Plato Today

by Richard Crossman

Plato was born around 2,500 years ago. He lived in a small city-state in Greece and busied himself with the problems of his fellow Greeks, a people living in scattered cities around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In all he tried to do for the Greeks he failed. Why, then, should people in the modern world bother to read what he had to say? Does it make sense to go to a Greek thinker for advice on the problems of an age so different from his own? To anyone who has questioned the relevance of Plato to the modern world Richard Crossman s lively book provides a brilliant reply. The problems facing Plato s world bear striking parallels to ours today, the author maintains, so who better to turn to than Plato, the most objective and most ruthless observer of the failures of Greek society. Crossman s engaging text provides both an informed introduction to Greek ideas and an original and controversial view of Plato himself."

217 pages, ebook

First published December 1, 1963

About the author

Richard Howard Stafford Crossman, OBE, sometimes published as R.H.S. Crossman, was an English academic and British Labour Party politician. A university classics lecturer by profession, he was elected a Member of Parliament in 1945 and became a significant figure among the party's advocates of Zionism. He was a Bevanite on the left of the party, and a long-serving member of Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) from 1952.

Crossman was a Cabinet minister in Harold Wilson's governments of 1964–1970, first for Housing, then as Leader of the House of Commons, and then for Social Services. In the early 1970s Crossman was editor of the New Statesman. He is remembered for his highly revealing three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, published posthumously.

Reviews

[Tima · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would say reading this was unexpected. Plato today means Plato's observation of our own society and finally finding out that his republic was a sound work but must have failed in its modern implications. Well, many states have been founded with an eye on what Plato dreamed to create but sadly Athens of his times was on a irreconcilable fall. Plato is too strict with the formation of his republic state, he advocates of philosopher kings but they are nowhere to be found actually. So the theory goes to King philosophers, kings who have been trained in his academy and are destined for a political position. He wants to coalesce in some way Athenian freedom with Spartan discipline. Plato from his aristocratic point of view calls the common man ungovernable because their life is polluted with greed and all sorts of maladies. He is right partially but it is too egoistic to think no common man can be superior in intelligence and morality to the ruling class. When he visits modern world, he sees only maskers. He found Soviet system touching the values of republic in form then he sees the promise of hitler as a determined and destined man to make the ruthless change. In the end both states fail. The book somehow ends with 'it is not Plato that we need today but Socrates.' Quite a good point he makes.

[Rick Wilmot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had read this book when I was reading Plato 55 years ago. Crossman's analysis is very good.