Locke & Plato

According to Cornford, Plato's Republic has to be considered in the context of the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War and the waning years of Greece's democratic golden age, proceeding toward the years of the Athenian empire (Cornford, 1945). John Locke developed his views in the context of the 1688 Revolution in England, which followed rule and abdication of the Catholic James II, who believed in divine right of kings and dissolved parliament, with the accession of Protestant William of Orange, who agreed to the parliament's disposition of the English succession and to the institution of parliament itself (Macpherson, 1980, p. x). Locke and Plato both can be seen as developing their views of the state in a period of dramatic political transition, as if they were determined to rethink and in the process reform political theory and praxis.

While Plato discusses the state in terms of its achievement of its own ideal form, there are strong implications that the historical reality of "a stable and harmonious order" (Cornford, 1945, p. xxviii) is to be elusive. Nevertheless, from the early

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h a genuine desire for wisdom; unless, that is to say, political power and philosophy meet together . . . there can be no rest from troubles . . . for states, nor yet, as I believe, for all mankind; nor can this commonwealth which we have imagined ever till then see the light of day and grow to its full stature (Plato, pp. 178-9). Plato's principle of private virtue has a public, social, and administrative component. Put another way, the structure of the Republic will reflect the structure of the ruler's personal integrity. Thus the origin of the state is in the people who make it in general and in those who govern it in particular. Locke's concept of the man-made theory of the state derives from a more or less natural theory of property. From this theory also derives a concept of individual rights vis-a-vis the prerogatives of the ruler. As Macpherson notes (1980, p. xviii), Locke conceives individuals as naturally acquisitive; that is, it is their nature, and thus it is the state of nature of all individuals, to obtain and protect property. But because in the state of nature individuals will acquire property unequally and seek perhaps unfair advantage while maintaining virtually unlimited desires for more property, a regulator
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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