I always defended Plato against Aristotle. It’s very fashionable to say bad Plato, protototalitarian, versus more open, democratic Aristotle. Ha. Read Plato’s Republic and be careful just about two things: there is at least something that you don’t find in Plato. First, do you notice he doesn’t need slaves for his republic. Secondly, Plato explicitly says in his Republic that women and men are equal. It is totally contingent now that men have more authority but in his ideal state women are equal to men. One should stop with this story bad Plato, original European metaphysics and so on. If anything we can learn today that Plato’s critique of democracy which is a very precise critique, a very Jacobin critique, which says that even, if I simplify it, if democracy is not empirically corrupted, there is corruption, in the very basic idea of democracy, which means there is no common good, that state politics should be determined by pragmatic negotiations between your interest, my interest, the highest social pact could be about the compromise between private interests as it were. Insofar as we understand democracy in this way one should criticize democracy, there is a kind of a priori corruption in democracy as such, independent of empirical democracy.

http://ift.tt/2bXN78s