>
> What about Plato? It is telling that in _The Republic_, Plato has Socrates
> first vanguish Thrasymachus--a young Sophist who argues that justice is
> whatever the powerful decide it is and that the powerful decide whatever is
> in their best interest to be just--by stating that the powerful hardly know
> what is in their best interest (here a cunning substitution of an epistemic
> question for that of a political one.). And then only after the rhetorical
> defeat of Thrasymachus does Plato/Socrates truly begin an apology for class
> society. The rule by the 'best' (= aristos) cannot be made to sound
> plausible as long as rulers are portrayed as acting out of class-interest.
> By dispelling the specters of class-interest through an epistemic fallacy,
> Plato can now argue for abstract principles of virtue--unchanging products
> of reason beyond the visible world--that each citizen must embody in public
> political life, and only equally abstract ideas of individuals separated
> from social relations and selfish passions will in the end serve as
> plausible bearers of such first principles (thouogh in Plato's Republic,
> citizens are not quite separated from social relations, since they must at
> least fit into one of the three slots: guardians, auxiliaries, and
> producers).
>
> Yoshie
But Plato might answer that the meritocrats are the best; meaning that they are drawn from all classes of society. Because of their education and learning, they are the only ones capable of observing, not the shadows on the cave wall, but reality as it actually is and thus are the only ones able to know what the good is. Elements of Plato's model in the Republic can be found in most societies that have existed from the USSR to the USA. The key assumption behind Plato's theory and much of liberal and conservative doctrine is that the 'ordinary folk' are too stupid to manage their own affairs. The masses need smart benign meritocrats( is meritocrat an actual word?) to manage things. Bakunin puts it most eloquently; From the fiery pen of Bakunin: " the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones."
Bakunin was here talking about Marx's faction in the 1st international. I think socialist intellectuals should always keep these words in mind.
RSP