Plato and Fascism

A lot of people have talked about how Plato can be considered a Proto-Fascist, and I somewhat agree but there is nuance to this that I feel needs to be acknowledged.

Plato’s discussion of the “Five Regimes” in Republic Books VIII-IX uses most Greek Political terms with different meanings then Aristotle used them, (with Aristotle’s meanings usually being the default meanings used by modern scholars and Wikipedia).  Plato’s Five Regimes were Aristocracy which was how things should be in his view, Timocracy which was a corruption but still preferable to any state Athens was in during Classical Antiquity, Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny.

While you can define Plato’s Aristocracy as Fascist based on which traits of the Philosophy of Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile one prioritizes in deciding what the defining traits of Fascism are, in practice Mussolini’s regime was more Timocracy and Nazism was definitely more Timocracy.  But again I’m not referring to Aristotle’s definition of Timocracy (land ownership as basis of citizenship) which the Wikipedia page for Timocracy cites as the default.  I’m gonna quote a sentence from Wikipedia’s page for Plato’s Republic. “In a timocracy, governors will apply great effort in gymnastics and the arts of war, as well as the virtue that pertains to them, that of courage.” This definition for Timocracy is also essentially a part of what I meant by Heroarchy in a recent post I made on my main blog.

While on this subject I’d like to point out that some YouTube criticism of the Philosopher King concept is kind of missing the point.  Plato was not arguing that the kinds of people doing Philosophy as their profession in then contemporary Athens are inherently the kinds of people best fit to rule. He’s going back to the core Etymology of Philosopher to say that an ideal ruler should be bred, raised and trained their whole life from birth to be a Wise King. Think about the A Song of Fire and Ice Books and why Varys believes Young Griff will be an ideal King, that’s what Plato means by a Philosopher King.  I’m not pointing this out to defend the idea, I think it is misguided especially when combined with the other aspects of how Plato’s Aristocracy is supposed to work, but I do feel it’s important to know what he meant.

Another thing people are often confused by is how Plato speaks about the Five Regimes as a sequence as if that’s what history especially in Athens has demonstrated when it doesn’t fit our understanding of the history of Athenian Democracy. But the key is that Plato and most Athenians in his time believed certain things about the history of Athens modern Historians know are probably mostly not entirely true.  

Part of the whole premise of Timaeus-Critias is that it’s claiming Athens was this Ideal Aristocracy in the very distant past, that’s the Athens that defeated Atlantis and is probably meant to correlate to the Golden-Silver ages of Greek Mythology.  And then I would guess that the Timocracy period of Athens was supposed to be the Athens of the Heroic Age, the Athens of Theseus, then the Oligarchy was the Athens of Draco, and then the tension between between Democracy and Tyranny was how Plato saw the Classical history of Athens he was living in.

But in the long term Platonism isn’t just defined by Plato himself.  One theory I’ve entertained on this blog already is that The Laws was maybe not an authentic writing of Plato but a Pythagorean Pseudepigrapha.  The Laws does seem to have a similar yet different underlying Political ideology to it from The Republic, so can the hypothetical State described in The Laws be considered more of a Timocracy?  The Gymnasium having an important status in the center of The City alongside The Temple of Zeus is one clue that it could be thought of that way.

When people seek to trace the roots of Fascism back to Ancient Greece Plato isn’t the only source, they also look to Sparta, but more specifically Sparta as it was imagined by Athenian Laconophiles.  Plato and Aristotle are often placed among those but they both did have criticisms of Sparta, even in The Laws where the unnamed Athenian blames Sparta for all the Gay stuff he hates.  But I do think what both Plato and Aristotle’s conception of Timocracy have in common is that they were in part thinking of Sparta.  The principal true unqualified Athenian Laconophile was Xenophon.  Xenophon also wrote the Anabasis which very much fits into the kind of Militaristic Hero Myths I talked about in the Heroarchy post, and perhaps his Cyropaedia laid the seed for the Great Man Theory of History since it would be the first Greek History text to be written as a Biography.

Middle Platonism is in my view the actually most influential period of Platonism.  It was during this period that the Greek Church Fathers started allowing Platonist ideas to influence them and lead them away from the generally more Stoic perspective of The New Testament.   And then there’s Plutarch, again since I see a symbiotic relationship between the Great Many Theory and Fascism it’s notable that Plutarch was perhaps unintentionally a key influence on that theory, his most well known work is The Parallel Lives, and many don’t know this but before him writing history in the form of Biographies was not the standard.  In particular his Biography of Alexander can at points seem like Thomas Carlyle’s Heroarchy thesis almost fully formed.  I don’t know if any smoking gun proof Carlyle was a fan of Plutarch exists, but I would be surprised if he was not.  Plutarch also had a lot of interest in Sparta.

I feel like Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Christianity is the closest thing we’ve had to a real life attempt to implement Plato’s Aristocracy, with The Emperor as the Philosopher King and The Monastic Church itself as the Guardians.  But perhaps a more Secular Version of it would be the “Socialism” of H.G. Wells in his non Fiction writings.

Plato’s definition of Oligarchy applies pretty well to Conservative Capitalism while his definition of Democracy applies to both Liberal Capitalism in its various forms and many forms of Socialism.  While Tyranny is probably how Plato would view Marxist-Leninist Regimes.