Relation to others· Power and justice
Epistocracy
Axis: Who should decide — Do political decisions belong to everyone, or first to the most competent?
Governing requires knowledge, like steering a ship or treating the sick. Entrusting decisions to ill-informed citizens produces bad policies: power should belong, at least in part, to those with the required competence.
Movements 1
Platonismexplicit
Platonism is epistocratic (reserving power for those who hold knowledge): power should fall to those who know, the philosopher-kings (the philosopher-guardians of the just city, alone fit to govern), alone able to contemplate the and so to govern justly. Democracy, which entrusts decisions to the opinion of the ignorant multitude, is judged corrupting.
Plato, Republic, 473c-474c, the philosopher-king · Plato, Republic, book VIII, 555b-562a, critique of democracy
Philosophers 5
Platoexplicit
The argument proceeds by analogy with the technai, the crafts: one entrusts the helm not to the many but to the pilot who knows, and a ship where the crew elected its captain by acclamation would be deemed mad. Governing is likewise a knowledge, that of the Good and of justice, acquired only through a long education. From this Plato infers, against the Athenian that condemned , that authority must fall to competence and not to the opinion of the greater number. The thesis cuts all the deeper for striking at his own city's ruling regime.
Republic, V, 473c-e · Republic, VI, 488a-489d (the ship metaphor)
Millexplicit
Mill judges a regime on two counts: what it does for public affairs and what it does to the citizens. Representative democracy wins because it best develops those who take part in it, yet that very participation exposes it to incompetence and the tyranny of the majority. His answer seeks to reconcile the two demands: a plural voting scheme that excludes no one from the franchise but weights votes by education, so that number does not silence competence, which inclines him toward .
Considerations on Representative Government (1861), ch. 8 (plural voting) · Considerations on Representative Government, ch. 3 (the superiority of representative government)
Show inferred positions (3)
Confuciusinferable
Power should fall to the wisest and most virtuous, not to the many: one promotes the upright, sets aside the crooked, and the people may be made to follow a path, not made to understand it. This trust in the rule of the best, formed by study and virtue, is markedly epistocratic.
Analects, II, 19 (promote the upright over the crooked) · Analects, VIII, 9 (the people may be made to follow, not to understand)
Socratesinferable
One does not choose a ship's pilot or a sick man's doctor by lot: ruling is likewise a form of knowledge, a craft requiring knowledge of the good, not everyone's business indifferently. Hence the Socratic critique of selecting magistrates by lot at Athens and of the supposed competence of the many. Plato will draw from it the rule of philosophers; in Socrates it is first the demand that the one who knows should decide.
Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 2, 9; III, 9 (the art of ruling, selection by lot) · Plato, Gorgias, 455b-456a; Crito, 47a-48a (the expert analogy)
Hegelinferable
Hegel distrusts direct democracy, where the many risk being but a formless mass given over to opinion: the rational will is embodied first in institutions and in the universal class of civil servants, not in the vote of all alone. But the corporations, the estates (Stände) and public opinion give the many a mediated voice: it is not a pure technocracy, rather an ordered competence in which the many are represented without being sovereign.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §287-297 and §303-305 (the executive, the universal class)
Characters 1
Calliclesexplicit
To rule and to hold more belongs by right to "the better and more intelligent", not to the crowd that chance assembles; his criterion of the "better" is not the Socratic knowledge of the good but the capacity to will and to obtain. It is an aristocracy of nature, at the opposite pole from Athenian democratic equality.
Plato, Gorgias, 483c-d; 490a