24 Handbook of Organization Theory and Management
Where it was the custom to conduct public sacrifice on the city’s common hearth, the duty was assigned to an archon or, where a king remained, to the king as his chief remaining function under a mixed constitution.
As Plato was to lament, the system had serious flaws.42 One was that the magistrate’s activities were subject to microscopic review at all times.
It began with inquiry about his character and reputation at the time of his selection. At the examination, the clokimasia, he had to produce witnesses to attest to his character as well as present documents proving his adequate military service, payment of taxes, family conduct, and fulfillment of religious obligations. Any citizen could show cause before the court why the magistrate-elect should not be confirmed in his office.
Upon relinquishing office, the magistrate’s conduct while in office and his accounts were subject to careful scrutiny by a special board whose report had to go to the courts either for specific charges to be laid or for discharge to be approved. Even if the magistrate were given a clean bill by the board, it was still possible for a citizen to bring charges in the assembly and show why the discharge should not be granted. Given this continuous system of public inquest, it is hardly surprising that Plato characterized Greek public administration as unenterprizing.43
Plato had other criticisms such as the payment of magistrates, who he thought should serve gratis as an act of civic obligation, and especially the payment of citizen-judges in the heliaea. He reserved his most stinging commentary on Athenian democracy for the expert speechwriters and orators — sophists he called them — who were able to sway untutored judges and make justice a sometime thing. Plato was scandalized by the fact that slaves could be forced to give evidence before Athenian courts under torture. Such assessments drove him to write his two masterworks on political science, the Republic and the Laws.
Plato’s Great Works on Organization Theory and
Plato and the Invention of Political Science 25
citizenship was to be divided into classes resting securely on the inherent abilities of the individual, and children were to be educated, perhaps indoctrinated is a better word, so as to develop effectively within the sphere to which they had been called. In the Laws, the realities of life overtook Plato, and his ideal state was then closer to earth. His philoso- pher-kings, originally conceived in the plural, were changed into a phi- losopher-king in the singular. Plato was deeply affected by the failure of his personal missions to Syracuse to persuade the tyrant Dionysius to adopt the principles of the Republic. His new scheme attempted to combine the virtues of monarchy and democracy in a mixed polity.44
The Republic
The Republic comes down to us with a double title: “The State” or, in Latin, republica, whence the name by which it is generally known, and
“Or Concerning Justice.” While it is obviously a treatise on political science and jurisprudence, it is considerably more than that. It is an attempt at a complete philosophy of man. It is concerned with man in action, and it is therefore occupied with the problems of moral and political life. But man as a whole cannot be understood apart from his thinking, says Plato, so the Republic is also a philosophy of man in thought and of the laws of his thinking. The Republic forms a single and organic whole.45 The question, which Plato set himself to answer, was simply this: what is a good man, and how is a good man made? Such a question might belong only to moral philosophy, but to the Greek, a good man must be the citizen of a state. Upon the first question, therefore, a second naturally followed: what is a good state, and how is a good state made? Moral philosophy thus ascended into political science. The quest does not end there, however. To a follower of Socrates, it was plain that a good man must be possessed of knowledge. A third question therefore arose: what is the ultimate knowledge of which a good man must be possessed in order to be good? That is for metaphysics to answer. When metaphysics has given its answer, yet a fourth question emerges: by what methods will the good state lead its citizens toward the ultimate knowledge, which is the condition of virtue? To answer this question, a theory of education is necessary. Plato thought that if his scheme of education were to work satisfactorily, a reconstruction of social life must also be attempted, and a new economics must reinforce the pedagogy.46
The Republic is written in the imperative mood, not to analyze but to warn and counsel. It is in many respects a polemic directed against current teachers and the practices of contemporary politics. The teachers against whom it is directed are the younger generation of sophists, of the type Plato had already portrayed in the Gorgias. They and not Socrates, in
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Plato’s view, were the true corrupters of the youth of Athens by the lectures they gave and the training in politics they professed to give. They had preached a new ethics, or “justice,” of self-satisfaction. They had revolutionized politics by making the authority of the state a means to the self-satisfaction of its rulers.
Plato made a strong case against democracy in the Republic. Interest- ingly enough, the origins of Plato’s disenchantment with democracy went back to the funeral orations of Pericles, who died the same year Plato was born in 429. By the time of Athens’ prolonged war against Sparta in the middle of the fifth century (the Peloponnesian War), democratic institutions had been nearly perfected. An assembly of the people delib- erated, with all Athenians who were citizens participating. The selected leader who ruled over and governed the assembly was first among equals.
His position was not a permanent leasehold but a temporary obligation and honor. All citizens could speak freely in the assembly as part of the law-making process.47
Pericles used the occasion of the burial of Athenian war dead to offer paeans to Athenian democracy. Later democrats embraced his efforts as the most splendid examples of epideictic oratory on record.48 In ancient democracy, words reigned supreme, particularly those spoken before one’s fellow citizens. Classics scholar Nicole Loraux goes so far as to say that Athenian democracy was “invented” through rhetoric, particularly the funeral oration, a practice peculiar to Athens. “In and through the funeral oration,” she writes, “democracy becomes a name to describe a model city” (Loraux 1986, 202).
Pericles used the solemn ritual of burying the war dead in the struggle against Sparta to do more than honor those who “shall not have died in vain,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He used his orations to define and refine Athenian democracy and to explain why sacrifice in her name was a noble and worthy thing. Pericles emphasized the uniqueness of Athens, not just its constitution and laws, but also the qualities of mind and the habits of thought that defined what it meant to be an Athenian. Unlike the Spartans, the Athenians were not forced by painful discipline to conform. Rather, they were self-conscious citizens and patriots who chose the city over their own lives. One can imagine mothers and fathers gathered to bury their beloved sons hearing Pericles proclaim (Thucydides 1980, 143):
Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not
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membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses.
These democratic sentiments ran counter to the traditional Gr eek outlook, which from Homer onward had divided men into high and low, good and bad, worthy and unworthy. Tradition held that it is through the acceptance of such distinctions, the recognition that all men are not equal, that peace and harmony in the community are to be maintained. The conventions had weakened during the last decades of the fifth century, and Plato wanted to restore them. To this extent, his political thinking can be called reactionary, but in a more profound sense it was revolu- tionary. Although of high birth and of a wealthy family himself, Plato rejected birth or property as grounds for discrimination. He followed Socrates in seeking a new basis for political power in the inner character and mentality of men themselves. Socrates had held that true wisdom, the right use of reason, was the hallmark of quality among human beings, not possessions or noble blood or the pretended knowledge of those usually regarded as wise. Plato carried this view further by molding it into a coherent picture of human society based not on tradition or convention, but on nature and reality as a whole.
Several strands of thought were interwoven in the formation of the patterns of human society as Plato saw it. One was the idea of differences in natural aptitude, easily recognizable because many skills were obviously handed down from father to son. In the Republic, natural aptitude is the foundation for the division of labor and the creation of a professional army from those innately fit for soldiering. The distinction between phi- losophers, men of true wisdom, and the rest of the community is justified by their inborn aptitude for reason and thought.
A second feature of Plato’s approach to social patterns and organization theory is his view of individual psychology. He says the psyche is made up of three elements: appetite, spirit, and reason. Men fall into natural divisions according to the predominance of one or the other of these elements in their makeup.49
The most important feature of all, however, is the relation that Plato sees between human groupings and their metaphysical thought. Just as there is a great gulf between the forms known to the mind and the appearances perceived by the senses, between the dark cave of illusion where we live and the bright realm of knowledge to which a few may escape, there is a deep division between “those who can appreciate the eternally immutable and those who lose their way amidst multiplicity and change” (Plato 1958, 484b).
With an innate fitness for the task of knowing, guided by the reasoning element within him, and lifted above ordinary humanity by his vision of
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the highest truth, Plato’s wise man is thus by nature distinct from all others. He is made of gold. Lesser men are made of silver, and still lesser ones of iron and brass. Thus the ideal state is divided into three classes:
the ruler, the fighters, and the working population, e.g., farmers, mer- chants, craftsmen, and laborers. Each of these has its appointed function, and each concentrates entirely upon the discharge of its functions. Gov- ernment, defense, and sustenance — the three necessary functions of the state — are made into professions and assigned to professional classes.
It is only with the governing and fighting classes that Plato is really concerned. He shares the biases against labor and business that seems to be characteristic of aristocrats in all ages. The regulation of the economic order in the Republic illustrates the contempt of the nobleman for the prosaic existence of those who must work for a living. They are only interested in appetite, the desire to fulfill material wants.
The rulers (called guardians) and fighters (called auxiliaries) must be trained for their work by every means available to the state.50 The social system surrounding these privileged classes must also include material as well as spiritual things. Plato suggests a system of communism so ordered that it will set the time and the minds of the guardians and auxiliaries free from material cares. He deprives both the administration and the army of private property, thus consecrating them to their public duties.
One of the two points at which the Republic is most suggestive for modern public administration is in the threefold class division that distin- guishes the functions of ruling and administering the state from all other crafts. The main difference between the philosopher-rulers and the pro- ducers in the Republic is that between political wisdom and technical knowledge. Only the philosophers have insight into human problems, and that insight is more than specialized learning. The craftsman, by contrast, including perhaps the quantitative analyst, the statistician, the computer information specialist, and the media relations expert in our own day, may have no comprehensive understanding of the purpose of the state or its administrative agencies. He has limited knowledge of a technical nature. Technical, procedural, and instrumental knowledge is advisory knowledge, says Plato, and not policy-making knowledge (Eben- stein 1969, 7–9).
The other point of direct applicability to modern public administration, indeed to all political life in the United States, is Plato’s excoriation of rhetoricians. His political argument against democracy is stark and simple.
It deteriorates into license as people do whatever they want whenever something much lower in Plato’s ranking of human possibilities than “the spirit” moves them. All sorts of unchecked dispositions are given free rein, and they are encouraged by those who manipulate through rhetorical speech. They take over the souls of the young, at whatever chronological
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age the young reside. Ideologues confuse the simple-minded and call forth the basest motives and fears of their fellow citizens. Of the rhetori- cians — he would have included the political advertising consultants and campaign managers of our day — Plato said (Plato 1958, Book VI, 493):
Once they have emptied and purged [the good] from the soul of the man whom they are seizing,… they proceed to return insolence, anarchy, wastefulness, and shamelessness from exile, in a blaze of light, crowned and accompanied by a numerous chorus, extolling and flattering them by calling insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage.
Plato sharply divides rhetoric from dialectic and opinion from knowl- edge. The high-minded search for truth looks nothing like the forensic feats of Thrasymachus in the Athenian assembly.51 Plato’s dialectic of knowledge is set up in opposition to a democratic rhetoric of persuasion.
He calls sophists, who plied rhetoric professionally, panderers. In the Platonic dialogue that bears the name of the rhetorician Gorgias, Socrates maneuvers Gorgias into declaiming that speech making is not concerned with helping the “sick” — the vast multitude to whom Plato’s physician would bring philosophic and political health — learn how to live in order to be well. Rather, it involves only freedom for oneself, the power of ruling by convincing others to concur in one’s argument. Gorgias is trapped by Socrates into admitting that oratory is not about right or wrong but mere persuasion, a “spurious counterfeit of a branch of the art of gov- ernment” — the branch known as democracy (Plato 1971, 44).
In Plato’s scheme of things, democracy contains no authentic or mean- ingful speech, only the babble of the ignorant. The ignorant are stuck in mere opinion and frequently give in to base instinct. Hope lies with what Plato called “the more decent few” who can master desire. The more decent few — the guardians — must forbid speeches about the gods and expunge all tall tales of ancient heroes, for poetry inflames the many.
Plato found Homer, Hesiod, and other masters of Greek literature oppro- brious and corrupting. Toward the end of the Republic he presents the conclusion that “all poetry, from Homer onwards, consists in representing a semblance of its subject, whatever it may be, including any kind of human excellence, with no grasp of reality.” In fact, the artist is assigned a place below the shoemaker or smith, because these craftsmen have at least a limited direct knowledge of reality, whereas the artist “knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents.” Art, therefore,
“is a form of play, not to be taken seriously.” Because the poet, by appealing to sentiment rather than reason, “sets up a vicious form of
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government” in the individual soul, “we shall be justified in not admitting him into a well-ordered commonwealth” (Plato 1958, 602).52
The ruler must occasionally lie for the benefit of the city. Plato often compares rulers to doctors, and the ruled to patients, and he says that
“for a private person to mislead the rulers we shall declare to be a worse offense than for a patient to mislead his doctor.” He attacks such crimes as “fatal” and “subversive” in a state. Though the ruled are under no circumstances permitted to deviate from the truth, particularly in their relations with the rulers, the latter may lie “in the way of a medicine.”
Just as a medicine may be handled only by a doctor, “if anyone, then, is to practice deception, whether on the country’s enemies or on its citizens, it must be the Rulers of the commonwealth, acting for its benefit; no one else may meddle with this privilege” (Plato 1958, Book III, 408).53
The achievement of a just state, a perfect antidemocracy, requires the creation of such a powerful, all-encompassing bond between indi- viduals and the state that all social and political confl ict disappears, discord melts away, and the state comes to resemble a single person, a fused, organic entity.
Private marriage, family life, and child rearing, at least for the guardian class, must be put away. The guardians must have no competing loyalties other than their wise devotion to, and rule over, the city. A systematic meritocracy must prevail in which children are organized and characterized as raw material to be turned to the good of the unified city. A child from the lower orders of society, those stuck in the mire of ignorance, may perchance show discernible sparks of future wisdom. If so, that child must be removed from his or her parents, “without the smallest pity,” and trained to be one of the brightest and best. Plato’s explicit purpose with this social engineering is to prevent the emergence of hereditary oligarchies and to ensure the continuation of rule by a natural elite. A system of eugenics is devised among his guardians to match up males and females with the most likely mates to produce vigorous, healthy offspring. Imme- diately after birth, a baby is removed from the biological mother and sent to a central nursery, where its rearing is entrusted to experts.54
In the Republic we find the prototypical antidemocratic fear, that things will easily fall apart if a city is anything but organically united. Scattered throughout the treatise are words that evoke a sense of chaos and disintegration: “asunder,” “destroy,” “dissolves,” “overwhelms,” “splits,”
“evil.” Other terms are designed to prevent the anarchy that democracy leads to: “dominate,” “censor,” “expunge,” “conform,” “bind,” “make one.”
For Plato every conflict is a potential cataclysm. Every discussion in which differences are stated is a threat portending disintegration. Every sally is an embryonic struggle unto death. Every distinction is a possible blemish on the canvas of harmonious and unsullied order.55
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