IDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL HIERARCHY: COMPARING PLATO AND

Ideology and Social Hierarchy: Comparing Plato and Hindu Social Thought

Ideology and Social Hierarchy: Comparing Plato and Hindu Social Thought

Plato perceived the ideal society as a city-state of no more than 20,000 people, ruled by an elite. He wanted something better than the kind of rule that had existed among the Spartans and societies with aristocracies, and looking into the past he saw that societies led by aristocrats could degenerate and that some aristocrats were unfit for leadership. He wrote a work entitled The Republic, imagining a society with a ruling elite made up of men who could pass their status to their sons but who would lose that status if their peers decided that they were unfit. And someone from a lower status would be admitted to the ruling group if the group judged him as having developed into a sound philosopher. (Kant et al 2003)

Plato imagined a society without the weaknesses of rule by inheritance and the weakness of leadership chosen by the multitude. Plato wished his ruler-philosophers to be unconcerned with possessions. He wished that they be interested in harmony and justice only. The best men, he believed, serve society out of devotion rather than for pay. Therefore, he believed, the ruling elite should share rather than compete for possessions.

As for women, Plato believed they were equal to men in many ways. He believed they had the capacity to be philosophers and were capable of virtue. (Howard et. al. 1996) A mentally accomplished female, he proclaimed, was superior to a mentally incompetent male. He approved of the greater respect and freedom for women that he had seen among the Spartans. He thought it best that men rule, but he believed that women should be free rather than possessed by men. He believed that the harmony that was essential to his utopia would be best served by his ruler-philosophers and their women associates and children living as one large family, the men and women coupling freely with whomever they pleased.

The Hindu pantheon, of course, shows great affinities with that of the early Greeks, since both are derived from a common source,and the Vedas contain the earliest expression of that worship of the heavenly bodies which persists right down to the time of the Stoics. The observance of social ethics, in a large measure, preserved Hindu society when various outside forces threatened to ...