincidence was accidental. The only direct effects of Plato in the Middle Ages are those which flowed from the study of the Timaeus, from the tradition of his view of the nature of Universals, and, it may perhaps be added, from the Platonic element in Augustinian theology.1 The curriculum of the medieval University may correspond to the curriculum of the seventh book of the Republic; but it was the curriculum of the medieval University not because it corresponded with the curriculum of the Republic, but because it had been for centuries the actual staple of education.
§ 2. With the Renaissance came a new birth of the Republic. The Platonism of the Florentine Academy and the circle which gathered round Lorenzo de Medici was indeed Neo-Platonic; but in the little farm at Montevecchio Ficino had completed by 1477 his translation of Plato’s writings into Latin. It is, however, in the Utopia of Sir Thomas More that we seem to find the Plato of the Republic redivivus.2 The Utopia has many references to the Republic; and, what is more, it advocates community of property and the emancipation of women. But whatever stimulus its author may have owed to the Republic, the Utopia is a different and independent treatise.3 While in Plato there is no little asceticism, in More there is something of hedonism; while Plato had taught that society should let its useless members die, More suggests that those who are too old or too sick to get pleasure or profit from life should commit suicide. Penetrated by a different spirit from that of Plato, while borrowing, as he does, Platonic details, More is a typical representative of an age in which, ‘in opposition to Christian monasticism men lived like Epicurean philosophers, and in opposition to Christian scholasticism thought like disciples of Plato’. When we turn to More’s advocacy of communism, we come upon the same difference from Plato which appears in his general outlook on life. The idea of communism may have come from Plato; its motives and its scheme are altogether different. The motives of Plato, as we have seen, are not economic, but political or rather moral: communism is necessary for the realization of justice, and because it alone will secure an unselfish and efficient government. The motives of More are economic: his communism is in direct reaction against contemporary economic conditions. Plato had felt that ignorant and selfish politicians were the ruin of the Greek city; More felt (as a Lord Chancellor said at the end of the fifteenth century) that ‘this realm falleth into decay from enclosures and the letting down of tenantries’. He saw the agricultural class evicted from its holdings to make room for sheep pastures: he saw ‘sheep devouring men’. He saw great landowners monopolizing the land, and men who would have been contented farmers betaking themselves to vagabondage and theft. Agricultural communism was being advocated among the German peasantry by the movement called the Bundschuh; and to agricultural communism More turned. Since private property means such lack of ‘commodious living’ for the mass of Englishmen, and since palliatives like equalization of property and inalienable lots are of no avail, let us go the whole way, to the final goal of common property.
More’s motives are thus economic: they are motives suggested more by the evils of his own times, than by the reading of Plato. His scheme is altogether different from that of Plato. Plato’s communism had touched only the two upper classes: More’s communism touches every member of the State.1 Plato’s communism had been arranged in such a way as to set the two upper classes free from all material work and material cares: More’s communism is so planned, that every man must put his hand to the plough, and labour at husbandry. Plato’s guardians were to share in common an annual rent in kind paid by the tiers état: More’s citizens share in common the whole of the products of their country. Plato left the third class with private ownership of all property, and the guardians with common ownership of nothing except their barracks and their annual rent: More leaves his citizens with no private ownership, and common ownership of everything.1 Of all these differences, the one which is cardinal is the difference in the attitude of the two thinkers to labour. Plato meant his communism – a communism consistent with private ownership of most things, and involving common ownership of very few things – to set his guardians free from labour: More meant his communism, which was real communism in all things, to set all men free for labour. In place of unemployed farmers tramping the English roads, he would have work for all: in place of the many drones who live in rich men’s houses, he would have all men bees. In this way he hoped to shorten the hours of labour, and to give all men a six hours’ day.
It is obvious that More has many affinities with the modern socialism from which Plato so greatly differs. There are, indeed, differences between More and modern socialism. Modern socialism is generally collectivist, and advocates common ownership of the means of production: it is common ownership of products which More advocates. Modern socialism would not ‘purify’ society of its ‘luxury’; it would only divide that luxury equally and impartially. More comes nearer to Plato in this respect; he would simplify economic life down to the elements of agriculture and a few necessary trades. But on the whole More has the spirit of modern socialism – something of its zeal for a fairer distribution of this world’s goods; something of its close touch with actual contemporary economic conditions. And the problem of education is treated by him in the same realistic spirit. Education had been to Plato the head and forefront of his scheme: communism had been, in comparison, secondary and subordinate. Communism is first and foremost in More, and education is considered chiefly on its technical side, and as meaning a training in some trade; for every citizen of Utopia must practise a trade as well as agriculture, and alternate regularly between the two – a suggestion which shows yet again More’s modern and unplatonic view of labour.
In his attitude towards woman More is, in some respects, very like Plato. He believes in the emancipation of women: he believes that women are able to do the same work as men. As in the Republic, the women of Utopia bear offices: as in the Republic, they go to war. But it is not all who fight; and it is only the priestly offices which women can hold. Nor is there any community of wives: More believes in monogamy. There is something of Plato’s physical point of view in the suggestion that bride and bridegroom should see one another nude before marriage, in order that they may know that they are fitted for matrimony; but that is the only approach towards Plato’s attitude to the sexual question.1 There is no attempt to regulate population, except by the system of colonies.
It would thus appear that More, on the whole, is Platonic in the letter, and not in the spirit. He is rather ‘the father of modern Utopian socialism’, than an imitator of Plato’s communism. His aim is equality of enjoyment for all: it was the aim of Plato to secure perfection of knowledge for the few. In Plato intellectualism leads to the philosopher-king and the rule of the all-wise Caesar: More smiles at the idea of what the King of France would say to his Utopia.2 There is nothing of the ascetic despotism of the Idea in More: his motto is rather, ‘Let cheerfulness abound with industry’.3
§ 3. It is with Rousseau that Plato’s political theory begins to exercise that steady influence on thought which it has exercised ever since. Rousseau was born, and lived in his youth, at Geneva. The Republic of Geneva, to whose ‘magnificent, honoured, and sovereign lords’ he dedicated his ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality’, was itself something of a city-state; and while he was a boy in Geneva, Rousseau was busy reading in Plutarch the history of the city-states of antiquity, to which he constantly refers in his writings. In his later years he began the study of Plato; and Plato became a dominant influence in his thought.1 By the help of Plato he liberated himself from the individualist theory of Locke,2 and arrived at the collectivist theory of the State expounded in the Contrat Social. The title of his great work is really a misnomer: it might be called, with more propriety, De l’organisme Social. He speaks in the common and conventional vocabulary of contract, but his argument has none of its individualistic connotation.3 The State in his view is a moral organism (être moral et collectif: personne morale), with a sovereign general will directed to its well-being. It is not a legal association, for the protection of legal rights: it is a moral association, through whose common life man enters into his moral being. Apart from his membership of the State, man is a stupid and limited animal, moved by appetite and instinct: by his membership he becomes an intelligent being and a man (I. 8, cf. Laws, 875). The State substitutes justice for instinct and law for appetite: it gives to men’s actions the morality they lacked before. This is pure Platonism, or Hellenism; and Rousseau, thus imbued with the Hellenic view of the State as a collective moral society, was naturally led to propound the Platonic and Hellenic view of its educational character. It must realize moral liberty for its members, by releasing them from the bondage of appetite: it must force men to be free (I. 7). ‘Its education must give their minds the national type, and so direct their opinions and their tastes, that they are patriots by inclination, by passion, and by necessity’ (Gouvernement de Pologne, c. IV). With these principles as his fixed stars, Rousseau felt like Plato, and like Plato felt only too strongly, the zeal of the State. The State, as he conceived it, differed indeed from the State of Plato’s conception. It was a State in which every citizen had a voice in determining the general will, and a share in making the laws through which, and through which alone, the general will can speak. Rousseau preached democracy – democracy pure and primary; and he preached the sovereignty of law. These were Greek tenets: they are hardly the tenets of Plato, who believed that the will of the State was the will of its wisest members, and that its wisest members should not be bound by legal chains. But the democratic and legal State of Rousseau is no less urgent in its control of its members than the aristocratic and absolutist State of Plato. Rousseau would prefer that his citizen should have no other society than the State: ‘It is important, for the proper attainment of the enunciation of the general will, that there should be no partial society in the State, and that each citizen should only think in terms of the State’ (Contrat Social, II. 3). The sovereignty of the community over its members is inalienable, indivisible, and only limited by the fact that it must always be expressed in general rules of law. The community can lay down a civil profession of faith, whose articles contain if not dogmas of religion, at any rate those sentiments of sociability which are necessary to good citizenship and loyal allegiance: it can punish the disbeliever (‘not because he is irreligious, but because he is unsociable’ – but it punishes none the less); finally, if any man, after having confessed the faith, behaves as if he did not believe in its articles, the State can inflict death on the man ‘who has lied in the face of the laws’.1
These are the fundamental lessons which Rousseau learned from the Greeks and from Plato. But he borrowed in smaller things as well as in great; and his political theory is Platonic not only in its general conception, but also in some of its details. The legislator who appears on the scene in the second book of the Contrat Social (c. 7) is a Platonic figure. On veut toujours son bien, mais on ne le voit pas toujours: the community always wishes to enunciate a general will – by which Rousseau means a will directed to the general well-being – but it does not always know what it should actually will. The difficulty will be acute in the beginnings of the State; and the deus ex machina whom Rousseau provides for its solution is the legislator. He will advise the community without imposing his advice as law: he will remedy its ignorance without abrogating its sovereignty. As Rousseau borrowed the figure of the legislator, so, too, though perhaps unconsciously, he borrowed from Plato the conception which he forms of the size of the State. That size must be a mean: the State must be neither too large to be well governed nor too small to be self sufficing (II. 9). He is Platonic again – his very words might be the words of Plato – in his attitude to maritime commerce. ‘Have you a large and commodious sea-coast? Then cover the sea with vessels: cultivate commerce and navigation: you will have an existence which is brilliant – and short’ (II. 11).
Rousseau is not the last apostle of the social contract, but the first prophet of the Idealist school – not the successor and disciple of Locke, but the precursor and teacher of Hegel. Hegel (like Kant) started from Rousseau’s conception of the State as the organ of moral liberty; but he was also influenced directly, and in a still larger degree than Rousseau himself, by the history and philosophy of the Greek city-state. This is most apparent in the System of Ethics of 1802; but the influence is almost equally present in the Philosophy of Mind of 1817. Hegel refuses to envisage the State in terms of law, or as a legal institution: he discusses it in terms of social ethics (Sittlichkeit), and as the highest expression and organ of that social morality, at once precipitated in and enforced by social opinion, which controls the life of all groups, and pre-eminently and particularly the life of the State. The connexion between this conception of the State as the organ of social morality, and Plato’s conception of the State as the organ of justice, is patent. Both conceptions depend on the postulate that the State is a moral organism – an organized system of life by discharging his duty in which each citizen attains a full righteousness; and both conceptions thus issue in the same rule of life – ‘to fulfil my station and its duties’. Like Plato, Hegel was an absolutist, and though he hardly ventured to suggest the turning of Prussian kings into philosophers, he found the mainspring of government in ‘the will of a decreeing individual’. Just as Plato criticized Athenian democracy on the ground that it created two States in one, so Hegel criticized the English system of representative government, because it sacrificed the unity of the State to the play of private and particular interests. Hegel had none of Plato’s belief in communism; but it was part of his theory that ‘civil society’, with all its economic interests, must be brought under the control of the State, and if he was not a socialist, he was (what some may call next best, and others, again, next worst) a protectionist, who held that private interest, blindly engrossed on selfish ends, required public supervision.1
One of the Platonists of the nineteenth century – perhaps a Platonist malgré lui – was Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism. Like Plato, Comte believed that society could and should be governed by scientific knowledge; unlike Plato, he believed that such knowledge should be entirely free from metaphysical or theological assumptions, and that it should be purely positive and coldly inductive in character. Like Plato, again, he was a believer in mathematics; but unlike Plato, who believed in mathematics because they were the avenue to pure Ideas, he believed that the use of mathematical methods would of itself elicit the principles of social life. Sociology, or the study of Society, was to him a study of ‘social physics’, in its two aspects of ‘social statics’ and ‘social dynamics’; and it issued in laws as positive as the laws of physics – laws to which action should conform in much the same way as motion conforms to the laws of physics.1 It followed upon these principles that government was a scientific problem, and administration a matter of scientific paternalism. Differing, therefore, from Plato in his rejection of all metaphysical principles, and refusing to accept any but positive principles drawn by induction from the past and the present, Comte was nevertheless a Platonist in his belief in the reconstruction of the State, and the guidance of that reconstructed State, by the light of scientific principles. Somewhat like Plato, again, though influenced by the medieval church more than by Plato, he drew a distinction between the spiritual and the temporal power, the spiritual and the temporal class. His ideal State would have been one in which the spiritual class, ‘a combination of savans orthodox in science’, expressive of reason and acting by persuasion rather than by force, guided the course of affairs in the lights of scientific principles. In his youth he had been in close association with St Simon (a medievalist if also a Utopian), and it was from St Simon – rather than from Plato – that he drew his conviction that the goal of philosophy must be social and its work a regeneration of society; while it was also to St Simon that he was directly indebted for his distinction between the spiritual and the temporal power. His analogies with Plato are spontaneous rather than derivative; and in his objection to metaphysical principles, and his demand for positive ‘laws’, he is fundamentally anti-Platonic. Formally more akin to Plato than the Hegelians, he is really far further removed from the spirit of Plato.
The philosophy of Plato has been, in the last forty years, one of the chief inspirations of a school of English political thought – the school represented, in different ways, by Green and Bradley and Bosanquet.2 Perhaps it is under the influence of teachers trained in this school that Plato has found a new circle of disciples. You may come across English working men today, if you talk with students from the tutorial classes in our towns, who have read and learned to love the Republic. Plato, perhaps, would have been incredulous that such things could be: ‘it is impossible for the masses to be philosophical’ (Republic, 494 A). If he could have foreseen such things, he might have been willing to entertain some little hope of democracy; he might have consented to widen the scope of his scheme of education and the range of his scheme of communism, so that all, and not only a chosen few, might share in the love and the search for that wisdom, which he himself loved, and sought through all his life.
1 Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, pp. 366–7.
2 John the Scot knew Greek, and quotes the Timaeus in Latin which is not borrowed from Chalcidius; while Henry Aristippus, the deacon of Catana, translated the Meno and the Phaedo in the Norman kingdom of Sicily.
3 Burckhardt, The Renaissance in Italy, p. 546.
4 I., c. IV.
1 The legend of Atlantis is mentioned in the Timaeus (24 E–25 D). The fuller account, of course, comes in the Critias.
2 W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages, pp. 26–7.
1 See Carlyle, Medieval Political Theory in the West, II. 136–7. In a previous note (p. 24.4, n. 1) I have sought to suggest the affinity which may be traced between the programme of the Republic and that of Gregory VII.
2 This division crosses the common medieval division into clergy, baronage, and commons. It makes two classes of clergy and only one of laity: the common division makes one of clergy and two of laity.
3 Cf. supra, p. 410.
1 It lies outside my province to speak of the Platonic strain which, through St Augustine, entered into medieval theology, and which, leading always to a conception of God as acting according to law, was always opposed to the theory, championed by the later Nominalists, of an inscrutable God acting in inscrutable ways.
2 Plato Redivivus is the title of an unplatonic work by Henry Neville (a pamphleteer who had been Parliamentarian and Royalist by turns) in the reign of Charles II.
3 I am indebted to the edition of Utopia by Michels and Ziegler, Berlin, 1895 (Einleitung, pp, 16–35).
1 More speaks, in the first book of Utopia, as if Plato had advocated general communism: he ‘holds with Plato, and nothing marvels that he would make no laws for them that refused those laws whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions of wealth and commodities, which is not possible to be observed where every man’s goods are proper and peculiar to himself’. But he is not referring here to the Republic, but to an ancient tradition about Plato (to which Rousseau also refers in the Contrat Social, XI. 8), that he refused to legislate for Arcadia and Thebes – that is to say, for the city of Megalopolis founded in Arcadia by Epaminondas of Thebes – because they would not consent to equality of rights (Diogenes Laertius, III. 17). Natorp, however, arguing that Plato’s principles lovicallvu, involved full communism. and not ‘half’ communism (supra, pp. 248–9), believes that More drew the logical conclusion from the principles of the Republic (Plato’s Staat und die Idee der Sozialpädagogik, pp. 24, 33).
1 There is no gold in Utopia: in the Republic it is the guardians alone who have no gold.
1 This suggestion is copied from the Laws (772 A). The Utopia not only follows the Republic, but also the Laws. When More went into the details of his ideal State, he naturally turned to the Laws, with its wealth of detail. Like Plato in the Laws, he advocates a system of common meals for all the citizens, men and women (11, c. v): like him, he seeks to associate the old and the young together (ibid.). Like the citizens of the Laws, those of Utopia are very expert and cunning in the course of the stars and the moving of the heavenly spheres (11, c. VI.). The Utopians keep themselves isolated: when they travel, they have to obtain the licence of their prince (11, c. VI.: cf. Laws, XII.). More, unlike Plato, professes religious tolerance: he says of King Utopus, Quod credendum putaret, libmum cuique reliquit: the Utopians, he writes, follow in their king’s steps, and believe that ipsa per se veri vis will issue and come to light. But he is like Plato when he makes disbelief in the immortality of the soul, or in the providence of God, or in divine justice on sinners, punishable with death, and when he speaks of the unbeliever as forbidden to converse except with priests and men of gravity (11, c. IX.).
2 More definitely alludes, in his first book, to Plato’s philosopher-king. It is idle for philosophers to advise kings, as Plato found at Syracuse; the only remedy is a king who himself turns to philosophy: Plato was right in his simile about the philosopher, when he spoke of him as keeping indoors from the rain (a free rendering of Republic, 496 D).
3 Campanella’s Ciuitas Solis is a copy of More’s Utopia, ‘inspired’, a French writer says, ‘at once by the memory of Plato’s Republic and the spectacle of Catholic convents’. At the head of the city of the Sun is the Metaphysician: under him are three magistracies – Power, for war; Love, for eugenics; and Wisdom, for science, art, and education. Campanella would abolish not only property, but also the family; hence the need of a magistracy of Love. A Dominican friar, he advocates a system of confession to the authorities, by which they are kept informed of all that the citizens are thinking and doing. This has its parallel in the Laws (supra, p. 398).
1 Rousseau had read, as his references show, the Republic, the Laws, and the Politicus. In a work which he projected, but never wrote, there was to be a chapter entitled ‘Examen de la République de Platon’ (Vaughan, The Political Writings of Rowseau, I. 339 E). He was influenced by Plato not only in his political, but also in his aesthetic and educational writings. His Imitation théatrale is said by Vaughan to be drawn from the third (this should be the second) book of the Laws and the third and tenth books of the Republic. In his Émile (Vaughan, op. cit., XI. 146) he writes: ‘Voulez-vous prendre une idée de l’éducation publique, lisez la République de Platon … c’est le plus beau traité d’éducation qu’on ait jamais fait’.
2 Partially – but he never quite escaped. It is one of the fascinations of the Contrat Social that it shows Rousseau struggling through an individualistic terminology, and with occasional lapses into real individualism, to a theory of collective social control.
3 The old tradition that Rousseau was an individualist, who said that ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, and preached a return to the ‘State of Nature’, seems to depend on a reading of the Contrat Social which goes no further than the first sentence of the first chapter. Rousseau was an epigrammatist; and he has paid a heavy penalty for beginning his work with an epigram. If he had immediately added a second epigram, and if he had continued, ‘But it is just and proper that he should be in chains, if only the chains are just and proper; and government is self-justified, if only it is self-government’, he would have saved unwary readers from a pitfall, and himself from the penalty of misconstruction.
1 The parallel between this passage and the tenth book of the Laws has already been noticed (supra, p. 427).
1 See W. Wallace, Lectures and Essays, on the relation of Hegel to Socialism, p. 441. In modern Germany it is Plato’s theory of communism which seems to attract most attention; and more than one scholar (e.g. Pöhlmann and in a less degree Natorp) has claimed Plato for the Socialist camp.
1 Comte would have had Sociology investigate the recorded facts of history, and bring them within the sphere of regular scientific law by referring each to the series of its antecedents and eliciting each from the conditions inherent in its own particular stage of social existence. The problem of Sociology thus became, as Mill put it, ‘to find the laws according to which any State of society produces the State which succeeds it and takes its place’.
2 I may refer to the volume in the Home University Library on Political Thought from Spencer to Today for some account of Platonic influence and parallels in recent English political thought, not only among professed philosophers, but also among men of letters such as Ruskin and Carlyle.