Socrates Essay, Research Paper
Much controversy continues over Socrates’s attitude towards democracy. I.F. Stone, embarrassed that the first democracy should have killed a man for exercising freedom of speech and freedom of religion, attempted to justify this by going after Socrates as an enemy of democracy (The Trial of Socrates); but since Stone was busy defending Josef Stalin back in the Thirties, and even wrote a book in 1952, the Hidden History of the Korean War, defending the communist invasion of South Korea, his own democratic credentials are suspect. Indeed, an evaluation of Socrates essentially depends on the question of what democracy is supposed to be. That can be answered in due course.
There are three places in the Apology that provide evidence about Socrates’s attitude towards the democracy in Athens. The first is at 20e, where Socrates relates the story of Chaerephon asking Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates. He says that Chaerephon was his friend and the friend of many of the jury, sharing their exile and their return. Exile and return? Well, of course, the exile of the democrats from Athens, after the fall of the city in 404, and during the Spartan occupation and the regime of the Thirty Tyrants. That makes Chaerephon sound like a pretty serious partisan of the democracy. Would such a one think of Socrates as the wisest man, to the point of asking Delphi about it, if Socrates were conspicuously against the democracy? Not likely. That is not decisive evidence, naturally, but it is suggestive in connection with other things.
The next point, logically, is at 32c, where Socrates relates his experience under the Thirty Tyrants. An enemy of the democracy, and a sympathizer of the Spartans, should have been in seventh heaven after Sparta had actually conquered Athens and installed its sympathizers. But Socrates didn’t want to have anything to do with that government and crossed them to the extent that his life might have been in danger if they had not been overthrown. That complements the positive impression from the side of Chaerephon. The logically final point, however, occurs previously at 32b, where Socrates relates his actual clash with the power of the Assembly, over the question of trying the admirals from the battle of Arginusae. Socrates was the only one of the prytanes (in office through lot) to refuse to do anything contrary to the laws (par to*s n mous). In his view it was his duty to stand for the law and for justice despite the wishes of the Assembly. So he did so, at risk of prosecution or death.
To foil the will of the Assembly doesn’t sound very democratic, but then the will of the Assembly was often arbitrary and vicious. The will of the Assembly discredited the very idea of democracy for centuries. In Federalist Paper #10, James Madison comments on the problem of democracy to be overcome:
From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Socrates himself was among the original type of “obnoxious individual” against whom a pure democracy may turn. A fine statement about the danger of the tyranny of the majority comes from Alexis de Tocqueville:
If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their characters by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them.
James Fenimore Cooper, the author of classic American novels like The Last of the Mohicans, said in his political statement, The American Democrat, in 1838:
The common axiom of democracies, however, which says that “the majority must rule,” is to be received with many limitations. Were the majority of a country to rule without restraint, it is probable as much injustice and oppression would follow, as are found under the dominion of one.
By James Madison’s day some notion of a workable democracy returned only with an eye to the very kind of criticism that Socrates implies in the Apology: that even the Will of the People must be subject to the Rule of Law. That is already implicit in the idea of democracy as Thucydides (in The Peloponnesian War) expresses it in the funeral oration delivered by the great Athenian leader Pericles:
We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.
We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.
The rule of law means that it is not left to the discretion of those in executive power to decide what actions to approve and what actions to condemn. They must follow the standards laid down in the law. Just as important, however, the rule of law does not mean that any actions can be approved or condemned just because some legislative authority happens to pass a law about them. Pericles’s reference to “unwritten laws” is consistent with the views of John Locke (The Second Treatise of Civil Government), Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and even Martin Luther King Jr. [1] that the fundamental basis of positive law is the unwritten natural law dictated by reason itself (ultimately by God, as far as they were concerned), and that the fundamental protection of the individual is not in some positive grant of rights by legislative authority but in the natural rights which are part of the unwritten natural law. Thus, the Ninth Amendment of the United States Constitution says:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The “others” are clearly natural rights. Yet it is now common for people, even lawyers and judges, to “deny or disparage” certain rights, like privacy, just because they are not mentioned in the Constitution. Perhaps such people would do well to actually read the Bill of Rights.
Those who “disparage” unwritten laws and rights often defend the rule of law as a principle of blind obedience; and they use it to argue that people must obey written laws whether they agree with them or not [2]. Indeed, that conception of the rule of law would have forbidden the American Revolution, or any acts of civil disobedience–which were justified by Martin Luther King by quoting St. Augustine that, “An unjust law is no law at all.” But how, one might ask, can people just go around judging for themselves whether a law is just or not? The answer is that they have to, and that is the principle of freedom of conscience–as when Socrates tells the jury, “I will obey the god rather than you,” or when Martin Luther himself told the Imperial Diet and the Emperor Charles V at Worms in 1521, “Here I stand; I can do no other; God help me!” (”Hier st nde ich, ich kann nicht andres, so hilf ich Gott!”). The rule of law is not contrary to that; for the rule of law is not an injunction to blind obedience.
To be “ruled by laws, not by men,” is the old expression. Now, American colonies declaring independence, or a jury nullifying a law to find a defendant innocent, or a protester practicing civil disobedience, are not engaged in ruling. Instead, they are doing the precise opposite: negating the instructions and actions of government. The principle of the rule of law does the same kind of thing, for it means that the authority and power of government and of individuals in office is limited to those spheres, those issues, and those actions that are specified by the law. The rule of law denies to government unlimited or discretionary power and authority. The rule of law is thus part of a system of checks and balances to prevent dictatorship and despotism. Civil disobedience, etc. is simply to say that the authority of government has gone too far and must be further limited.
Whether it is properly understood or not, much talk about democracy holds the rule of law in contempt, either because it contravenes the Will of the People or because it also denies power to those who would rule according to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the “General Will”: The “General Will” of the people is what they would want if they knew what was best for themselves. Such a theory could justify, and has justified, the worst tyranny, like the Soviet Union, as in fact a “democracy.” It is a theory implicit in Marx’s notion of “false consciousness”: that people have “false” desires and don’t really know what they want–but we can know for them. Karl Popper (in The Open Society and Its Enemies) traces all that sort of thing to Plato: the problem Plato has with democracy in the Republic is not the absence of the rule of law but just the fact that the wrong people are in power–people without the proper virtues. With the philosophers in power, ex hypothese, the wise will rule–although Plato himself, like Socrates, elsewhere (as in the Symposium) defines the philosophers as those who are not wise but are simply aware of that.
The rule of law represents one aspect of living with limited knowledge, the ouk o da, “I do not know,” of Socrates, that neither the People nor selected rulers can be trusted to know the good well enough to rule at their discretion or to abridge the principles and rights that exist in natural law and can be set down in fundamental law like the Bill of Rights. Without hoi sopho , “the wise,” no one can be trusted with too much power. The rule of law is the shield of every honest person against those who want to claim superior power out of their supposed superior understanding. That was the principle of the Constitution, though, as Jefferson anticipated, it has been steadily eroded by the natural power-seeking of government, the craven accommodations of the courts, and the constant quest of those pursuing their own interests through the authority, agency, and coercion of government.
Thus, Socrates may be seen not merely as a partisan of democracy, but as a partisan of a proper and true democracy, a constitutional democracy, where the People and the government cannot be trusted with absolute and arbitrary authority any more than a king or dictator can be. Such a democracy is a compromise and is accepted, not because the majority can be always trusted to be morally superior, but because it may be less susceptible to abuse than other forms of government. Thus Winston Churchill said that democracy is the “worst form of government,” just better than all the others. Churchill echoes an earlier statement by James Fenimore Cooper again, that “We do not adopt the popular polity because it is perfect, but because it is less imperfect than any other.” That, indeed, is the democracy of Locke, Jefferson, and Madison: the Liberal Democracy of the 19th century. But it is not democracy as many people refer to it today. If the Law is whatever some court (even the Supreme Court) happens to interpret it to be, then none of us can rely on it not to be interpreted away as a protection. This is much of what has happened, just as Thomas Jefferson anticipated that the Supreme Court, although a check on the other branches of the federal government, would not impose a check on the federal government as a whole, to which the Court itself belongs. That is why the federal government, with zero authority from the enumerated powers of the Constitution (violating the Tenth Amendment), can seize your house (violating the Eighth Amendment) and put you in jail just for growing a marijuana plant in your yard–because, I suppose, it is bad for you. This would have appalled and astonished most Americans living before this century. It would have outraged the likes of Jefferson. It is greater tyranny than King George III ever dared exercise. And it is justified, not by the principles of Liberal Democracy, but by the principles of Social Democracy: which abridges freedom for the purpose of the “social good,” as that is determined, naturally, through political power and the majority.
The Free Market
The Socratic principle of the limitation of our knowledge may also be seen as a fundamental ground for capitalism and the functioning of the free market as understood by Ludwig von Mises (Socialism), F.A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit), and, currently, Milton Friedman (Free to Choose) and Thomas Sowell (Knowledge and Decisions, Markets and Minorities, Race and Culture, etc.). One of the basic principles of all of them–a basic principle of the whole Austrian School of economics–is that individuals, or special organizations, cannot have all the knowledge that would be necessary to calculate the value, as a relationship of supply and demand, and so the proper prices, of things in the market. There is just too much to know for it to be rapidly acquired and continually updated, especially when demand depends on what people want, and this changes and generally cannot be known at all until people actually spend their money. Only the free market itself can serve to coordinate the dispersed knowledge of multitudes of producers and consumers into the determination of a market clearing price. Anything else will not clear the market–i.e. it will produce surpluses (e.g. unemployment–a surplus of labor) or shortages (e.g. rental housing in New York City under rent control)–waste and inefficiency.
Thus, in 1920 von Mises began to argue that, since the knowledge of the needs, desires, and abilities of people is too vast to acquire, and so, since thereby prices cannot be calculated, an economy without a free market, i.e. socialism, cannot succeed. This is a lesson well illustrated by the Soviet block states that boasted for decades about the rationality and efficiency of their “planned” economies. They were neither rational nor efficient–relying instead on Marxist pseudo-science bolstered by tyranny. In fact they were almost unbelievably wasteful and inefficient, leaving shortages of nearly everything, poor quality, etc. Equally important to economic calculation is the fact that anybody anywhere can dream up some new innovation that changes production and the quality of life. That is radically non-predictable and led Karl Popper to contend that there cannot be a predictive “science” of history, or of science itself, the way Hegel or Marx wanted. Today the theory of chaotic events puts the stamp of mathematical description on non-predictiveness. But all this is a lesson poorly learned by many still pushing “industrial policy” and economic planning in the West.
Without a free market, somebody else must decide what kinds of good things will be produced for us. Even if there is some way for us to communicate our desires to them, that is not good enough. They will decide whether our desires are “socially worthy” of being satisfied. The same goes for new products. The entrepreneur who proposes a new product must run the gamut of bureaucrats who will decide whether the product is worthy of being produced. In the Soviet Union, the result of a setup like that was that what people wanted was pretty much irrelevant. There were shortages even of things that were regarded by one and all as necessities. And nothing new ever got produced. Even technological innovations in production that were regarded by higher authorities as brilliant and necessary often took decades to be implemented, if ever. In the free market, an entrepreneur produces a new product without asking anyone’s permission, offers it on the market, and then sees if people will buy it. What people then want is evident in what gets bought. Audio cassette tapes, CD’s, and VHS machines get bought; Edsels, 8-Track tapes, and Beta machines don’t. People go see Terminator II, Jurassic Park, and The Fugitive; they don’t go see Super Mario Brothers or The Last Action Hero. The result of this is a system damned as “commercialism” by the authoritarian Left and as “permissiveness” by the authoritarian Right: Each, of course, regards the things that people are willing to buy as unworthy. What they want is the power to prohibit people from producing what might be wanted and from buying what is wanted. Each see people as victims either of false consciousness produced by advertising (the Left) or simply of moral depravity, of whatever source (the Right).
At the same time each might claim to be implementing the democratic will of the people. Sometimes they are. Often they are not. Even if they are, their prohibitions are usually an example of the tyranny of the majority. A majority of Americans believe that mood or mind altering drugs are unworthy. Because it took more than a century for the clear understanding of the role of American government to be eroded, it was not until 1914 that any drugs were actually prohibited (opium first); but since then it has gradually come to be the case that every drug is prohibited until it is approved by the FDA–which now wants to extend its power to vitamins as well. And if you are found in unauthorized possession of a “controlled substance,” you can be put in prison, your property seized, and your life deliberately ruined. All to persuade you either that such drugs are unworthy or that you don’t have the right to decide on your own. But force and terror have never been persuasive as arguments–especially when they involve blatant violations of the Constitution as any literate person with a copy of it can discover.