Wisdom And Loyalty In Plato's The Republic

Certainly, it is true that Plato and Aristotle agree on wisdom being the primary requirement for a truly just and good polis. However, they possess different approaches to governing the city, which are based on Plato’s vision of the (1) the individual governance of the king and (2) Aristotle’s the collective governance of the aristocracy. Plato argued in favor of the philosopher king because of the inherent qualities of thought found in the philosopher’s mind. In this case, men of great wisdom and virtue were considered to be rare, which made the philosopher the only proper candidate to rule over others. In The Republic, Plato argues that men that pursue knowledge and wisdom are typically philosophers. Therefore, a great leader must always

For Plato, the aristocracy and the citizenry are not capable of ruling because they are uneducated and unknowledgeable in terms of wisdom-based governance. In this case, Plato’s depiction of the philosopher as a seeker of wisdom is a specialized occupation, which the ordinary citizen can only partially understand in terms of seeking wisdom. This type of governance applies to the view that a philosopher is the only qualified candidate for kingship because of this all-encompassing view of

Generally, Aristotle feels that a “democracy’ can be a threat to the city-state due to the problem of “mob rule” in governance. For instance, an uneducated/ignorant mob of citizens can take over a city and hold elections, but the decisions that they make will most likely be uninformed and impartial, and even dangerous for the well-being of the city as a whole. In this manner, Aristotle would agree with Plato that the citizenry may not be the most qualified because they are not capable of seeing the greater wisdom of the city-state per their own individual roles: “That within the multitude there have to be some who are rich, some who are poor, and some who are in the middle” (Aristotle 1289b). In this type of economic description of the citizenry of the city-state, the “rich” tend to have more than the rest, which defines a predetermined understanding of how money and power are presented in Aristotle’s view of the aristocracy as the best choice for governing the polis. In this way, the “vulgar” farmers and laborers do not have access to money and education,. So the best choice to rule would be a collective of “wise” members of the aristocracy to manage the ignorant masses. Certainly, Aristotle agrees with Plato on some form of Elite ruler or group of rulers to manage the citizens, which makes the concept