Plato Made Me An Anarchist: The Republic Is A Right-Wing Anarchist Writing
by Kierkegarchist
Most libertarians who read The Republic end up thinking Plato is some kind of proto-Communist. After all, this is the dialogue in which Socrates, Plato’s mouthpiece character, advocates a city where children are property of the community and the entire society revolves around systematic brainwashing. At first glance, the dialogue sounds really sinister. So you might be surprised to hear that The Republic was one of the books that persuaded me to drop minarchism in favor of full-blown right-wing anarchism*.* To put it boldly, I think that (understood properly) The Republic is not only the most overlooked right-wing anarchist text in existence, but it’s also one of the most comprehensive takedowns of statism put to page.
What most casual readers misunderstand about Plato’s philosophy is his reliance on indirect communication. Unlike Rothbard or Hoppe, who just come out and tell you what they mean, Plato’s arguments rely heavily on setting up seemingly strong arguments, only to pull the rug out from under them at the last second. In philosophy, we call the resulting state “aporia”—which loosely means a paradox. When reading Plato, the aporia is often the key to understanding what he is actually arguing. This is because the existence of a paradox makes the argument’s conclusion ambiguous—i.e. it opens up the possibility of at least two plausible interpretations. For most libertarians, the first interpretation of The Republic is obviously that Plato is a proto-communist, but is there a second interpretation? That all depends on where the paradoxes pop up. As it turns out, The Republic is overflowing with paradoxes in some crucial locations.
For the sake of brevity, there are two overlapping paradoxes I want to cover: the philosopher-kings and the Noble Lie. According to Plato, the best kind of state is aristocracy—ruled by the philosopher-kings who seek out knowledge of The Good itself by questioning everything. The paradoxes start to arise when you look at what Plato also says is required of the city. First, Socrates says that a just city must be structured so that people only do one job—whatever job they are most suited for (line 433a). People can’t be allowed to work jobs they’re less suited for because that would be a corruption of their nature within the city.
Except this rule doesn’t apply to the philosopher-kings, who necessarily have two jobs: being philosophers, seeking The Good, and being kings, running the State. Later on in the dialogue, when discussing why philosophers, who are only concerned with The Good, would want to quit their day jobs to rule the city, Socrates says that they will have to be forced to rule (line 499b). And this clearly isn’t some unintentional slip of the tongue. The dialogue itself starts with Socrates being literally dragged into the conversation by a slave boy. That Socrates very deliberately draws our attention to the detail that philosopher-kings are not just an unprincipled exception to the foundations of a just city, but also that the best city comes into existence by initiating violence against the best members of its society should give you a clue that something is up.
But Plato doesn’t stop there. As we noted earlier, one of the reasons libertarians often hate Plato is his idea of the “Noble Lie”—his suggestion that the best possible city requires widespread and systemic indoctrination. Specifically, the best state requires everyone to be taught that the reason you have whatever lot in life you do is because of the precious metals the gods dug out of your homeland and used to fashion your soul. Philosopher souls are made of gold, warriors have souls made from silver, and craftsmen from bronze. The effect of this lie is twofold. First, it unifies the citizens as brothers and sisters born from the same plot of earth, and second, it provides the individual with a political telos. This lie is what legitimizes the three-tiered hierarchical order that Plato says is necessary for the just society. According to Plato, only something that reflects The Good—for instance, an individual soul—can be just; therefore, for a city to be able to be just, it has to be like a just soul. Moreover, Plato argues that there are three parts of the soul (reason, spirit, and desire), so there must be three classes to the just city (rulers, warriors, and producers) that correspond to the three parts of the soul.
The first paradox is a bit obvious: if what it means to be a philosopher is to pursue Truth, then how do you get them to unquestioningly go along with the Noble Lie? While this in itself is a pretty serious criticism, we can go even further. What exactly is the lie and why is it noble? At its core, the lie is that human beings have a political telos—to be craftsmen or warriors or rulers—and that this telos is known by the state. We should immediately be able to tell why this is a big deal. Not just Plato’s hypothetical perfect state, but any state in order to justify its own existence would need to prove that it is fulfilling some part of human nature, or that it’s providing some kind of existential meaning; but any proof they offer will be a lie. A noble lie because it tries to offer people meaningful lives, but nevertheless a lie—which renders any alleged meaning a fake.
In the context of Plato’s other writing, The Apology, we can see why the Athenian jury considers Socrates to be such a threat. The fact that Socrates is an aporetic figure—someone who claims to “know nothing” –is a threat to them because to be a part of the political community requires knowing something. i.e. the foundational lie. Because Socrates questions everything and “knows nothing,” he isn’t committed to the creation myths that legitimize both the city and the bonds of citizenship with his fellow men. In short, if you’re someone who seeks truth and is honest about your lack of knowledge, then you are automatically a threat to the state.
The upshot of Plato’s hidden argument in The Republic is that even the best possible state—one ruled by people who only care about The Good itself—is built on a series of catastrophic structural contradictions. I’ve only pointed out here the ones that I consider to be the most easily recognizable, but I promise you there are several others. While most libertarians I’ve come across see these contradictions as evidence of Plato unintentionally tripping himself up, the fact that Plato in most cases very subtly tries to draw our attention to these contradictions seems to be evidence that these contradictions aren’t by accident. But if they aren’t accidental then what is their point? I think the best interpretation is that they’re guideposts to draw us somewhere deeper. Just like in Platonic metaphysics, we have to get beyond mere appearances. In The Republic, beyond the appearances of collectivist utopianism, we see that a just state is a contradiction in terms.