By Anders Sorensen
In Plato on Democracy and Political technē Sørensen argues that the query of democracy’s ‘epistemic capability’ was once person who Plato took extra heavily than is generally assumed. whereas he famously rejected democracy at the foundation of its inherent lack of ability to house political services (technē), he didn't imagine that this failure on democracy’s half was once unavoidably inevitable yet an idea that required additional exam. Sørensen indicates that during a few his most crucial dialogues (Republic, Gorgias, Statesman, Protagoras, Theaetetus), Plato used to be able to take in the query of democracy’s epistemic capability and to go into into strikingly technical and complicated discussions of what either rule by way of technē and rule via the folk must seem like to ensure that the 2 issues to be suitable.
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Extra resources for Plato on Democracy and Political technē
Example text
Rather, as we can see from his language in this passage, what he had in mind was a situation where someone with expert knowledge of ruling makes a mistake in the exercise of his technē because his expert knowledge fails him. Real existing rulers are fallible, to be sure, but they are fallible experts. Once we appreciate that Thrasymachus entertains this view of established political regimes his reasoning in the discussion with Socrates begins to become much less puzzling. His introduction of the notion of rulers in the strict sense is not simply a gratuitous ‘verbal move’ designed to get him off the hook by changing the topic.
Among these regimes, as we saw, he explicitly includes democracies (338d5–6). In fact, when he explains how the rulers of cities lay down laws in their own interest, his very first example is that of “a democracy that makes democratic laws” (δημοκρατία μὲν [sc. τίθεται νόμους] δημοκρατικούς, 338e2). The same is the case in the parallel passage from Laws 4, where the democratic regime that sets up the system in its own interest seems to be treated as the paradigmatic case of the phenomenon under consideration (Laws 714d1–3).
There are, in other words, two separate conditions for being a technē: the activity must be one that naturally aims at the good for human beings, and it must proceed in a certain fashion, namely, in accordance with the nature and cause of its subject matter. Socrates seems to claim that rhetoric’s status as a pleasure-oriented activity is somehow relevant for understanding its failure on both counts. But how should we conceive of the connection between (1) aiming at pleasure and (2) the inability to proceed in a scientific manner?
