Comparing Plato's Republic And The Leviathan

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Plato’s Republic and Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan convey the transfer from the ancient world to the modern word. The shift to modernity is marked by epistemology, progression, and the importance of the individual in a society. The arch of modernity begins with Hobbes, who introduces reductionism, mechanistic thinking, and truth from the senses, and defends authoritarian government, which peaks and goes into a gradual decline. This decline is expressed in Thomas Friedman's book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. The issues with modern government are explained in Friedman’s chapters that cover the inefficiency in American democracy. This regression was theorized in Plato's Republic. According to Plato, democracy is an ineffective form of government that …show more content…

His book proposes a different form of government that he thinks would cause the least amount of change, an imperfection in society. The Republic starts out as a conversation among several men attempting to define justice. Socrates, Plato's teacher, is the main character in the story and the one who brings up the idea of the perfect city referred to as the republic. In Books II through IV of The Republic, Plato discusses the specific roles each member of the society must abide by. These jobs are based off of the natural aptitude each person possesses. A person's ability is categorized by three different traits that mirror the tripartite of the soul, another one of his theories. Each person’s soul contains knowledge, bravery, and appetite, but one more than the other two, which dictates their place in the society (Plato 1065). The ones with knowledge are referred to as gold and are the philosophers who rule the city, the auxiliary are the brave soldiers who are referred to as silver, and lastly are the bronze, who are the wage earners who have a higher ratio of appetite than bravery or knowledge (Plato 1050). Straying outside of one's classification is an unjust act that could be harmful to the city. Those who cannot acquire knowledge, like the bronze or the silver, cannot be leaders. Truth is reserved for the philosophers, which is accomplished by censoring the gold from external pleasures, a method used to keep the masses happy (Plato

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