ABSTRACT
Plato's Guardians, also called by him Philosopher Kings, were to be, in a peculiarly strong sense, an ideological elite. For their rule was to be legitimated by their exclusive knowledge of the Platonic Ideas, supposedly constituting the true standards for values of every kind. Throughout Freedom and Liberation much is also disclosed, both directly and indirectly, about the Guardian elite which is to do all this making – the new Philosopher Kings who will, if all goes well, create, and impose their own values upon, what Gibbs still, despite all this authoritarian elitism, wants to credit as 'A free society'. The first supposed sense of 'freedom', which Gibbs labels 'prescriptive', and explains in a curiously constipated way, refers to what we have been calling legally guaranteed liberties: 'Prescriptive freedom is freedom from rules and rulers; still, where there is no authority and no law, there is no prescriptive freedom or bondage'.
