Objectives of Study

Karl Popper view Plato as dangerous since he presents the cosmos as if there is a realm of pure
essences or ontological certainties which the elites can come to know. Natural law would then be
man’s obedience to the laws constructed in accordance with that knowledge. The just society is
that which would be governed by such knowledge and hence the polis would be made rational
and sober. In the properly organised polis every man would find happiness carrying out his
natural tasks. The ruler returns from his encounter with truth to subdue the political chaos of the
polis and creates the just state. The ruler is guaranteed to be legitimately exercising his power not
through a political legitimacy – for example, democratic consent – but through his grasp of the
mathematical nature of the ontology of the cosmos and his vision of that ontology. Popper reads
Plato as a man of gnius whose political and jurisprudential imagination was inspired by a fear of
social chaos and the need for an ideology of truth to guarantee social control. But there are
occasions where we can also read Plato as suggesting that his theory of the ideas is a political
and not an epistemological necessity. The key passage is where Plato has Socrates finish his
speech on the possibility of the just polis by an allusion to its impossibility:

It makes no difference whether the polis exists somewhere or will ever exist. He will do only the
deeds peculiar to that polis, and none else.

Socrates appears to argue that the true polis of absolute justice will never be encountered in
actual history, nor is it possible actually to encounter pure ‘truth’; the rational person cannot
claim to have total possession of the truth, but only an ‘ideal’ or concept. The rational person
who seeks justice must turn to idealism, not because he wishes to escape from political
commitment, but because he needs ideals – or mathematical models – in order to orientate
himself in the otherwise disparate contingency of the empirical. His claim to the truth of natural
law is a political commitment to certain rationally perceived ways of organising and expressing
the meaning of life.