philosopher king

philosopher king, idea according to which the best form of government is that in which philosophers rule. The ideal of a philosopher king was born in Plato’s dialogue Republic as part of the vision of a just city. It was influential in the Roman Empire and was revived in European political thought in the age of absolutist monarchs. It has also been more loosely influential in modern political movements claiming an infallible ruling elite.

In Plato’s Republic the leading character, Socrates, proposes the design of an ideal city as a model for how to order the individual soul. Such a just city will require specialized military “guards,” divided subsequently into two groups—rulers who will be “guards” in the sense of guardians, dedicated to what is good for the city rather than for themselves, and soldiers who will be their “auxiliaries.” Already at this stage of the Republic it is stressed that the guardians must be virtuous and selfless, living simply and communally as do soldiers in their camps, and Socrates proposes that even wives and children should be in common.

At the outset of Book V, Socrates is challenged by his interlocutors to explain this last proposal. In response, Socrates expounds three controversial claims, which he acknowledges will expose him to ridicule. The first is that the guardians should include qualified women as well as men; thus, the group that will become known as “philosopher kings” will also include “philosopher queens.” The second claim is that these ruling men and women should mate and reproduce on the city’s orders, raising their children communally to consider all guardians as parents rather than attach themselves to a private family household. Those children, together with those of the artisan class, will be tested, and only the most virtuous and capable will become rulers. Thus, the group to become known as “philosopher kings” will be reproduced by merit rather than simply by birth. Finally, Socrates declares that these rulers must in fact be philosophers:

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Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…cities will have no rest from evils…there can be no happiness, either public or private, in any other city.

Socrates predicts that this claim will elicit even more ridicule and contempt from his Athenian contemporaries than will equality for women rulers or communality of sex and children. Many Athenians saw philosophers as perpetual adolescents, skulking in corners and muttering about the meaning of life, rather than taking an adult part in the battle for power and success in the city. On this view, philosophers are the last people who should or would want to rule. The Republic turns this claim upside down, arguing that it is precisely the fact that philosophers are the last people who would want to rule that qualifies them to do so. Only those who do not wish for political power can be trusted with it.

Thus, the key to the notion of the “philosopher king” is that the philosopher is the only person who can be trusted to rule well. Philosophers are both morally and intellectually suited to rule: morally because it is in their nature to love truth and learning so much that they are free from the greed and lust that tempts others to abuse power and intellectually because they alone can gain full knowledge of reality, which in Books V through VII of the Republic is argued to culminate in knowledge of the forms of Virtue, Beauty, and, above all, the Good. The city can foster such knowledge by putting aspiring philosophers through a demanding education, and the philosophers will use their knowledge of goodness and virtue to help other citizens achieve these so far as possible.

Thus, the emphasis in the Platonic notion of the philosopher king lies more on the first word than the second. While relying on conventional Greek contrasts between king and tyrant and between the king as individual ruler and the multitudinous rule of aristocracy and democracy, Plato makes little use of the notion of kingship per se. That he had used the word, however, was key to the later career of the notion in imperial Rome and monarchical Europe. To the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161–180), whose Meditations record his Stoicism-inspired philosophical reflections, what mattered was that even kings should be philosophers, rather than that only philosophers should rule. To François Fénelon, the Roman Catholic archbishop charged with the moral education of Louis, duc de Bourgogne, the grandson of Louis XIV, the crucial issue was that kings should possess self-restraint and selfless devotion to duty, rather than that they should possess knowledge. The enlightened despots of the 18th century, such as Frederick II the Great of Prussia and Catherine II the Great of Russia, would pride themselves on being philosopher kings and queens. But philosophy by then had left behind Plato’s focus on absolute knowledge, signifying instead the free pursuit of knowledge and the implementation of reason.

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Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, the medieval philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī had championed the notion of a religiously devout philosopher king. More than 1,000 years later the notion of such a figure acting as the interpreter of law inspired the Ayatollah Khomeini and the revolutionary state that he shaped in Iran. Finally, and more broadly, the notion of the philosopher ruler has come to signify a general claim to domination by an unaccountable, if putatively beneficent, elite, as in certain forms of Marxism and other revolutionary political movements.