Sometime after the year 400 B.C., as Plato finished the last of his great dialogues, he had no idea that some twenty-three centuries later a western liberal democrat named Robert Dahl would challenge his ideas. It may have struck him as ironic that scholars would declare his philosophy the basis on which modern democratic principles were formed, but if Plato were alive to listen to these arguments, he might have heard an echo of his own voice. This essay contends that while Robert Dahl’s worldview is fundamental to the existence of western democracy, Plato’s principles of guardianship are not without merit. Dahl may have been more correct in valuing individual liberty, but as Plato understood, unchecked liberty is dangerous, anarchial, and should be closely guarded.
In his book Democracy and its Critics Political Science professor Robert Dahl confronts several common challenges to democratic principles. It is, in many respects, a defense of democracy and a qualified counterargument to Plato’s views. But it’s not all disagreement. In fact, to declare a winner in this debate would be somewhat foolish. The ideas of liberty and guardianship are not mutually exclusive. They are in many ways interdependent. The Supreme Court, for example, is precisely a manifestation of Plato’s guardian state. Dahl (1989) brushes over this fact but consider that America’s founders devoted one third of governing power to a judiciary that is neither elected nor can be removed. Furthermore, the essence of a representative democracy distances the people from the political process. Representatives, while elected, do not run every decision by the voting public. They are entrusted, to a degree, to make decisions on behalf of the people who elected them. In short, Plato didn’t have it all wrong, and to separate guardianship from democracy is to remove the rule of law and fundamentally alter western political process.
The shared ground between Plato and Dahl goes further than the arrangement of American democracy. One could argue that their philosophies arise from a common understanding of morality and diverge when each decides what to do about it. Regardless, this common origin directly influenced the ideas of both men, the ideas of western democracy, and indeed the structure of our democratic systems. It is, as Dahl writes, the very justification of democracy to, “live under laws of one’s own choosing, and thus to participate in choosing those laws [that] facilitate the personal development of citizens as moral and social beings” (Dahl, 1989 p. 91). He continues more poignantly,
I believe the reasons for respecting moral autonomy sift down to one’s belief that it is a quality without which human beings cease to be fully human and in the total absence of which they would not be human at all (p. 91).
Dahl contends that it is democracy itself that teaches self-reliance, self-worth, and independence (p. 92). At first pass, these positions might seem at odds with Plato’s view of guardianship, but in fact they’re highly complementary. Like Dahl, Plato recognized that moral autonomy exists. He questions whether life would be worth living if the aspects of our intellect that benefit from justice are corrupted, going so far as to declare our sense of justice to be “[f]ar more honored [than the body]” (Crawford, 2007 p. 27). Furthermore, the very essence of Crito is our inner debate over whether to obey the law. It is the ambiguity of this debate, and the potential for unchecked liberty, that necessitates a legal guardrail.
Admittedly, it’s difficult as citizens of western democracy to be wholly impartial when evaluating the virtues of the democratic system. Certainly self-reliance, liberty, and the freedom to pursue self-interests are fundamental to the American way of life, and it’s difficult to argue that Dahl didn’t have it right in his description of western liberalism. However, here again, he and Plato converge at the limits of liberty and self-direction. To better understand this convergence, consider that many of the core ideals that Dahl identifies as uniquely democratic: self-reliance, self-determination, and independence, are all fundamental aspects of anarchial autonomy. The anarchist as Dahl points out, is compelled by moral obligation to evaluate the laws he follows and obey those he chooses but never the ones he rejects. Personal responsibility to the anarchist, he writes, cannot be forfeited (Dahl, 1989 p. 43).
The common ground between anarchy and democracy may have been what worried Plato. After all, the lines between direct democracy, mob rule, and anarchy are quite blurred. It’s not hard to imagine the chaos that would ensue if every citizen were free to exercise their moral autonomy to whatever degree they saw fit. Certainly, the perpetrators of the worst atrocities in human history all felt morally justified. So, while the importance Dahl places on liberty and self-determination is correct and fundamental to democracy, its furthest extremes lie in chaos. Plato surely understood this as the basis for the law but also the reason to protect the law from despotic forces.
Such circumstances may seem theoretical, but they’ve played out in recent American history. In 1957, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs The Board of Education, which desegregated public schools, mobs of southern whites backed by the Arkansas national guard took to the streets in protest. In response, President Eisenhower sent in the Army and later addressed the nation:
The very basis of our individual rights and freedoms rests upon the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and insure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts, even, when necessary with all the means at the President’s command…The interest of the nation in the proper fulfillment of the law’s requirements cannot yield to opposition and demonstrations by some few persons. Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts (Eisenhower, 1957).
By his own admission, Dahl declares moral judgements to be necessarily ambiguous. To assert that such truths exist in the same sense as mathematical proofs or the laws of physics, he writes, is patently false (Dahl, 1989 pp. 66-67). This admission which Dahl meant as a blow to guardianship is actually an endorsement of Plato’s reliance on the law. Surely southern whites felt morally justified in their actions and, in an anarchial sense, evaluated which laws were worth disregarding before mobilizing. There were certainly many more Americans who exercised the same moral autonomy and arrived at a different conclusion. However, it is specifically because moral judgements are subjective that a set of common laws are required. As this example shows, the sterile rulings of the Supreme Court necessarily need to be insulated from the fervor and passion of mob rule. In a very real sense, some form of legal guardianship is necessary to protect civil society from the very people who inhabit it.
For their similarities, Plato and Dahl diverge radically in their conclusions on the nature of man and the role of government. And clearly the debate between Plato and Dahl cannot be easily settled. However, western democracies like the United States could not exist without the precepts of liberty and individualism. In these aspects, Dahl had it right and, given the undeniable success of democracy in producing the world’s greatest empire, it’s hard to argue that a superior system exists. That said, Plato understood that unchecked liberty leads to chaos and destruction, and therefore, an impartial legal system, a guardian, was critical to protect against mob rule.
References
Crawford, T. (Ed). (2007). Six great dialogues. Dover Publications, Inc.
Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its critics. Yale University Press.
Eisenhower, D. D. (1957). Radio and television address on the situation in Little Rock. Dwight D.
Eisenhower presidential library. https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/media/3883