The question of Plato's notion of 'leadership' in the Republic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is obviously no question that the notion of "leadership" is central in Plato's Republic, nor is there apparently any question that it is crucial, since it is foundational for Plato's society. Writing his Republic, Plato's aim as he says, was to write a "theoretical constitution"(or to critically present the theoretical framework and principles for a constitution - logô politeian) in order to "establish a good society" (aristên polin oikizein). A good society, according to Plato's theory, is the one which is founded on a good principle and grounded on a good leadership, that is to say the principle of justice and the leadership of the philosopher. However, along with his notions of "society" and "justice", Plato's notion of "leadership" has been questioned and challenged by many (often quite vehemently, especially in the 20th C. and particularly after the Second World War) and seen as a totalitarian State under a dictatorial justice of an authoritarian ruler. Therefore, the trilogy of Society, Justice and Leadership, as the core of the Platonic Republic, demands and invites again a critical re-examination: What does Plato mean by "society", "justice" and "leadership" and what does he mean by "good" (aristê) as applied to them? Does Plato consider the holistic State as the best kind of Society and the hierarchical Jurisprudence as the perfect Principle? Does he consider the autocratic Potentate as the required Philosopher-king? What does he mean by the philosophical leader under the principle of justice which, in his view, is the bedrock for his constitutionally founded society? The present article proposes to re-examine this question relating to Plato's enigmatic and controversial notion of "leadership".
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".