The campaign was a disaster. Plato means Athens, and Athens means democracy, but Plato was no democrat. The “manipulation of demotic pseudo-knowledge,” Ms. Atack writes, encouraged political ...

His pupil Plato, however, found that practical knowledge led to the abstractions of metaphysics and political theory. Carol Atack’s “Plato: A Civic Life” traces Plato’s philosophy back to ...

Plato’s well known skepticism of democracy seems the result of his fear of what happens when you put things to a vote. That’s how Socrates died — voted into a death sentence when his case was ...

The Republic, the best-known work of ancient Greek philosopher Plato, authored around 375BC, has shaped western political thought. Greece is now known as the “cradle of democracy”. Not only was the ...