Off the yellow brick road – how current liberal democracies have strayed away from their theoretical corner stones, diagnosed by applying Plato's The Republic

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The theory of liberalism
• Platonic methodology
• The abandonment of shared values
• The façade of democracy
• The rise of tyranny
• The common good discussion
• Considering objections
• Conclusion

Introduction

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his best-known work, The End of History and the Last Man where he argued that the conclusion of the Cold War marked the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution: liberal democracy, having defeated totalitarianism, stood as the final form of human government¹. The book's fame rested on its boldness, but its most interesting dimension was one that received less attention. Fukuyama worried that the "Last Man," satisfied by material comfort and procedural equality, might lack the inner resources to sustain the very system that had triumphed. Liberal democracy, he suspected, might be threatened not by external rivals but by its own citizens' loss of moral seriousness. This concern proved more prescient than the thesis it was meant to qualify. Fukuyama's later Political Order and Political Decay (2014) moved substantially toward a diagnosis of institutional decline within established democracies,² a trajectory that lends support to the argument I advance here. I will argue for the thesis that contemporary liberal democracies have little to do with the theory of liberalism, and that the divergence is both deep and structural. In the liberal tradition, from Locke and Mill to Rawls, each major thinker recognised that liberal institutions depend on a shared moral substrate they cannot themselves generate – more precisely, on a substantive common good. The dominant, neutralist form liberalism has since taken, has progressively dismantled the tradition that used to supply that common good, leaving states that champion liberalism by name to degenerate into oligarchies and tyrannies which merely keep up its appearances.

To identify this discrepancy, I will employ the typology advanced by Plato in The Republic. In books VIII and IX he explains how a state's constitution deteriorates, going from the rule of the most qualified, an aristocracy, to the most wretched constitution – tyranny. Along the way the state falls into democracy and oligarchy, and I will use those ideal types to highlight the issues of modern liberal democracies. The platonic framework is not used as a predictive tool, but as a diagnostic vocabulary which will help spot the patterns of decay that liberal theory is not best equipped to handle.

I begin by presenting theoretical liberalism through the work of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, drawing out the structural similarity between their positions: each thinker recognises, with increasing sophistication, that liberal institutions depend on a substantive common good they cannot themselves generate. After setting out the Platonic methodology in more detail, I argue that current liberal democracies no longer meet this precondition. What remains, democratic by name, has moved toward actual oligarchy; the instability inherent in oligarchic rule, as Plato's framework predicts, pushes those who govern further toward tyranny. A critical dialogue between Rawls, Plato, and MacIntyre then asks what a sufficient common good would have to be, and whether any form of liberalism could supply it. Finally, I consider critiques of my argument and defend my position.

The theory of liberalism

On its surface, trying to define liberalism may seem an extremely easy task. "By definition, a liberal is a man who believes in liberty"³ sounds profound enough to constitute the definition of liberalism all on its own. But liberalism is a theory that has been ironed out over decades if not centuries. John Locke is often cited as the father of liberalism, and indeed in his works the earliest renditions of liberalism can be found. As I will show in this section, his was also the most primitive version of liberalism. Yet despite the improvements, more sophisticated theories of liberalism still encounter an issue that plagues Locke.

The starting point for his theory was examining humans as they lived before states were created. Unlike some other thinkers, like Hobbes or Rousseau, Locke does not paint a hyperbolic picture, taking the pre-statehood men into either extreme. He recognises that life before man-made laws was organised according to the laws of nature. These are accessible by all who think rationally. And everyone who does, Locke argues, ought to arrive at the same laws of nature, that is "being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent."⁴ Despite it being the right of all men to live governed only by the natural law, they may encounter some inconveniences (like the lack of a shared understanding of the law, no third-party judge who could arbitrate conflict, or no higher power of authority to enforce the law) which make them consider accepting the rule of another over themselves. The natural liberty of men, Locke continues, is "to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule."⁵ However, having recognised the benefit that agreeing to the formation of a government will have for all involved, men agree to the social contract, wherein they give away some of their natural liberty to the state, and in exchange the state guarantees their remaining liberties, like the right to freedom or private possessions, will be respected. Locke is, in fact, so certain of the prerequisite for liberalism, the law of nature, that he calls on it as a yardstick to measure tyranny against. If a government is overreaching its power, and curbing its citizens' natural rights, the people are justified in revolting.⁶

For Lockean liberalism to be accepted, one must grant the natural laws that are shared by all rational agents, and which all rational agents can access. Otherwise people will have no incentive to form the social contract, if they do not see eye to eye on what rights are to be protected, or why their rights should end when the rights of another begin. Locke himself does not feel the pressure to derive this common substrate from within liberal theory, and there is a reason for this. He writes from within a specific tradition – the tradition of Protestant natural law shaped most directly by Richard Hooker, whom he cites with approval and at length throughout the Second Treatise.⁷ The equality, rational agency, and natural teleology that Locke invokes are not free-floating postulates; they are, as Jeremy Waldron has argued, inseparable from the theological framework of divine creation and providence that Locke inherits and shares with his audience.⁸ His is therefore not a theoretical failure so much as an inheritance: the substantive moral work is done, invisibly, by a tradition Locke sits within and does not need to argue for. The common system of values underlying liberal institutions looks self-evident to him – as self-evident, in his own metaphor, as the laws of mathematics or Platonic forms – because the shared formation of his audience within a common moral and theological inheritance has already made it so.

John Stuart Mill develops on Locke's basic view and argues that, rather than being derived from nature or perhaps God-given, the shared values which underwrite a liberal society are a cultural achievement. They can only be accessed within societies that have achieved the stage where they can be persuaded through discussion and deliberation, rather than brute force only.⁹ Even though Mill's theory of liberalism can be boiled down to following the harm principle, which states that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,"⁹ a society has to be rational enough to agree on what constitutes a sort of harm. This is what drives the distinction made early on in On Liberty, where Mill specifies that his treatise is not about the barbarian, or those who have not achieved the same level of rational deliberation. This position is later strengthened through his defence of free speech, which only has meaning, if speech is the medium of common deliberation through which a society agrees on its laws.

But here lies an issue with Mill's liberalism. If the content of the harm principle has to be agreed upon through common deliberation, then there is no pre-determined border on personal liberty, nor a pre-existing disincentive against harm. For the harm principle to be meaningful, every person involved has to subscribe to the same, or at least a similar enough, set of values. If citizens hold radically different views on freedom, or a significant part of the citizens change their views drastically and cannot be convinced otherwise, then the harm principle becomes an empty husk, a mere truism. And to coerce them via force would undermine liberalism to the same extent as not being capable of agreeing on the values system. Mill also recognised the danger coming from the tyranny of the majority, which occurs when the majority pushes their values and views onto everyone else while disregarding their views and values. Recognising this as an issue harmful to liberalism paints Mill into a corner where, in his ideal liberalism, the majority cannot omit a disagreeing minority: they have to reach some form of a consensus. Otherwise the set of principles this society would hold become nothing more than slogans carrying no weight. Mill's position reproduces Locke's manoeuvre in a new register. The "civilised community" within which rational deliberation becomes possible is not culturally neutral; it is, concretely, the Victorian England whose moral framework – Christian, classical, saturated by habits of self-restraint and public duty – Mill does not need to justify because he and his interlocutors still inhabit it.¹⁰ What Mill presents as a stage of civilisational maturity is, more precisely, the particular moral tradition that makes his liberalism intelligible. He is, to adapt an image later made famous by MacIntyre, living off moral capital he does not recognise as inheritance.

This very issue, ensuring that both individual freedoms of the citizens, as well as their personal ethics are respected, is something that plays a key role in John Rawls' deliberation on liberalism. Rawls recognises the "fact of reasonable pluralism" which makes room for a society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines.¹¹ As a solution to this potential issue he introduces the concept of the overlapping consensus, a political conception of justice such that all citizens can agree to it, despite their potential differences in personal ethics or systems of values. The main criterion which has to be fulfilled is the criterion of reciprocity. But even Rawls himself recognises that "fully overlapping consensus cannot, it seems, be achieved"¹² since a liberal government will promote citizens' individual systems of values by promoting their individual freedom. To limit their personal ethics would be a limitation on their freedoms. In order to salvage the consensus, Rawls introduces a further criterion, designed to keep the bad-faith actors away from the public consensus. For one's input to be meaningful, they have to satisfy the criterion of reasonableness: "Reasonable persons… desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept."¹³ This, as Enzo Rossi points out, "arbitrarily builds liberal outcomes into the deliberation procedure,"¹⁴ leading to legitimate consent being only recognised as legitimate if it agrees to liberal policies, thus undermining the pluralistic tenet established by Rawls and being itself rather redundant, or only liberal institutions can actually produce voluntary and free consent. Rawls' way of accounting for pluralism seems to only work if the pluralism is contained to a society which broadly holds the same set of values already.¹⁵ In other cases, the simple difference between personal interests and principles of justice will, in time, lead to the erosion of trust within a society, even among fully reasonable citizens.¹⁶ The circularity is less a slip than the signature of the project. Where Locke and Mill could assume a substantive moral substrate because their audiences still inhabited it, Rawls is writing for a society in which that substrate has fragmented to the point where it can no longer quietly do the work. His attempt is to reconstruct what Locke and Mill could take for granted from procedural materials alone – from what free and equal citizens could affirm independently of any comprehensive doctrine. The criterion of reasonableness is the point at which the procedure admits, without saying so, that it needs more than procedure to work.

It seems that both less and more complex and sophisticated theories of liberalism run into the same issue. How can an agreement on the society's principles be achieved, if the citizens do not share a system of values, or at least a conception of justice? It would be self-refuting for a liberal government to establish its ways and values by force, thus undermining the personal freedoms of anyone who may disagree; but if there is no consensus, all other laws become void of substance. Locke appealed to the natural laws that preceded the state, Mill argued for rational deliberation in sufficiently culturally advanced societies, and Rawls pushed for a form of reasonable consensus that even he saw as unlikely. Read alongside one another, the three positions mark a single trajectory of increasing sophistication: each thinker grasps more clearly than the last that liberal institutions depend on something they cannot themselves generate, while the tradition that used to supply that something quietly recedes from view. What each is groping toward, and what none can derive from within the liberal framework itself, is a substantive conception of the common good. It is that common good, not merely a "shared system of values," that turns out to be the precondition for liberalism rather than its product. Where it must come from, how thick it must be, and whether liberalism in its dominant form can survive its absence: those are the questions the rest of this essay is forced to take up.

Platonic methodology

It appears that attempts to describe the issues plaguing liberal democracies through liberalism's own theoretical resources may be futile, as they fail to engage with the core issue. All of the key thinkers of liberalism have understood how important a shared conception of values is, for the society they describe to exist, function and survive. And yet none of them were able to produce a satisfactory account of how those values should be instilled. This is what licenses the turn to Plato. He is brought in not as a rival typologist of constitutional decay, still less as an endorsement of his prescriptive conclusions, but because he recognises the same necessity the liberal tradition only assumes – that a political community requires a substantive common good as its organising principle – and commits to it fully where the liberal thinkers do not. In The Republic Plato embarks on a journey to examine the concept of justice and define what it means to be just. To do so, he employs the allegory of a city. He first describes the perfect state, ruled by philosophers in accordance with the form of the good. Then he proceeds to describe how the state deteriorates, from the perfect aristocracy all the way to tyranny. The platonic examples are not descriptions of real cities, then or now; but, structured as an allegory of the soul, the types of constitutions Plato advances serve as clear ideal types¹⁷ – simplified presets that, for our purpose, can guide further discussion about liberalism.

The allegory is deliberate: Socrates and his interlocutors attribute parts of the soul to parts of a state to make the examination of justice tractable. On the platonic framework every soul is divided into three parts. The rational part, reason, is supposed to rule and by its virtue we can access the realm of the forms and ultimately comprehend what is good. Then the spirited part, thumos, is that which executes reason's orders and keeps the rest of the soul in check. Emotions and ambitions would fall under thumos. And finally there is the appetitive part, where desires and appetites reside. These, in turn, can range from the most necessary ones like thirst for water to unnecessary ones like the desire for expensive cutlery, and finally to lawless desires, which are wretched and as far removed from the good as possible, like the urge to perform patricide or incest. Since the form of the good plays a role of an action-guiding principle, other elements can participate in it well or poorly. The just city, ruled by philosophers with an army of philosophically educated guardians, is what imitates the form of the good best. Philosophers correspond to the rational part of the soul, and since they have access to the forms they ensure that the state is constant in its strive for what is best. The everyday citizens recognise the benefits of living in the just city and accept the philosophers' rule over them.

Aristocracy can degenerate into timocracy, where the love of honour, rather than the love of wisdom, prevails. If the honour lover is not exposed to loving knowledge, they will probably turn their love for honour into a love for some singular desire. Plato argued that this would be thriftiness, and thus an oligarchy will arise. In that system, the rulers are focused on satisfying their singular urge, their main unnecessary desire. In the soul, the love for money subjugates all other desires, like reason would have. For the state, a select few of those who own most rule, and they are focused on exploiting all other citizens in order to multiply their own net worth. They raise taxes, buy up property, lend at interest. Faced with this inequality, the people will revolt. Where there was a single guiding desire, now there is none, and any attempt at control is refuted as anarchic freedom is embraced, in what Plato referred to as a democracy. For the soul, this means yielding daily to new desires, never persisting and never taking the time to excel in anything. For the state, democracy means chaos and a stalemate. Those who become rulers will have neither experience and knowledge, nor the conviction to govern a state. And as the state is fighting with itself, confused from the extreme degree of freedom, a champion of the poor will arise, promising them a better life and flattering them with lies. This is how a democracy becomes a tyranny, when someone rallies people behind them and overtakes control. The tyrant is the most harmed soul, he is a slave to his lawless desires, incapable of controlling them.

Plato has been criticised by the likes of Karl Popper¹⁸ for being simply afraid of democracy, and even being blamed for the rise of closed societies which lead to Nazism in Europe. However Plato's actual critique of democracy is very different than based in fear and, as will become apparent soon, is actually quite similar to the worries raised by Rawls himself. Arlene Saxonhouse put it quite nicely: Plato's critique of democracy focuses on the democratic constitution's inherent formlessness.¹⁹ Saxonhouse argues that Eide, forms, are the key to any categorization. They allow for establishing distinctions between lawless and lawful desires, necessary and unnecessary ones, citizens from non-citizens, etc. Democracy, as a system committed to absolute freedom and equality, conceptually disagrees with categorical forms. For Plato justice is tied to every person performing their function, their essence, and each person has a different function. In order for this to be true, there must be different categories of essences and souls (like philosophical vs non-philosophical soul). By preaching complete equality and lack of categories for its citizens, the anarchic democracy contradicts the very existence of Eide. From this formlessness flows the dissolution of common terms and shared goals: the political face of what the previous section named the absence of a substantive common good, and the condition Rawls' failure of overlapping consensus diagnoses in the liberal register.

However the platonic formlessness of democracies opens the door for tyranny to form. In the just city, reason guards against lawless desires. But if there are no categories to differentiate lawless from e.g. necessary desires, then they grow rampant. This formlessness, characteristic for platonic democracy, is also exhibited by current liberal democracies – systems focusing on individual liberty with little to no limitations, and on absolute equality. It is the structural equivalent of the moral fragmentation identified by MacIntyre. Saxonhouse's diagnosis of democracies as formless and lacking in Eide goes hand in hand with the findings of Oda Tvedt, who, in Plato's Republic on Democracy: Freedom, Fear, and Tyrants Everywhere, argues that what Plato's description of democracy shows is that freedom in a vacuum cannot be the organising principle of any society.²⁰ If that were so, then the society would lack tools to curb hostile actors, and they would have no incentive to not hurt their co-citizens, for example through accumulating wealth and becoming oligarchs, or tyrants. The core issue Plato identifies is, on inspection, the same issue the liberal theorists groped toward and could not resolve from within their own resources: the absence of the substantive common good on which any coherent political order depends. Plato's Republic therefore offers an invaluable methodology for measuring how far actual liberal democracies have strayed from the common good their theorists presupposed.

The abandonment of shared values

For liberal theory to be coherent, the meaning behind some of its core tenets has to be generally agreed upon and commonly understood. Mill's harm principle presupposes a shared understanding of the concept of harm. Only then it works as a maxim for any community or society. Locke's natural law accessible by reason, presupposes a shared concept of rationality, while an individual's reason is very closely tied to their tradition of thought. There are differences even between the tradition of Athens and that of Jerusalem, despite how closely they are intertwined. The shared normative premises, required to establish generalizable definitions of these terms, are underivable from liberalism itself. The liberal tenets are formal and procedural, they offer principles to actual govern a society, but lack an inherent second order theory. Mill and Locke, writing in homogenous societies, had the privilege of assuming that second order theory, rather than deriving it within the liberal framework itself.

But if the underlying society, the community which is to be governed in a liberal way, stopped being homogenous, abandoned some preexisting commonly accepted set of values, then the liberal framework becomes rather empty. Without the underlying second order theory, the terms become somewhat meaningless as there is nothing to base a common understanding of them on. The condition I have in view is the one Alasdair MacIntyre describes in liberal societies. He paints a vivid picture, of a society that through some catastrophe lost all the achievements of natural sciences.²¹ All that remains are parts of notebooks, fragments of articles, instruments left behind, etc. This society attempts to piece together this "science" from what remains, they find themselves accepting the fragments without understanding, or granting, the theories that gave those fragments the coherence and tied them into the broader scientific theories. This captures what I take to be true of contemporary moral discourse: people using the moral terminology like duties and justice without grasping the broad theories from which those terms drew their meaning. The three elements of moral discourse which he identified are as follows: the arguments presented are logically valid, claim to be objective while actually expressing non-rational preferences, and lack a common measure between them.²² This makes moral debate unresolvable, perhaps even meaningless, as any disagreement is essentially a misunderstanding of terms rather than a disagreement about facts, moral or otherwise. Without appealing to some already existing system of values, an actual discussion is impossible, if the liberal principle of individual freedom is to be kept up, especially given that "the task of the professionals of political life is to contain and domesticate [issues appealing to first principles], so that any political appeal to first principles does not become a philosophical debate about first principles."²³

Because of how political discourse is structured within liberal societies, it becomes essentially impossible. This leads to limitation of what topics are actually present within the public debate, which is limited by the complexity of actually starting a meaningful debate. Because of this hardship, MacIntyre argues "the large majority of those inhabit [Western societies] are excluded from membership in the elites that determine the range of alternatives between which voters are permitted to choose."²⁴ A minority of citizens hold the power over topics that are discussed, they gatekeep debate, and when a debate arises organically, they steer it in such a way as to benefit themselves and their peers. The example that MacIntyre offers is that of farming households. Farming has been necessary for the upkeep of society for millennia, which should make the destruction of the farming households a topic with at least some presence within the public debate. But, if it is discussed, because of the minority controlling the conversation, rather than debating about the protection of farmers from multinational agribusinesses, direct the discussion toward "taxes, tariffs, farm subsidies, interest rates, bankruptcy laws."²⁵ The structural failure to allow all citizens to engage in meaningful political debate underwrites MacIntyre's conclusion, which I adopt here as my working diagnosis: that "politically the societies of advanced Western modernity are oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies."²⁶ Because these societies are a mix of people with vastly different sets of values and normative convictions, no unified system can govern political debate, and no true consensus can be reached. In order to avoid an endless paralysis of trying to arrive at any meaningful agreement between everyone, liberal societies in the West employ bureaucracy.

The managing class is one of the key emblems of modern Western societies, as their role is essentially to replace action-guiding principles. A manager ought to guide action of the citizens in a way that claims to be neutral, not tied to any second order normative theory – as is required by respecting individual freedoms. However, as there is no theoretical backing behind their decisions, there is no way to guarantee consistent outputs. More so, the bureaucratic apparatus is governed by whoever governs the state. In democracies, the winner of elections is theoretically supposed to rule with respect to the rights of the minority, however there is no inherent system to ensure that. So the managing class claims to operate in a neutral way, since they do not represent any normative theory per se, but in actuality this allows them to conform to the normative outlook of whoever is currently governing the state.

Rawls' conception of the overlapping consensus was designed with pluralistic societies in mind. It would be very fitting as a remedy to the conditions pointed out by MacIntyre. However, Rawls falls into two issues. First one, already briefly outlined above, is the circular prerequisite of reasonableness. Rawls argues that all of those who ought to engage in the overlapping consensus have to represent reasonable views. Otherwise the hopes for any sort of consensus are very slim. But for Rawls' theory to work, reasonableness has to be already defined through liberal views. If someone does not value freedom or the right to self-determination, then they will not agree to a consensus with people who are trying to preserve individual liberty. This makes Rawls' conception less useful than he would like to think, since it can only be applicable to groups who already subscribe to liberal values – bringing us back to the question of where those values are derived from and what backs them – or people who do not conform to the liberal way of life ought to be excluded from the consensus. This raises the second issue, one that could be described as a paradox of tolerance. For the principles of freedom to be kept up, the liberal society has to accept also those, with views that would undermine the freedom of others', or it has to limit the acceptable pluralism. All of this culminates as the state, that by name champions liberalism, becoming a de facto oligarchy, serving some very particular interests rather than the common good, as the common good cannot be established due to the sheer diversity of systems of values and personal normative theories.

The façade of democracy

From the Platonic and MacIntyrean diagnoses, features of oligarchy can be extracted and applied to modern Western liberal democracies. Plato's description of oligarchy is remarkably specific, and it is this specificity that makes it useful as a diagnostic tool. An oligarchy arises, he argues, when the love of honour that characterised the timocratic regime gives way to the love of wealth. The rulers of the oligarchic city are no longer selected for their virtue or their capacity to govern, but for the size of their estates.²⁷ The property qualification determines who rules and who is ruled, and the result is a city divided into two: the rich and the poor, inhabiting the same space but living, in effect, in different cities.²⁸ This is not merely an observation about inequality – Plato's point is structural. The oligarchic city is not a single city at all, in the sense that it has no common life, no shared project, no unified conception of the good. It is two populations yoked together by geography and coercion, each regarding the other with suspicion. The rich fear revolt, the poor resent exploitation, and neither party can appeal to a common standard of justice, because the regime has replaced justice with wealth as its organising principle.

This structural description maps onto the condition of contemporary Western liberal democracies with an uncomfortable degree of precision. The concentration of wealth in the twenty-first century has produced societies that are, in all but name, divided into the two cities Plato describes. A shrinking fraction of the population holds a growing share of economic and, crucially, political power. This is not a controversial empirical claim. What requires examination is how this concentration is sustained within systems that formally guarantee political equality. The answer, on the Platonic reading, is that the oligarchic regime does not announce itself. Plato emphasises that the rulers of the oligarchy are careful to maintain appearances.²⁹ They do not abolish elections or constitutions. They do not declare that only the wealthy may hold office. They simply ensure that the mechanisms of democratic participation function in such a way as to reproduce their power. The formal equality of citizens is preserved; the substantive equality is hollowed out.

Sheldon Wolin, writing from an entirely different intellectual tradition, arrives at a strikingly convergent diagnosis. Wolin argues that the United States, and by extension other advanced Western democracies, have developed a form of governance he terms "inverted totalitarianism."³⁰ Unlike classical totalitarianism, which mobilises the population in service of the state, inverted totalitarianism demobilises the population, encouraging political apathy while corporate and financial interests capture the machinery of government. The democratic forms persist – elections are held, legislatures convene, courts adjudicate – but the substance of democratic governance has been replaced by what Wolin calls "managed democracy," in which the range of politically possible outcomes is constrained in advance by the interests of capital.³¹ What makes Wolin's analysis relevant here is not that it borrows from Plato, because it does not. Wolin reaches his conclusions through empirical observation of American political institutions. The convergence between his diagnosis and Plato's typology is precisely what gives the Platonic framework its diagnostic power. Two thinkers, separated by over two millennia, and working from entirely different methodologies, identify the same structural dynamics: the capture of political institutions by concentrated wealth, the maintenance of democratic appearances to forestall resistance, and the systematic demobilisation of citizens who might otherwise challenge the arrangement.

A further Platonic insight is worth dwelling on. In his description of the oligarchic city, Plato observes that the rulers "pretend not to notice" the impoverishment and degradation of the lower classes, because attending to their condition would require measures that threaten the rulers' own wealth.³² This pretence is not incidental; it is constitutive of the regime. The oligarchy sustains itself through selective blindness. Issues that would require structural change are simply absent from political discourse, not because they are unknown, but because acknowledging them would destabilise the arrangement. MacIntyre's observation about the farming households is an instance of exactly this dynamic: the structural conditions that destroy a way of life are redirected, within the managed public debate, into technocratic questions about tariffs and subsidies, ensuring that the deeper structural question – who benefits from the destruction of small-scale farming – is never posed.³³ The Platonic and MacIntyrean diagnoses reinforce each other here. The oligarchic rulers pretend not to notice, and the structure of liberal political discourse ensures that the citizenry lacks the vocabulary to notice for themselves, since the terms in which the debate is conducted have already been emptied of the moral substance that would make genuine critique possible.

But oligarchy, on Plato's account, is not a stable endpoint. The "two cities" dynamic generates a resentment that the regime cannot contain indefinitely. The impoverished majority, unable to participate meaningfully in the political life that formally includes them, grows hostile to the institutions that have failed them. This hostility does not express itself as a coherent political programme, because the very conditions that produce it – the departure from common good, the emptying of political language, the managed narrowing of public discourse – have also deprived citizens of the resources to articulate an alternative. What emerges instead is a diffuse, reactive anger, directed not at the structural conditions of oligarchy but at whichever targets the most persuasive voice identifies as the source of the trouble. This is the structural opening that produces the demagogue: a figure who presents himself as the champion of the dispossessed, who rails against the elite on behalf of the common citizen, but whose actual effect is the consolidation of personal power.³⁴ The demagogue is not an accident of oligarchic governance; he is its product. He is generated by the very dynamics that Plato describes: concentrated wealth produces dispossession, dispossession produces resentment, resentment produces a demand for a champion, and the champion, unchecked by any shared standard of competence or virtue, tends toward tyranny. The structural conditions that Plato identifies – concentrated wealth, the collapse of shared values, a demobilised and resentful citizenry, and a political class that has forfeited its legitimacy – are not hypothetical. They are descriptive of the trajectory that contemporary liberal democracies have been following, and it is this trajectory that the next section will examine in its tyrannical dimension.

The rise of tyranny

The previous section argued that contemporary liberal democracies exhibit the structural features of Plato's oligarchy: concentrated wealth determining political power, the maintenance of democratic appearances to forestall resistance, and the systematic exclusion of the majority from meaningful political participation. But on Plato's account, oligarchy is not the final stage of degeneration. It produces conditions that push the regime further, toward tyranny. To understand how this transition works, it is necessary to return to the analogy between the city and the soul, because the tyrannical turn is not merely a political event. It is, for Plato, a corruption of the soul itself – and it is this corruption that manifests, at the level of the state, as the breakdown of all remaining constraints on power.

In the just city, the rulers are oriented toward the form of the good, and this orientation disciplines their conduct from within. The philosopher-ruler is restrained not by external enforcement alone but by the internal structure of a soul in which reason governs the appetitive part. Even the lawless desires, which Plato describes as surfacing in dreams, when reason sleeps, are present in the just soul.³⁵ The difference is that a rational ordering principle holds them in check. The just ruler has a standard against which to measure his own appetites, and that standard is not of his own making. This is why Plato insists that the rulers of the just city must be educated in philosophy: not as an ornament, but as the mechanism by which their appetites are subordinated to a higher aim. The oligarchic ruler has no such aim. Having replaced the love of wisdom with the love of wealth, and governing a regime in which the only criterion of status is the size of one's estate, the oligarch lacks any internal principle that would check the growth of increasingly extreme desires. Worse, he is surrounded by flatterers – people whose function is not to challenge or restrain the ruler but to gratify whatever appetites arise.³⁶ Where the philosopher was surrounded by fellow seekers of the good, the oligarch is surrounded by those whose livelihood depends on indulging him. In such an environment, there is no voice that says "this desire is lawless." There is no shared conception of virtue against which to measure it. The trajectory is structurally predictable: unnecessary desires grow into lawless ones, because the regime's own structure cultivates tyrannical souls by removing every constraint that would prevent the escalation.

In the tyrannical soul, a single master passion, what Plato calls "eros" in its most degenerate form, seizes control and subordinates everything else to its service.³⁷ Translated to the level of the state, the ruling class, no longer disciplined by any shared conception of the good, comes to treat the political order as an instrument for the satisfaction of private appetites. The scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein illustrates this dynamic with uncomfortable precision.³⁸ What makes the case diagnostically significant is not its moral horror, which is self-evident, but its structural features: conduct sustained over decades, implicating figures from politics, finance, and institutional power across multiple countries; conduct that was not secret in any meaningful sense, since rumours circulated for years and some accusations reached public awareness long before any legal consequence followed; and institutions formally charged with preventing such conduct failing to act until the situation became publicly undeniable, with a conspicuous absence of full accountability even then. On the Platonic reading, this is exactly what the framework predicts. When formlessness prevails, the lawless desires that were always present in the rulers surface unchecked, and the institutional mechanisms supposed to provide accountability become instruments of concealment. The rulers pretend not to notice, because noticing would threaten the arrangement from which they benefit.

The structural point extends beyond any single scandal. The formlessness diagnosed by Saxonhouse, the moral fragmentation diagnosed by MacIntyre, and the managed democracy diagnosed by Wolin converge here: a system that cannot distinguish lawless from lawful desires at the level of public morality will eventually fail to restrain them at the level of elite conduct. The forms of accountability persist: investigations are opened, hearings are held. But they operate in a moral vacuum, and the vacuum ensures that nothing decisive follows.

This brings us to the deepest layer of Plato's diagnosis: the tyrant is not free. He is the most enslaved of all men, governed by desires he cannot control.³⁹ The tyrannical city is likewise not powerful but the weakest of all cities, because it has no internal coherence. Liberal democracies exhibiting these features are not strong states abusing their power out of some excess of conviction. They are weak states that have lost the capacity to govern according to any principle at all. What remains is the shell of democratic institutions and the reality of oligarchic-tyrannical power – driven by the private appetites of those who hold it, incapable of producing the common good that the liberal tradition promised. MacIntyre's image of a society using moral fragments without understanding the theories that gave those fragments meaning applies here as well. What we are left with is not liberal democracy in any sense that Locke, Mill, or Rawls would recognise. It is, in Plato's terms, a tyranny of the soul writ large – a political order enslaved to appetites it can no longer name, let alone govern.

The common good discussion

What the previous three sections have shown is what happens when the common good dissolves: shared meaning fragments, oligarchy fills the vacuum, and tyranny follows from the formlessness that oligarchy entrenches. But this diagnostic argument leaves a constructive question unresolved. If the common good is the precondition that liberal institutions cannot themselves generate, then what would a sufficient common good actually look like, and can liberal theory supply it without abandoning its foundational commitments?

Rawls represents the minimalist view. His overlapping consensus is the most sophisticated attempt, within the liberal tradition, to construct a common good that can survive reasonable disagreement about ultimate ends. The political conception is deliberately freestanding: it makes no claim about what is ultimately good, only about what free and equal citizens could agree to as the framework for their cooperation. This thinness is not a weakness on Rawls' own terms. It is the condition that allows the consensus to be genuinely overlapping rather than imposed. But, as the earlier discussion showed, the criterion of reasonableness does the smuggling work that the official theory disowns. Citizens are admitted to the consensus only if they already accept the moral primacy of free and equal cooperation, which is precisely the liberal commitment the consensus was supposed to derive rather than presuppose. The common good Rawls offers, if it is one at all, is therefore not a discovery of what citizens with diverse comprehensive doctrines actually share, but a reflection of what those who already share liberal premises will recognise as common. As an organising principle for a political community, it is too thin to generate the substantive moral substrate it requires.

Plato holds the opposite view. The Form of the Good is not negotiated, not constructed, not the residue of overlapping consensus among the differently committed. It is an objective reality, accessible only to those who underwent the philosophical education.⁴⁰ The just city is just because its rulers have genuine knowledge of the good and order the city in accordance with it.⁴¹ This is, as a substantive answer, almost everything that Rawls' procedural minimum is not: it is thick, discovered, and action-guiding. The price is obvious. A common good that depends on the philosophical training of a small ruling class and the deference of the rest is incompatible with the liberal premise that citizens are free and equal. What Plato shows, by going as far as he does, is what a sufficient common good actually looks like – substantive enough to discriminate between lawful and lawless desires, action-guiding enough to constrain the rulers from within. The diagnostic value is precisely that this is exactly what the liberal theorists discovered they needed and could not supply. Before turning to MacIntyre, one implication of the Platonic position for the argument so far deserves to be marked. MacIntyre's diagnosis identifies what fragments when the substantive common good dissolves: moral vocabulary, public debate, the categorial distinctions on which critique depends. Plato's framework identifies what fragments within those who rule — the internal ordering that holds unnecessary desires in check, the standard not of their own making, the psychic structure that permits self-discipline at all. The two are complementary, not redundant: semantic collapse outside the ruling class, psychic disintegration within it. It is their combination, and not either alone, that produces the specifically oligarchic-tyrannical form this essay has been diagnosing.

MacIntyre occupies the third position, and it is the one my argument most resists flattening into the spectrum. Like Plato, he holds that the common good must be substantive: a community without a shared conception of human flourishing cannot sustain a coherent moral language, let alone a coherent political one, which is the burden of his argument that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality without appeal to a telos was always going to fail.⁴² But he locates the source of the substantive good differently. It is not accessed by philosophical contemplation. It is carried, transmitted, and embodied within particular moral and religious traditions, where practices of virtue make a shared life intelligible to those who participate in it. This is, in effect, a non-secular Plato: substantive in the requirement, but particularist rather than universalist in the source. The position has an empirical advantage that Plato's cannot claim. The communities in which something like a shared common good is still operative are not philosophical thought-experiments; they exist in religious orders, in some traditional villages, in pockets of associational life that have resisted the dominant neutralist culture.⁴³ MacIntyre's position is therefore not utopian. It points to a third route between Rawls's procedural minimum and Plato's metaphysical maximum: a common good substantive enough to do the work, but rooted in lived tradition rather than in claims to objective philosophical access.

Setting the three positions against one another sharpens the precise claim of this essay – a substantive common good is required. The diagnostic sections have shown what its absence produces. The procedural minimum that Rawls offers is too thin to be the substrate it presupposes. The metaphysical maximum that Plato offers is incompatible with the liberal premise of free and equal citizenship. MacIntyre's tradition-embedded conception meets the substantive requirement without smuggling in either the philosophical aristocracy of the Republic or the circular reasonableness of the overlapping consensus. This licenses a careful conclusion: it is not that liberalism, in every conceivable form, is incompatible with the substantive common good its theorists have always quietly assumed; rather the dominant, post-Enlightenment, neutralist form of liberalism – the form whose theoretical apex is Rawls and whose practical residue is the managed democracy diagnosed earlier – has taken that incompatibility as its operating principle. The question of whether some other form of liberalism, more hospitable to a thicker conception of shared good, could supply what its dominant form cannot, is not one that the existing liberal tradition has answered. It is the question that the structural degeneration of contemporary liberal democracies makes urgent.

Considering objections

One potential objection targets the central claim about the common good. One might argue that liberalism possesses the internal resources to generate and sustain the normative commitment this article claims has eroded. William Galston's liberal pluralism represents the most sophisticated version of this argument. Galston contends that a liberal state can, through civic education, cultivate the virtues and competences required for liberal citizenship, while still respecting the expressive liberty of individuals and groups to live according to their own conceptions of the good.⁴⁴ On this view, the shared values need not precede liberal institutions; they can be produced by them.

But Galston's own formulation reveals the difficulty. He concedes that expressive liberty has civic preconditions, particularly what he calls "internalized norms of self-restraint when faced with practices that reflect understandings of the good life one does not share." These norms are precisely the shared normative substrate that this article has argued is eroding. Galston's theory does not explain where they come from if not from a pre-existing moral consensus; it presupposes what it claims to produce. His further concession that groups unwilling to share the common purpose may be granted a kind of intermediate citizenship effectively acknowledges that liberal pluralism cannot accommodate all forms of value diversity within a single coherent political order.⁴⁵

Finally, one might object that the diagnosis presented here is simply too pessimistic. Liberal democracies, whatever their flaws, still protect basic rights, still permit peaceful transitions of power, and still offer their citizens more freedom than most historical alternatives. This is true, but it does not address the argument. The question is not whether liberal democracies are better than the available alternatives – they may well be – but whether they are, in fact, what they claim to be. The formal mechanisms of democratic governance persist, but the substantive question is whether those mechanisms serve the function for which they were designed, or whether they have become rituals that legitimate oligarchic power. That elections are held does not settle the question of whether they are meaningful. The argument of this article is not that liberal democracies should be replaced, but that calling them liberal democracies may no longer be accurate.

Conclusion

If the label is no longer accurate, then the question becomes what these states actually are. The argument of this article has been that liberalism's theoretical coherence, from Locke's natural law through Mill's harm principle to Rawls's overlapping consensus, depends on a substantive common good its own theorists could not generate. Locke and Mill did not need to derive it; they wrote from within moral traditions that did the work invisibly. Rawls tried to reconstruct it from procedure alone, and the circularity of the result was less a slip than the signature of the attempt. A substantive common good turned out to be the precondition for liberalism, not its product; and when the dominant, neutralist form liberalism has since taken dismantled the tradition that used to supply it, the framework hollowed out, leaving formal structures intact while the substance they were designed to carry drained away.

Plato's Republic offered a diagnostic vocabulary for what fills the void. The formlessness that Saxonhouse identified in Plato's democracy matched the moral fragmentation MacIntyre diagnosed in contemporary liberal societies. The "two cities" of Plato's oligarchy matched the managed democracy Wolin described from empirical observation of Western institutions. The lawless desires of the tyrannical soul matched the unchecked appetites of a ruling class that has lost every internal constraint. These thinkers reached convergent conclusions from entirely independent starting points, and it is this convergence that gives the diagnosis its force.

The deepest insight, however, belongs to the analogy between the soul and the city. For Plato, the tyrannical city is the weakest of all cities because it has no internal coherence, just as the tyrannical soul is the most enslaved because it is governed by desires it cannot control. The contemporary liberal democracies described in this article are not strong states wielding excessive power. They are weak states, driven by appetites they can no longer name. MacIntyre warned that the societies of advanced Western modernity are "oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies."⁴⁶ What Plato's framework adds to that warning is the further diagnosis: these are not merely oligarchies. They are oligarchies whose rulers have tyrannical souls, governing cities that have forgotten what justice means. If there is a direction of recovery, it lies not in a thinner procedure or a thicker metaphysics, but in the third route this essay has considered: a substantive common good carried in lived tradition, of the kind toward which MacIntyre points. Whether any form of liberalism can take that route is the question this diagnosis leaves open. What we call liberal democracy may still be many things, but liberal, in any sense that the tradition's own thinkers would recognise, it is not.

References