Plato and the Age of Revolutions: Did He Have Any Immediate Effect?

No, Plato had no immediate effect on the Age of Revolutions, because he died about two thousand years before it began. Plato lived from about 428/427 to 348/347 BC. The American Revolution (1775-83) and the French Revolution (1789-99) came more than two millennia later, so any influence he had on them was indirect and came through the books that educated people of the eighteenth century read, argued about and, in some cases, disliked. The more interesting question is how revolutionary-era readers actually used him, and what Plato himself thought of revolutions. The answers are less flattering to the usual story than people expect.

Did revolutionary-era thinkers read Plato?

Yes, but selectively, and rarely as a political guide. The clearest example is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died in 1778, eleven years before the French Revolution began. In Emile (1762), early in Book I, Rousseau tells readers who want an idea of public education to read Plato’s Republic, and adds that it is not a political work, as people who judge books by their titles suppose, but the most beautiful treatise on education ever written. The exact wording varies between English translations. What matters is the claim: for Rousseau, the Republic was a book about raising people, not a blueprint for a government. That is a useful corrective for anyone who assumes the book was a revolutionary handbook. For the dialogue’s own arguments, see the Republic summary.

What did Jefferson and Adams think of Plato?

Not much, at least in 1814. On 5 July of that year Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams that he had been reading Plato’s Republic seriously, found it the heaviest task of reading he had ever undertaken, and asked how its “unintelligible jargon”, along with what he called its whimsies and puerilities, could have kept its reputation for so long. Adams replied on 16 July. He agreed with Jefferson, saying his own reading of Plato had left him disgusted; he had suggested to the Virginia writer John Taylor a novel whose hero travels through the Republic, and he thought philosophers ancient and modern as deluded as the adherents of the great religions. Adams was particularly critical of Plato’s proposal to hold property and wives in common. Two caveats apply. Jefferson’s hostility is one man’s judgement, written decades after independence, and some scholars, such as M. Andrew Holowchak, argue that his own political views were closer to Plato’s than he realised.

Were the revolutions modelled on Plato?

Not mainly. When American founders reached for ancient examples, they favoured Rome, especially the early Roman Republic, over Athens and Sparta, which they admired in parts but did not adopt as models: Athens as too democratic and unstable, Sparta as too collectivist and militaristic. That is the argument of Carl J. Richard’s Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts (2008). Plato’s Laws does recommend a blend of monarchy and democracy (693d-701e), but the founders’ debates about mixed government are usually traced to Roman and later sources. French revolutionaries are likewise usually described as leaning on Rome and Sparta. Plato was present in the classroom but was not the model that the revolutionaries pointed to.

What did Plato himself say about revolution?

Plato wrote about political upheaval as a diagnosis, not as a programme. In Republic VIII he traces how a constitution decays through a sequence of regimes: timocracy, then oligarchy, then democracy, then tyranny (544c-569c). He holds that every change of regime begins with division inside the ruling group itself, a split that opens the way for change (545d). In the oligarchy, the rich and the poor become two cities in one (551d); in the democracy, which arises when the poor defeat the rich, by force or by frightening them into withdrawal, an excess of freedom and equality breaks down all authority (557a-558c, 562a-564a). That unrest, Plato argues, produces a champion of the people who turns into a tyrant. This is a sequence in which revolution is the symptom of a sick city, and it ends badly. It made Plato a critic of revolutionary change rather than its patron. He also lived through violent political change in Athens, including the overthrow of the democracy by the Thirty in 404 BC and the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BC, which colours his scepticism. For the longer argument, see the essays on Plato and democracy and on why he was sceptical about it.

Did later readers blame Plato for modern politics?

Some did, after the age of revolutions had ended. In 1945 the philosopher Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies, in which he treated Plato as an early enemy of freedom, arguing that the Republic’s tightly ordered, hierarchical city anticipated twentieth-century totalitarian ideas. The book was widely reviewed and has been admired and attacked ever since. Critics say that Popper quoted selectively and read a philosophical thought experiment as a political programme, and the debate over his reading is still open. Whatever one thinks of it, Popper’s argument is itself a sign of how Plato’s later influence worked: not as a cause of revolutions, but as a text that later generations reread to explain their own politics.

So what was Plato’s real “effect” on the age?

Mostly an indirect, mixed and sometimes reluctant one. He supplied a vocabulary for thinking about constitutions and their decline, and a canonical book on education that Rousseau admired. He did not supply a plan for revolution, and a number of the people who read him in the age of revolutions, Jefferson and Adams among them, were unimpressed. For a modern take on how his ideas on government are used today, see Plato’s critiques of democracy and their lessons.