for and compromises in power, with a view toward stable experience of political authority. Such prerogatives of political power as exist issue from whatever authority those not directly in power agree to confer on those who hold the actual power to enforce their authority.
Plato, Locke, and Mill all have opinions about how political authority should be understood, and all are important shapers of Western political discourse. It may be inappropriate to describe one philosopher as more or less friendly or hostile to western liberal democracy, for that term can be interpreted as a modern construction that represents an as it were selective accretion of the whole history of western political thought from the time of Plato onward. But there are differences in how each understands the source of political authority, which are connected to differences in conception about political democracy and the very shape that a state takes. An appreciation of these differences may point toward reasons that the western liberal democracies may have selected and adapted for use some but not all features of the political thought of each.
From the early portion of the Republic onward, Plato sets forth a moral foundation for political authority. A state's regime legitimacy, according to Plato (Socrates) is properly based on virtue, justice, wisdom, and it is guided by the just and virtuous psychology and temperament of its rulers. Justice is "the power which produces states or individuals" who function according to their proper nature, or according to their own ideal form. The idea is developed further:
[Justice] . . . is not a matter of external behaviour, but of the inward self . . . . The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp one another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his house in order, by self-mastery and discipline . . . . Only when he has linked these parts together in well-tempered harmony and has made himself...