Corruption of the Electorate

Alan Bloom’s reading becomes more disturbing the more that Plato’s Republic comes into focus. He calls the Republic a dramatic example of the “foundation of political science”, and sees the pallid restrictions on human character within the thought experiment as necessary for such a science.

Could the difficulties we have seen arise within Socrates' city-of-words been avoided? Are they essential ingredients of human society?

One of the reasons he gives for this characterization is his reading of the encounter at large: that Socrates is spending enough time with his conversants to be unable to avoid his own biases/doctrines. While this is supported at least on its face by other moments in Plato (the rehashing of the city or the tripartite myth of the self in the Timaeus or Phaedrus, the embittered tonal shift Laws x, etc.), the problems which arise in this reading seem to overdetermine its conjectural failings.

Even beyond the issue of Plato, are any points defended by Plato's Socrates his own (Socrates' own) beliefs? Do we believe this because of his defense of them or for some other reason (their subconscious recursion, their unchallenged nature as per chauvinism, etc.)?

I will have to return to the Interpretive Essay after completing the Republic, as much of it has to do with (the dialogue as a Socratic apology)(the place of poetry and myth within or against philosophy)(the characterization of Glaucon and Adeimantus as tyrants-in-training or possible-tyrants) rather than the political leanings of Plato. Not that these alternative points are irrelevant to Alan Bloom’s political point within the Interpretive Essay, but rather that the relevancy of these arguments’ presuppositions to the political require both literal and interpretive attention.