Plato (427-347 BC) was an Athenian philosopher of ancient Greece. He was a follower of Socrates (470-399 BC) and as such wrote a series of dialogues in which Socrates was the main protagonist. One of the most famous dialogues is The Republic, written in the context of a dynamic and often challenging political period and in which Plato presents his ideas of a perfect society called the perfect city, an ideal political society governed by political experts. . As the protagonist of the dialogue, Socrates seeks to demonstrate that justice is necessary for happiness and assumes that the best way to advance our understanding of justice is to study it on a large scale, such as a city-state. Some have, however, compared the way in which Plato's perfect city is structured and governed to totalitarianism – a form of government that theoretically does not allow individual freedom and aims to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state. I will cover the structure and basic characteristics of Plato's perfect city, the question of how Plato understands the good of the perfect city and how this relates to the good of individual citizens, I will discuss both the idea of ​​the noble lie and the statue analogy before moving on to analyze the different fundamental types of totalitarianism, so as to discuss why I believe the perfect society outlined by Plato in the Republic is, in fact, totalitarian in its nature and why it specifically fits the definition of theocratic totalitarianism. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Plato's perfect city has three different classes of citizens. The first and highest class is that of philosopher-rulers (who can be philosopher-kings or philosopher-queens). Philosopher rulers have a number of key responsibilities, such as legislation and law enforcement, overseeing the city's education and culture, approving marriages, and deciding public policies. The rule of these philosophers is bound by the original legal framework proposed by Socrates in the Republic. Philosopher kings and philosopher queens rule in turns, devote their time to philosophy, and do not own private property or have families. The next class is the auxiliaries. Auxiliaries are young people who are believed to have the natural ability to eventually become future philosopher-kings or philosopher-queens or are people considered more intellectual than members of the working class but lacking the talent necessary to be philosophers. . Those deemed to have the potential to become the next generation of philosopher-rulers go through rigorous tests and challenges to ensure they are up to the role, as Socrates points out, saying: “From childhood, therefore, we must assign them tasks that above all to deceive and make people forget these beliefs. We must observe them carefully and choose the one who remembers and who is difficult to deceive, and reject the rest." (Book of the Republic 3 413c7-d1) The auxiliaries follow the orders of the philosopher rulers and their main concern is the internal security of the city perfect and war. The third and lowest class in Plato's perfect city is the working class. It is made up of people such as farmers, doctors and manual workers and are responsible for providing food and other material goods for the perfect city worker follows the laws and orders of the rulers-philosophers, however, has no contribution to the administration of political affairs. This structure means that citizens are clearly divided into different factions with little, if any, opportunity to move between them . Thistype of system, severely lacking in social mobility, has proven in the real world to easily lead to political unrest. Indeed, Plato himself believed that the greatest threat to the peace and stability of the perfect city was the potential for these factional tensions to lead to civil war. This is why he believes that the rulers of the perfect society should be philosophers who do not own private property, since the main motivation for a civil war is the desire of those in power for even greater political control and often for acquisition of goods or wealth. If they cannot own private property there is no incentive to accumulate it, and since the rulers of the perfect city are philosophers, they should value intellectual achievement above political power. Since philosophical rulers therefore have no incentive to abuse their political power, Plato believes that citizens will not feel oppressed and will not cause a revolt against them. Even if the risk of civil war is believed to be minimal, the idea that the ruling class can decide who is born into which class is flawed and, in fact, totalitarian. There is nothing wrong with the idea that some citizens may be better suited to manual labor, farming or pottery, in a free society, it should be the choice of those citizens if they wish to accept this as a limitation of their skills or potential . When it is up to the elites in society to evaluate your class based on their beliefs, religious or otherwise, and they cannot be held accountable by those who govern, then this is totalitarian. So how does Plato understand the good of the perfect? city ​​and how does the good of the perfect city relate to the good of individual citizens? Plato claims that his perfect city aims at the happiness of the entire city and not just the happiness of a particular group or class of people, as he says "...our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class , but the greatest happiness of all…” According to philosophers such as Karl Popper, Plato assumes that the perfect city is an entity greater than the individual citizens who live in it. Popper thinks there are passages in the dialogue that show that Plato is committed to the totalitarianism, such as “… the guardians and auxiliaries, and all others alike, must be forced and persuaded to carry out their work in the best possible way. And so the whole State will grow into a noble order, and the individual classes will receive the proportion of happiness that nature assigns to them. (Book Republic 4 421b7-c6). This idea that nature assigns people their potential talent and happiness at birth leads to Plato's statue analogy. The statue analogy emerges in the Republic when Socrates responds to Adeimantus' concerns that the city guards they are describing will have none of the luxuries associated with happiness (and that philosopher-rulers would have). Socrates says, “It's as if we were painting a statue and someone came up and criticized us for not having painted the most beautiful parts with the most beautiful colors: 'You painted the eyes – the most beautiful part – black instead of red!' I think we would make a reasonable defense if we said, "See, curious boy, don't think that we should paint the eyes so pretty that they don't even look like eyes." Let's see if we make the whole beautiful by giving each part its appropriate color..." and goes on to say that giving the working class the freedoms, luxuries and happiness of the philosophers would cause the perfect society to collapse and cease to function: "... our farmer will not be a farmer, our potter a potter, nor will anyone else stick to one of the patterns from which a city is made." (BookRepublic 4 420c7-421a2). So, in simplified terms, the statue analogy is used to explain that when one part of something becomes too beautiful, it interferes with and obscures the beauty of the whole, which is more important. In the case of the perfect city, the individual part would be one of the classes (auxiliaries or workers) and the whole would be society itself. Instead of the problem being one party becoming too “beautiful,” the problem for Plato is the idea of ​​one of the classes in his perfect society becoming too rich or happy to the point of interfering with the upper class. So, if the guards that Adeimantus speaks of were to have the material goods and wealth of philosopher rulers, this would damage the functionality of the entire city because they would probably no longer want to be guards and protect the city. It could be argued that this approach plays into the narrative that Popper paints, where he claims that Plato's city has a “totalitarian character” as “the state interest dominates the life of the citizen from the union of his parents to his grave.” One of the other points of controversy when it comes to how Plato understands the good of the perfect city and how this relates to the good of individual citizens comes from the so-called "Noble Lie". The Noble Lie is mentioned in Book 3 of the Republic, when Socrates speaks to Glaucon: “Now, can we devise a plan to make our rulers, or at least the rest of our citizens, also believe one noble lie?…I will try to convince first the rulers and soldiers, then the other citizens, that everything we did to train and educate them happened as in a dream, and that in the meantime they were really being raised and molded... 'All of you in the city are brothers' , we will tell them, 'but the most precious are those fit to govern, because when the god formed you at birth, he mixed gold in them, silver in the auxiliaries, iron and bronze in the peasants and artisans. Since you are all related, you will normally reproduce faithfully, but the time will come when a golden offspring will give birth to a silver, the silver in turn will give birth to gold, and so on for the rest..." (Book of the Republic 3 414b8-415b3) . Here Plato introduces his version of the "myth of metals" that the "golden" generation rules, the soldiers are silver and then the "bronze" and "iron" people are the workers. The idea behind this lie, propagated by the elite and of a religious nature, is to maintain social harmony within the perfect city. It does this by convincing citizens that, despite belonging to different classes and having different freedoms, the child of a worker can be born as a ruler or auxiliary and similarly the children of rulers or auxiliaries are not necessarily born with the same talents as their parents. and they may be demoted to the working class, so they are all one family. Totalitarianism is defined as a form of government that theoretically allows no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state. However, there are several specific forms of totalitarianism with characteristics that may correspond more closely to the ideas that Plato proposes in his perfect city. One of these specific forms of totalitarianism is communist totalitarianism, which advocates the use of totalitarian dictatorship to achieve socialism. Plato, however, does not advocate implementing socialism in his perfect city as the structure with 3 different classes of citizens, each with totally different standards of living, does not fit the ideas of socialism. Tribal totalitarianism is another form of totalitarianism in which power is monopolized by a party that represents and governs in the interests of a particular tribe. Tribes, however, are not a feature of the perfect city of.