III. The political aspects of the dialogue are closely connected with the dialectical. As in the “Cratylus,” the legislator has “the dialectician standing on his right hand”; so in the “Statesman,” the king or statesman is the dialectician, who, although he may be in a private station, is still a king. Whether he has the power or not, is a mere accident; or rather he has the power, for what ought to be is (“Was ist vernunftig, das ist wirklich”); and he ought to be and is the true governor of mankind. There is a reflection in this idealism of the Socratic “Virtue is knowledge”; and, without idealism, we may remark that knowledge is a great part of power. Plato does not trouble himself to construct a machinery by which “philosophers shall be made kings,” as in the Republic: he merely holds up the ideal, and affirms that in some sense science is really supreme over human life.
He is struck by the observation “quam parva sapientia regitur mundus,” and is touched with a feeling of the ills which afflict states. The condition of Megara before and during the Peloponnesian War, of Athens under the Thirty and afterwards, of Syracuse and the other Sicilian cities in their alternations of democratic excess and tyranny, might naturally suggest such reflections. Some states he sees already shipwrecked, others foundering for want of a pilot; and he wonders not at their destruction, but at their endurance. For they ought to have perished long ago, if they had depended on the wisdom of their rulers. The mingled pathos and satire of this remark is characteristic of Plato’s later style.
The king is the personification of political science. And yet he is something more than this—the perfectly good and wise tyrant of the Laws (IV 710), whose will is better than any law. He is the special providence who is always interfering with and regulating all things. Such a conception has sometimes been entertained by modern theologians, and by Plato himself, of the Supreme Being. But whether applied to Divine or to human governors the conception is faulty for two reasons, neither of which are noticed by Plato:—first, because all good government supposes a degree of cooperation in the ruler and his subjects—an “education in politics” as well as in moral virtue; secondly, because government, whether Divine or human, implies that the subject has a previous knowledge of the rules under which he is living. There is a fallacy, too, in comparing unchangeable laws with a personal governor. For the law need not necessarily be an “ignorant and brutal tyrant,” but gentle and humane, capable of being altered in the spirit of the legislator, and of being administered so as to meet the cases of individuals. Not only in fact, but in idea, both elements must remain—the fixed law and the living will; the written word and the spirit; the principles of obligation and of freedom; and their applications whether made by law or equity in particular cases.
There are two sides from which positive laws may be attacked:—either from the side of nature, which rises up and rebels against them in the spirit of Callicles in the “Gorgias”; or from the side of idealism, which attempts to soar above them—and this is the spirit of Plato in the “Statesman.” But he soon falls, like Icarus, and is content to walk instead of flying; that is, to accommodate himself to the actual state of human things. Mankind have long been in despair of finding the true ruler; and therefore are ready to acquiesce in any of the five or six received forms of government as better than none. And the best thing which they can do (though only the second best in reality), is to reduce the ideal state to the conditions of actual life. Thus in the “Statesman,” as in the Laws, we have three forms of government, which we may venture to term, (1) the ideal, (2) the practical, (3) the sophistical—what ought to be, what might be, what is. And thus Plato seems to stumble, almost by accident, on the notion of a constitutional monarchy, or of a monarchy ruling by laws.
The divine foundations of a State are to be laid deep in education (Republic IV 423), and at the same time some little violence may be used in exterminating natures which are incapable of education (compare Laws, X). Plato is strongly of opinion that the legislator, like the physician, may do men good against their will (compare “Gorgias,” 522 following). The human bonds of states are formed by the intermarriage of dispositions adapted to supply the defects of each other. As in the Republic, Plato has observed that there are opposite natures in the world, the strong and the gentle, the courageous and the temperate, which, borrowing an expression derived from the image of weaving, he calls the warp and the woof of human society. To interlace these is the crowning achievement of political science. In the “Protagoras,” Socrates was maintaining that there was only one virtue, and not many: now Plato is inclined to think that there are not only parallel, but opposite virtues, and seems to see a similar opposition pervading all art and nature. But he is satisfied with laying down the
