Plato was one of the first to develop the concept of a political utopia. In The Republic, he attempted to outline the guidelines for a just society. Plato's Utopia appears, at first to be an excellent idea. However, his perfect society is less than the ideal, even from the contemporary perspective. Aristotle, through "The Politic” attempted to understand the nature of man in a "realistic" view. What Plato called ideal, Aristotle called unfeasible. He tries to make rationale judgment in the management of his ideal of a society, through understanding human behavior and logic, making it what he would deem a more realistic society.
As humans we tend to care more about our individual needs prior to the needs of others. The values that we express reflect our own self-interest, where the good of the individual was the main concern and was not the same as that of the State. Plato saw this to be determinate to society based on the awareness that Guardians, such as civil leaders and assistants would care more about their individual desires, and their needs; disregarding anything else to fulfill their pleasures. "On this basis they will then be free from faction, to the extent tat any rate that human beings divide into factions over the possession of money, children, and relatives" (Stephanos 464e). Plato recognized this to create factions among individuals, where these divisions' main concerns were to themselves, their family, and to others that were close to them. Families create that invisible line that disassociates people, which was one of Plato's main fears for the development of his utopian society. What he urged was for separation of the family for the people in control of the government or state. It comes into play with the idea of the noble lie where the guardian's individual contentment is connected with the happiness of the polis. In other words, he tries to eliminate all forms of personal pleasures and needs so that the guardian prime objectives were to that of the polis itself.
Hypothetically, if Plato was successful of denying private spouse, children and property to the Guardians, then their prime concerns will be directed to the polis. This is the idealization of his utopia. The guardians will only have one allegiance in their life, which is the development and growth of their city. It can be associated with the noble lie because he is technically substituting what the guardians naturally associated to be desirable, which were their own self pleasures. He replaced their logic with a new form of happiness that is directly associated to the city. Plato believes that this will create a better and unified city because those in power will not be corrupt and abuse their positions.
Plato stated, "Further, an older man will be charged with ruling and punishing all the younger ones...And, further, unless rulers command it, it's not likely that a younger man will ever attempt to assault or strike an older one. And he won't, I suppose, dishonor one in any other way" (Stephanos 465a). The reason why he only takes way anything private from the guardians is that he believes that non leaders would not do anything to go against the guardian. It is similar to the idea of platonic love, where the younger generation (the citizens) looks up to the older generation for advice and wisdom. It is an idea of respect for the older generation (guardians). He believes that the non leaders or citizens have two things hindering them from revolting, which is fear and shame. It is the fear that if one revolts against the guardian, then other citizen will come in aid and protect the ruler. The other reason is the idea of shame of going against the authority figure, which could be shown as acts of treason. Plato's rationality behind this is that he believes nothing will happen if the non leaders are not deprived of their privacy. "Since they are free from factions among themselves, there won't ever be any danger that the rest of the city will split into faction against these guardians or one another" (Stephanos 465b). Since the Guardians prime motives are to the development of their city, there is this universal agreement amongst them since they lost their individuality and private desires. Plato believes that if there are no factions between the Guardians, then there would be no factions between the citizens. Ultimately, he believes it to be like a domino effect, where if those in higher position were in agreement in one another, then it will eventually spread to everyone else.
In Plato's eyes, it seems to be a perfect way to create a society with social order, but in reality, it's unrealistic. If we go back in history, there was never once a situation where this type of ideology could have ever worked. If we look to the time of King Henry the 8th, his individual desires were above anything else. King Henry the 8th wanted a divorce from Queen Katherine because she couldn't give him a son, but the Catholic Church would not acknowledge it. He went through such extreme where he dissociated himself from the Catholic Church, creating the Church of England. King Henry the 8th could be seen as a leader of a faction in Plato's reality because his individual desires got in the way of him being a guardian to England. If we look at nations in the Middle East, there are multiple countries where faction leaders assimilated power via coup d'état because of their own individual ideologies. Some examples are Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya, Omar Hasan of Sudan and Qaboos of Oman. People who tried promoted this platonic ideology of universal agreement were assassinated due to divisions and groups against their philosophy. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil rights movement could be seen as an example. He fought for racial equality in this country. He was ultimately success, but was assassinated in a hotel. Another person who can be exemplified is Gandhi, who tried to spread his message of non violence and universal peace, but was assassinated as well. If we look at the CEOs of Wall Street before the recession of 2008, companies like AIG and Goldman Sachs knew what they were getting into. They knew that their companies were going down, but still they never controlled their corruption, leading to the downfall of their companies, causing investors and other citizen to lose their financial security, but at the same time, they were still profiting from all of this. It is understandable why Plato saw individual desires a great distress to the polis and even today we are seeing its discursive power, but his ideology is not feasible to our human rationality.
Plato vision of human happiness for leaders and non-leaders is that of social unity. His dream is that of a social harmony that could exist among all individuals, where guardians would care about their polis, and civilians would care about each other and their nation. It is where everyone has the same aspirations and concerns. He wanted disunites to be replaced with civil communities of people who would have the same common goals in life, with social equality. As for myself, I personally would never want to be part of Plato's establishment. I could never become a guardian to his utopia because just like what Aristotle said, my main concern is to myself, my family, and then other people. I believe Aristotle just summarized my mentality. Besides my own selfish desires, another reason would be fear. Looking at a realistic standpoint through past societies and individuals, serving under that type of mentality could leave me with two possibilities, death and/or my hallucination of power; both that I am afraid of.
The only way that I could be a Guardian to his type of society is if I was born and bought up with this ideology of his noble lie starting from the moment of my birth. To be Plato's Guardian a person has to change their own outlook on everything he or she preserves as life. I personally see that each motive that we express and think of in life has some personal desire inside. When a parent wants their child to be happy, I consider he or she is thinking about their own happiness through their child or some ulterior motive that would affect them as well. My mother wanted me to go into medical school; even though she told me I would have a successful career as a doctor, I saw some other motives that she would never blatantly express to me. She failed out of medical school in Indonesia, so I personally saw her wanting to live her dreams through me, and the other reason is to gloat about me in front of her friends, which is common in Indonesia. But, if you exemplify the parental figure to a Guardian figure, they are almost the same thing, and I find it impossible to believe anyone would be deemed fit to be a Guardian in Plato's society because it would involve true self-sacrifice of ones individuality and we were all brought up to express that individualism. If I was born and brought up through Plato's method, maybe I could be fit to be a guardian, but as of now, through fear and realization of the Plato's true ideal guardian, I would never want to be in that position.
Family affects an individual social being. Our upbringings could determine who we are now and what we could possibly become in the future. Plato visions of a "the community of wives and children" deemed unfeasible according to Aristotle. "Aristotle had pointed out that recognition of identity on grounds of likeness would inevitably frustrate Plato's intention to abolish private family ties among his Guardians. He now describes some awkward consequences of their not recognizing each other: i.e. the removal of certain inhibitions on undesirable conduct and of certain incentives to desirable conduct" (Saunders, p109). Through Saunders, Aristotle said that there are impracticalities in his formation of a community of wives and children. There are social restrictions we all usually follow and if broken are typically tabooed. Aristotle believes that Plato failed to understand the social rationality of his idea. Plato's vision for his Utopia is all, but impracticable and unrealistic based on his philosophy. It hard to imagine because as humans we have our general differences with one another, but he wanted the general society to think as if it was one unified social creature. "They may do so altogether, but not each separately; and the same with regard to possessions. Thus, there is a clear fallacy in the use of the word 'all'; for words such as 'all' and 'both', and 'odd' and 'even', owing to their double senses lead to highly disputable conclusions even in reasoning" (Book II, iii, 1261b16). Breaking down the family structure to where you recognized each woman as your wife or each man as your husband destroys social barriers, which could lead to what we see as tabooed or what Aristotle saw as "further evil consequences" (Book II, iv).
Some examples of what can happen when formal social identifications are removed are incest relationships, increased assaults and homicides. The reason for incest is that you don't recognize someone as your mother, father, brother or sister. In Plato's world, they are just another citizen in the polis. Aristotle saw the realistic consequences of Plato's reality because if you can't identity a person as a member of a family, then he or see is just another "partner". There is no close kinship to be formed in that type of society, which Aristotle identifies as adding a greater risk to people. Words such as mother, father, brother and sister are essentially words to describe your connection to your family. They can be seen as warm hearted words to describe the bond you share with someone of your family, but with the lack of a "personal identification" your "close associations" are nothing more than fellow citizens and those individual bonds people share with one another are broken, which seems rather oblique. In Plato's reality, he wanted to dilute the strong emotional, sexual and family ties people have and replace it with a universal tie among the citizens. It's an unworkable reality because according to Aristotle, it can lead to detrimental consequences because of the lack of emotional ties all people share. The balance that Plato thought he could create without any social chaos that Aristotle argued about could have come from his idea of platonic love. That "pure brotherly love" is a non-sexual affectionate relationship, but realistically without that form of love Aristotle believed to be an unworkable formation of a society.
The parable of the animal training is an analogy that can describe Plato's relation of the citizens to the city-state. The state or elected rulers could be seen as the "animal trainer" to the citizens. Plato analogized the citizens to a tamable beast. As long as the people or "beast" is content, presumable nothing terrible would happen to the animal trainer, but once the trainer provokes the beast to act on something it doesn't want to, then will the animal retaliate. Plato believes that the citizens are incapable of running their own state because we are, "somewhat deaf, short of vision, and ignorant of navigation" (Bloom, p398).
Aristotle believes that all citizens in a Greek city-state take part in government and hold various public offices, which is why Aristotle takes public office as a defining feature of citizenship. Because citizenship involves an active role in running the state, a citizen identifies strongly with the city-state to which he belongs, to the point that the Greeks consider exile to be a fate worse than death. The tight bond between citizen and city-state also explains why Aristotle considers active citizenship as a necessary feature of a good life. He insists that we can only fully realize our rationality and humanity as citizens of the polis, and so he concludes that fully realized humans are, by necessity, political animals.
Even though he believes that "man is by nature a political animal" there is this other side to man. According to Aristotle, to partake in office or government is one of the strongest points of defining man, but within it contains this social duality of man's priorities in the city-state. Man's main priority is first and solely to himself, second is his family or closes relations and third is his state. It's subversive to Plato's philosophy where he rationalized the exact opposite: the state as the prime concern, then fellow man and lastly your individual desires. What Plato saw as being detrimental to his society, Aristotle accepts and tries to rationalize. "The ends justify the means"; it's an epigrammatic expression used to describe people rationality about making a decision. In Plato's philosophy, he wanted the means and ends of the citizen to be parallel to that of the state and vice versa, to create a social harmony amongst the citizen and their polis. As for Aristotle, he realizes that the individual ends were the main and first concerns for them to justify their means. As for the idea of "public and private happiness", both Aristotle and Plato had two different ideologies to that association. For Plato, in the vision of his utopia, there is no difference between public and private happiness; they are essentially the same thing. A person's happiness is to be to that of the state, for the individual's main concern was that of the state. The state and its citizen were in unison with one another, which is one of Plato main idea of the common good.
As for Aristotle, public and private happiness can be considered two associations that could work together. This idea is similar to when Aristotle talks about acquiring items and property. "A shoe may be used either to put on your foot or to offer in exchange. Both are uses of the shoe; for even he that gives a shoe to someone who requires a shoe, and receives in exchange coins or food, is making use of the shoe as a shoe" (Book I, 1257a5). There is the private usage of an item, where it is used for a private or personal need and there is the public usage, by which you give away to someone in order to acquire and item that the person doesn't own. This is where the private happiness of an individual could work together with the public happiness or "equilibrium of self-sufficiency". But, Aristotle also expressed a detrimental way where the private happiness of an individual could interfere and hurt the public happiness. It is shown when he talks about the creation of monopoly. In Book I, xi: 1259a23, he talks about a man in Sicily who bought all the iron foundries and when merchants came up, he was the only seller, making an incredible amount of money. In the end, the merchant had to depart from Syracuse by Dionysius. The point of this story is that in some instances, the private happiness of the individual could overwhelm the public happiness to the point where it becomes detrimental to society.
There are different interpretations of the type of government that is in charged of the Athenian and American societies. It is to be understood that it is structured as democratic oligarchies, where we have both the ruling of the elite as well as the people. There are multiple things in the government that could be defined as a democracy and oligarchy, based upon past history and how they are currently run today. "There are tasks of which the actual doer will be neither the best nor the only judge, cases in which even those who do not possess the skill form an opinion on the fished product. An obvious example is house-building: the builder can certainly form an opinion on a house, but the user, the household manager, will be an even better judge" (Book III: xi, 1282a14). That statement could analogies American doctrines. If we look at American doctrines like the Gettysburg Address or the Constitution, their interpretations can be seen as democratic because it is left for the majority to decide on its ideology and understanding of it. Over the period of time since its creation and birth, some of the words never changed, others been added on, but its interpretations has been evolving and will continually do so to make fit the ideology of each generation of Americans. This is an example of how the rabble or "opinion pool" is prevalent in America, but besides that a lot of America could be defined as an oligarchical reality. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal". During different eras of American history, the words "that all men are created equal" could be looked at from different stand points. During the time it was written, it was to be considered that all free white property owning males were considered free. By the time after the Civil War, African Americans were considered free, but weren't equal until the civil rights era. Based on the generation an individual was born in, the words could have totally different meanings.
An Oligarchy means the rule of the few, which can be generalized to the wealthy. In reality, those without economic power cannot go into a political life or into office because it isn't a feasible mean for them to support themselves economically. Usually people with economic power hold political power because they could sustain and support their lifestyle. So those of the majority in office could be seen as wealthy individuals who participate in government. If we look at the past administration, a majority of those in President George W. Bush cabinet were wealthy white individuals. President Bush family owned an oil company, his secretary of treasury John Snow was CEO and president to B&O Railroad; and Robert Gates, his Secretary of Defense was on the corporate board to multiple investment companies. These are examples of just some of the few men who are in the government, but as you can see; their economic power is prodigious, allowing them to take office. In the United States, 10% of its citizens hold about 70% of all US assets. Most defiantly those individuals are a part of that 10%. During the time of the great depression the top 0.1% of Americans had a combined income equal to the bottom 42% and a majority of the wealthiest people was in the government as well. It seems to shows that truly is running the country. When President Bush gave the people tax cuts, it mostly was there for the wealthy because his ideology and that of the Republic is that tax cuts would lead to the creation of jobs in the private sectors because it would mean more money to spend. That ideology along shows how powerful the wealthy (oligarchs) are in control of this country; from the political side of government to the economic world of Wall Street. Realistically it seems like the hold America.
A lot of Aristotle philosophy can be applied to American economic, social and political scene. Some parts of Aristotle definition of a citizen can be applied into the American society. "What effectively distinguishes the citizen proper from all other is his participation in giving judgment and in holding office" (Book III: I, 1275a22). A citizen in America has the right to vote and participate in office, no matter what his standing in society is. In other countries, people would have to be in a certain class or some type of elitism view that would eliminates other people to try to participate in government, but in America, it is open to everyone who are citizens. He also defines that a citizen in a democracy can be one of foreigner born, and "illegitimate children". This is in fact true in America today. America citizenship is open to any individual from any country around the world. A foreign born person could apply as a citizen with the same rights as any other citizen of this country. "Illegitimate Children" can be defined in a modern sense of children born in this country, but their parents hold citizenship status in a different country. This is prevalent in situations of immigration laws. As long the person was born in America, he or she is automatically a citizen. "On the other hand, by setting up courts drawn from the entire body of citizens, he did establish democracy in Athens" (Book II: xii, 1273b35). It is just like our court system and how citizens can provoke it. It is just like when the majority provokes and tries to redefine the constitutionality of American doctrines. An example of this is the court case of Brown v. Board of Education where in unanimous decision did the court agreed that racial segregation in the education system was in violation of the fourteenth amendment of the United States constitution.
Economically, Aristotle promoted in having private property as a form of wealth. With owning private property, one can exchange an item they have or an item that they need. "Such a technique of exchange is not contrary to nature and is not a form of money-making; for it keeps being original purpose: to re-establish nature's own equilibrium of self-sufficiency. This is prevalent in America because everyone owns some form of property, wither it is through land or materials. Through we follow this type of exchange, or used to follow when bartering was popular in American history; America today deviates from his ideal and established a universal form of currency. Aristotle considered currency in the form of money as "having no root in nature since, if those who employ a currency system choose to alter it, the coins cease to have their value and can no longer be used to procure the necessities of life" (Book I: ix, 12571a41). Aristotle believes that through the formation of a currency system, there is no limit to the amount of riches to be got from this model, which he finds unfavorable. If we look at the super wealthy today, the amount of property they acquire is enormous and is almost impossible for a majority of citizens to achieve, which Aristotle saw as unnatural.
In book one of the politics; Aristotle talked about the term of a slave. He said that a slaves were "organic property"; a living tool. "Any human being that by nature belongs not to himself, but to another is by nature a slave; and a human being belongs to another whenever, in spite of being a man, he is a piece of property" (Book I: iv, 1254a9). In the United State, we don't see anyone as a slave or a "tool". That would be considered an act of injustice being performed, but before the civil war era, this would have been a means to the justification of owning slaves, which was extremely predominant in the south. After the Civil War era, America has been developing humanitarian laws to prevent the establishment of "legal slaves". Technically, though there is no such thing as slaves among citizens, there is a problem among those who are undocumented. Illegal immigrants are suffering, and in some situations are put into slavery in the agriculture sectors of America and even as sex slaves, through prostitution. Even though America tries to prevent it, the fact that they are undocumented makes it extremely hard to find them because we have no way of knowing about their existence.
As in terms of the perfect society, Plato believes he had created the ideal utopia, only to be opposed by his successor Aristotle. What Plato saw was possible; Aristotle viewed as irrational and unrealistic to even comprehend. When Aristotle created his perception of an ideal society, he took into account rational human behaviors which were to be subjected into his thinking. A lot of his philosophy can be seen in parallel with the economic, social and political ideals of America. His political philosophy appears to be more in tuned with human nature than Plato because he tries to grasp the concept of human rationality. Instead of trying to alter human thinking, like with Plato and his noble lie, he tries to make rational judgment of natural human reactions to certain ideals and attitude, creating his own political philosophy.