ABSTRACT
Plato has long been thought the enemy of democracy, but the issue has been confused because he-and we also-use the word in several different senses. Plato, with some reason, thought ill of the political regime in the Athens of his day. Democratic follies had lost Athens the Peloponnesian War, and democratic intolerance had condemned Socrates to death. But Plato was much more a critic of the theory of democracy. Democracy was egalitarian and pluralist. It extended equality before the law, laouojiCa (isonomia), to an absolute equality, which held that all men were equal in all important respects, and maintained that one man’s opinion was as good as another’s. If all choices were equally valid, each man should be free to make up his mind as he pleased, and follow his own inclinations. A democratic society must, therefore, be a permissive one, recognising no objective standards of right and wrong.
