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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the support of the Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundations, as well as Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. We have benefited from ongoing support from the Institute for Business in Society at the Darden School of Business, in particular Executive Director Joey Burton and the following researchers: Sergiy Dmytriyev, Megan Juelfs, Rebecca Little, Jenny Mead, Andrew Sell, Logan Spangler, and Salem Zelalem. We are grateful to Harry Lloyd for further research assistance.
Thanks also due to: Thom Little and Steve Lakis from the State Legislative Leaders Foundation; Professors Gregory Fairchild, Mary Margaret Frank, Jared Harris, Tim Rood, and Ben Wempe; Jennifer Hicks from the Darden Executive Programs; Jamie Dow and Christopher Megone from the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre, University of Leeds.
The development of this book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of the Oxford University Press, especially Peter Momtchiloff and Adam Swallow. We are also grateful to Jenny King for seeing the project through to the end. An earlier draft was seen by three anonymous readers for the Press, who provided us with incisive comments. Their advice helped transform the book into a much larger project than was initially conceived.
Finally, David Newkirk originally suggested that we work together. He has been a constant source of insight over the years.
Introduction
Setting the Scene
The Doctor
Captains and Navigators
The Artist
The Teacher
Doctors and Teachers
The Shepherd
The Weaver
The Sower
Teachers and Sowers
11. Appendix 1:
Plato and Modern Leadership Models
Conclusion
Plato’s Use of the Ship of State Image in the Republic
Appendix 2:
Interpreting the Cave Allegory
Appendix 3:
Extracts from Plato’s Dialogues
Bibliography Index
Introduction
Studies of leadership have proliferated in recent years, drawing on a wide variety of disciplines, among them history, management studies, political science, economics, and psychology. This is predominantly an academic phenomenon, but it exists alongside more informal, ‘self-help’ books, as well as autobiographies written by former CEOs and others. In the course of all this, a vast number of definitions and theories of leadership have been proposed, such as ‘transformational’, ‘servant’, ‘responsible’, ‘ethical’, and ‘thought’ leadership.
In this book, we adopt a very different approach, by going back to one of the greatest thought leaders of all time, the Greek philosopher Plato, and using his insights to throw light on contemporary theory and practice. The book combines an account of his thought with applications to modern case studies and leadership approaches. Plato wrote extensively on political philosophy, where he puts a great deal of focus on leadership: what kind of leaders there should be, how they are to be trained, and what kind should be avoided.1 Our view is that what he said about political leadership carries over well to other spheres, notably business.
His views on leadership are interesting in part because of the time in which he lived. Athens in the fifth century BCE, when he was born, was a place of extraordinary innovation cultural, intellectual, and political. But it was also a roller-coaster of a time, the highest achievements of the human mind matched by periods of extreme violence and chaos. All this gave him the opportunity to witness leadership at its best and its worst. It should also be said that he was not just a theorist, but an institutional leader in his own right: he created a vehicle for the dissemination of his ideas, called the ‘Academy’, a centre for teaching and research that was in many ways the inspiration for the modern university.2
Plato left behind around thirty books on a wide range of topics, ethics and politics being two of the most prominent. Although some of his writing is quite technical, it has a friendlier side, capable of tapping into the intuitions of his readers and appealing to their imagination. This is certainly the case when he writes about leadership. Across a number of his works, he uses the following models to understand the phenomenon: the shepherd the doctor the navigator the artist the teacher
• the weaver the sower.
Even before you read any of his works, you can see the appeal of these models. Each one points to certain features of leadership, which we intuitively recognize to be important. To compare a leader to a shepherd is to stress the notion of care; as someone who tends the flock, protecting it from dangers, the leader is the servant of their followers. The doctor is also at the service of his or her patients, focusing first and foremost on their well-being. This model also makes us think of various social or institutional ills that the leader might have to remedy. The navigator is someone who steers the passengers and crew through choppy waters. There is the idea of danger here, especially unpredictable dangers. Like the doctor model, there is also the idea of a specialized skill practised by the leader. This raises the question of exactly what expertise the leader will have, how they acquire it, and from whom. So too with the leader as teacher: now the idea is that you lead by informing and educating people. The relation between leader and follower is more intellectual than in the case of the shepherd, perhaps also the other two models as well: after all, we don’t think of navigators instructing their passengers, or even doctors their patients (though in this case we might).
The model of the artist emphasizes the importance of vision: just as a painter or a sculptor might look to a model and organize materials in its image, the leader is guided by a vision, which may be moral, social, or technological. The model of the weaver is all about cohesion: a weaver selects and then unites several different strands of wool into a single garment; likewise a leader needs to recruit the right people and, despite their very diverse talents and temperaments, bring them together into a unified team. Finally, the sower is someone who takes a more hands-off approach to leadership. Their aim is to generate ideas and initiatives for others to take up and then develop. The leader plays an important part in nurturing these ideas, but they are also happy for others to take the lead.
You might agree that these models have intuitive appeal. But perhaps they are too intuitive: some of them might feel like dead metaphors or clichés. But what Plato did was to take a set of homely images, some of them already in wide circulation (like the shepherd and the navigator), and give them a very distinctive twist. Sometimes he did this by honing in on specific details in a model, e.g. particular facts about disease, navigation, or weaving, and then using them to make the model illuminate features of leadership that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Sometimes he problematizes a model: for instance, he shows that modelling a leader on a doctor someone who prescribes unpalatable treatments raises awkward questions about how such a person will ever persuade their followers to take the cure. These are just two of the ways Plato deepens the salience of his different models; we shall encounter many more as we go on.
All these models bring out very different aspects of leadership. And this brings us to another feature of Plato’s approach. As a philosopher, he is often associated with the idea of finding a single definition for something, e.g. of justice, love, or knowledge a ‘one-size-fits all’ approach. But, for some reason, he tended not to take this approach with leadership. When we think about his list of models, the question is not which one of them is correct.
They might all be, in the sense that they capture certain aspects of the extraordinarily complex phenomenon of leadership. Each model may have its place in different contexts. Some situations require an educator; others a leader to navigate between various obstacles. No one leader imitates all the models all of the time; but each model may be apt for individual episodes in a leader’s career. Different cultures and contexts require different qualities; it is impossible as well as fruitless to boil leadership down to a single formula. The variety exhibited by Plato’s models helps bring out the sheer diversity of what may be involved.
The advantage of this approach is that it reflects the fact that ‘leadership’, like many terms that matter in human life, is so complex that it is almost impossible to pin down. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that it is impossible to give any kind of simple definition of the word ‘game’, familiar though it is. No one formula will fit all cases. Give it a try: ‘a game is a pastime, involving competition between two or more players.’ But this doesn’t work for all cases. Some games involve multiple players, but others, like patience, do not. Not all games involve winning and losing. Some are pastimes, but not all: think of professional chess players. For Wittgenstein, concepts like games involve whole lists of features, some, but not all, of which will crop up in any one instance; different games share some features with each other, but not all games have exactly the same features.3 To capture the point he used the term ‘family resemblances’: there might be a string of features, and different members of a family might have some on the list, but not others. Or it is like a rope that seems continuous, but is in fact made up of several overlapping strands, no one of which extends its whole length.
We take a similar approach with leadership: don’t expect there to be a single formula; the point of the models is to highlight different features. That said, there is plenty of overlap. The notion of care is very prominent in the cases of the shepherd, the doctor, and the navigator; expertise is essential for the doctor, the navigator, and the teacher; both the teacher and the sower enable others to become like themselves. The doctor and the artist have a prescription or model that may well be at odds with their followers’ desires or expectations, which means that leadership may require the willingness to challenge and confront.
All this helps to explain why Plato is such an attractive figure to use when thinking about leadership. However, most of the ideas we shall discuss comes from his political writings, which raises the question of how far one can use politics to throw light of other areas of life, especially business.4 Readers will be able to judge for themselves whether the models Plato used to understand political leadership can carry over to other fields. We see no reason why they should not: in all cases, we are dealing with the way human beings interact in groups focused on a common goal, and politics is only one arena in which this takes place. Indeed, we shall argue that in some cases Plato’s models fit other areas of leadership better than politics. Besides, many relationships in business are political: leaders have to work with people who are not necessarily employees; they have to find ways of influencing external stakeholders not unlike the way politicians have to win fellow citizens, lawmakers, and international partners over to their cause.
Outline of the book
Since Plato’s views on leadership were so influenced by the times in which he lived, we start in Chapter 1 with a sketch of the historical backdrop to his philosophy. After that, we proceed through the models one by one. In each case, we begin by exploring Plato’s use of the model, and discussing what was innovative about it, what may be problematic, and how it might be developed beyond the political context in which he originally proposed it. We then apply his thinking to our case studies: usually one from politics, the other from business. We close in Chapter 11 with a comparison between four of the most prominent modern theories of leadership and the Platonic models. At the end of the book, in Appendix 3, we have included extracts from Plato’s works where he sets out the models.
This book presupposes no prior knowledge of Plato and is designed to be accessible to readers new to his ideas. At the same time, we hope that those familiar with his philosophy will find it a fruitful way of re-reading his work. We have tried to represent his views accurately, but on occasion have felt free to adapt or amend them in the interests of making them more relevant to the present. As for our case studies, we have looked for examples to match the Platonic models, and tried to ensure that they really do map on to the key principles of the models we have chosen. Of course, matching theory to practice, the general to the particular, is a messy business (as Plato would have been the first to acknowledge). So we are not claiming that our case studies match the models point for point. But we do think that they illustrate some of the core components of the model in question. And we hope that the exercise of matching actual leaders to Plato’s models will stimulate readers to think of further examples for themselves.
Notes
The centrality of leadership to Plato’s political thought is the theme of Anton (2011).
See Meinwald (2020): ‘Plato’s Academy, founded in the 380s, was the ultimate ancestor of the modern university (hence the English term academic); an influential centre of research and learning, it attracted many men of outstanding ability’
Wittgenstein (1967) §66
We are certainly not the first scholars to have looked to Plato to throw light on business leadership. For some articlelength studies, see Klein (1988), Takala (1998), Cragg (2012), Cox and Crook (2015), and Bauman (2018) However, to our knowledge, no one has looked systematically across the different models and metaphors Plato provides for understanding the phenomenon, though Klein (1988) does focus on the model of the weaver.
1
Setting the Scene
The historical background
The Athenian empire
Born in 428/7 BCE, Plato worked mainly in the ancient Greek city of Athens until his death in 348/7. It is important to realize that the Greece in which he lived was not a single political unit as now, but a region that included many smaller political entities, or ‘city states’. Athens, one of the largest, probably had around fifty thousand male citizens at its height, but most were much smaller. They were scattered around the region now called Greece and in some cases beyond, e.g. in Asia Minor on what is now the western side of Turkey, as well as in Sicily and North Africa. Some of them occupied sizeable areas on the mainland, like Sparta; others were on islands, such as Lesbos, Thasos, and Naxos.
Far from being united, Greece was often torn apart by inter-state rivalry and, sometimes, war. But certain things held them together, e.g. a common language and a common religion. Sometimes they were also held together by a common enemy: the Persians out to the east, who occupied a vast territory, now including Turkey and Iran, and were always on the lookout for opportunities to increase that territory, notably by invading the Greeks. Between 480 and 478, five decades before Plato’s birth, several Greek states managed to unify themselves sufficiently to beat back the Persians. In the aftermath of their success, they wondered how they might sustain it. The answer was a defensive alliance, now known as the Delian League, which involved all its members pooling their resources to create a permanent fighting force against any future Persian attack. The leader of this alliance was Athens, which was one of the two most powerful Greek states. The other was Sparta, who decided not to participate.
The way in which this alliance was set up would have huge importance over the next few decades. Instead of having each member contribute troops, ships, and equipment to the force, it became the practice that most states would contribute money to a single fund, to be administered by the league’s most powerful member. In other words, Athens was given a war chest to create the largest fighting force the Greeks had ever known. But it was not long before the Delian League turned into an Athenian empire: the other states had given Athens the resources not just to defend them from the Persians, but also to make them bend to its will. What was originally intended as a contribution to the defence fund became a system of
enforced taxation to the Athenians. If an individual member decided they did not like the way the ‘league’ was going and wanted out of it, Athens could simply use its military power to bring them back into line. This they did on a number of occasions, when individual states tried to secede: the Athenians invaded their land and took a series of retaliatory measures, including financial penalties (indemnities), the demolition of defensive walls, internal political interference, and expulsions. (The most extreme example was the city of Scione, which revolted in 423: the Athenians killed the men of fighting age and enslaved the women and children.) So, under the guise of shepherding its fellow Greeks into a defensive alliance, the Athenians had turned itself into a tyrant and indeed some of them admitted as much.1
The empire meant an influx of wealth into Athens. It became a vibrant metropolis and a hub of innovation, with some extraordinary achievements to its credit in architecture, literature, science, and philosophy. Despite these achievements, Plato was a stern critic of the empire, as we shall see not so much because of the treatment meted out to the subject states, but because of the moral harm it did to the Athenians themselves. He likens them to a sickly patient, bloated by wealth and leading a life of excess.2
Athenian democracy
The most important Athenian innovation for our purposes was political. In the decades before Plato’s birth, Athens developed a system of democracy. Its emergence was a gradual process, but a decisive point came in 462, when two politicians, Ephialtes and Pericles, enacted a series of reforms. The democratic system they entrenched has been celebrated as one of the most extraordinary experiments in political history. At its heart was the Assembly, the supreme body responsible for legislation and particular decision-making. Any male citizen, whatever his background or status, could turn up to listen to a debate and vote. They were also entitled to speak in it. This was a direct democracy, not one in which you elect representatives to do your voting for you. In addition, there was the Council, a group of five hundred citizens, chosen by lot and (among other things) charged with drawing up the agenda for each meeting of the Assembly. At any one time, they had ten ‘generals’ (stratēgoi), chosen by election rather than lot, charged with day-to-day decision-making and (as their name suggests) military operations. The law courts were also democratically managed, with sizeable juries chosen from among the citizens. The courts were an important part of political life, as people could use them to eliminate political rivals by hauling them up on charges of corruption.
The fortunes of the democracy ebbed and flowed, and its fate was very much bound up with the military fate of Athens. In running its empire, Athens came into conflict with Sparta, the other main power of Greece. Shortly before Plato’s birth, in 431, the two started a war, known as the Peloponnesian war, which dragged on for over two decades. Sparta was eventually the victor, and the defeat led to political chaos in Athens. When it surrendered in 404, its democracy was replaced by a dictatorship the rule of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. (It had also been temporarily replaced with an oligarchy in 411.) But their regime was so
brutal and divisive that they lasted only a year. Democracy was restored in 403 and remained in place for the next few decades, the period when Plato was most active as a philosopher. There is plenty of room for debate as to how democratic the Athenian system actually was. Although all male citizens, whatever their background, were entitled to vote, women were completely excluded; there was also a huge slave population in the city. It is even a matter for debate how much power the male citizens wielded: the historian Thucydides said that, when Pericles was general, Athens was in name a democracy, but in reality was ruled by its foremost citizen.3 But what matters for our purposes is Plato’s view. To judge from some of his works, he was in no doubt that the system put power in the hands of the people; he explicitly denies that Pericles was master of the people: on the contrary, he just pandered to their whims.4
In taking this position, Plato was emphasizing the political importance of rhetoric. For him, this gave rise to the phenomenon of political demagogues: those who work out what the people want to hear and say it back to them. For him, such figures were not leaders, but followers. True leadership requires someone to confront the will of the people.
Even from this brief sketch, we can see why some of the leadership models mentioned in the Introduction appealed to Plato. If imperial Athens was like a sickly patient, the task of the leader would be akin to that of a doctor. The political chaos that marked the first thirty years of Plato’s life the collapse of the democratic regime, the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, and the subsequent restoration of democracy would have made the navigator an appropriate image: a leader who can steer the ship of state even through the worst of storms. The experience of tyranny in 404–403 would have made Plato attracted to a model that characterizes the leader in the very opposite way: the shepherd, wholly devoted to the well-being of his flock. And amid all the chaos, leaders need the courage and independence of mind to think outside the box and form their own vision of how the state should be run; hence the model of the artist. Finally, since the Athenians were tearing themselves apart, an appropriate model of leadership is the weaver, capable of uniting all citizens into a single web of state.
The intellectual background
Because of the importance of public speaking in democratic Athens, people started to ask how they could acquire the art of rhetoric. To meet the demand, a group of professional teachers arose, called the sophists. Travelling around Greece, but with a special interest in Athens, they professed to teach young men hungry for power how to succeed in politics. One of them, Gorgias of Leontini (in Sicily), professed only to teach rhetoric. Other sophists, like Protagoras of Abdera, also taught their students how to argue their case in law courts. What he and his like were offering was the ability to help even those who had all the odds stacked against them. This meant the ability to ‘make the weaker argument the stronger’, as they put it. All this gave the sophists a reputation for twisting the truth and manipulating their audiences; they were also accused of ‘corrupting the young’ i.e. all those who spent their money trying to acquire forensic and rhetorical skills. But, for all the criticism, they were
also intellectuals of a more serious kind: they wrote books on rhetoric, truth, and the relation between law and morality, among other subjects. Though the evidence is fragmented, they were clearly an intellectual force to be reckoned with.
Amid all the controversy surrounding the sophistic movement was another intellectual, the philosopher Socrates. Unlike the itinerant sophists, he never left his native city of Athens except to go on military campaign a couple of times, as required by the law. He was born forty years before Plato, and spent his life in philosophy, especially moral philosophy. He wrote nothing down, and claimed not to know anything, although he certainly held strong views about ethics, politics, religion, and human psychology. Instead, he went round questioning others, especially those who claimed expertise for themselves, his favourite quarry being anyone who claimed to have ethical knowledge. For instance, on one occasion he interrogated two Athenian generals about the nature of courage, only to reveal their ignorance on the matter;5 likewise he showed the sophist Protagoras, who claimed to teach virtue, that he had no understanding of the subject.6 For him, such conversations were a way of disabusing others of their ignorance and forcing them to interrogate their own beliefs. He likened himself to a gadfly buzzing around a horse that wanted to go to sleep. In a similar way, he tormented his fellow Athenians with questions, trying to stop them falling into a state of intellectual complacency.7
In one sense he was extraordinarily successful. Young men, including the rich and talented, flocked to join his circle. Although they presumably received the same interrogatory treatment he meted out to others, it was doubtless entertaining to see him knocking the great and the good off their pedestals. The great and the good, however, were not so pleased. Over time, momentum began to build against him. In the end, he was prosecuted for ‘corrupting the young’, as well as holding unorthodox religious beliefs. Although he had always tried to distance himself from the sophists, he was in effect grouped with them in the minds of his contemporaries and considered just as dangerous. He was tried at the age of 70, in 399, and found guilty. His sentence was death by drinking hemlock. Views differ on exactly why he was accused of corrupting the young. One explanation is that the young men who followed him around learnt to imitate his methods of interrogation and humiliate their elders, rather as he had done.8 Their victims therefore blamed him for leading the young men astray. Another explanation is that he was perceived as having influenced a group of younger politicians who had been complicit in some of the worst anti-democratic plots of recent years. Notice that his trial happened in 399, when democracy had been restored after the rule of the thirty tyrants in 404–403, and those leading the charge against him were prominent democrats. The younger politicians associated with Socrates included Alcibiades, who had not only helped undermine Athenian democracy in 411, but also betrayed the city to the Spartans in the later stages of the Peloponnesian war. Two other members of Socrates’ circle, Critias and Charmides, had been among the Thirty Tyrants in 404–403. Seen in this respect, Socrates’ dealings with the young appeared downright sinister, at least to the Athenian democrats.
His works
Plato was born into a wealthy and well-connected family, but it was his association with Socrates that really determined the course of his life. He joined his circle while young, following their conversations and engaging in philosophical debate. For Plato, Socrates was an object of fascination and love. As well as being a great philosopher, he also saw him as a leader a political leader, no less:9 though never elected to office, Socrates lived his life as a public intellectual, engaging directly with his fellow citizens stirring them out of their slumbers like a gadfly. This idea is what lies behind another of our models: the leader as teacher. Even if Socrates ultimately failed, for Plato he still left behind an ideal of how leaders should interact with their followers.
After the death of Socrates, Plato devoted himself wholeheartedly to philosophy. He did so in at least two ways: first, as an author of the thirty or so works that have come down to us; second, as the founder of a philosophical school, the Academy, which served as a training ground for future generations of philosophers.
A striking feature of his works is that they are almost all dialogues conversations between two or more people. Interestingly, he never appears as one of the speakers, and in the great majority of cases Socrates is the lead interlocutor: he does most of the talking and, when there is an argument to be won, he almost always wins it. This is part of Plato’s tribute to his mentor, but it raises a number of problems for his readers. When Plato has Socrates speak, is he reporting what the historical figure actually said, or is he using Socrates as the mouthpiece for his own philosophical views, on the grounds that it was Socrates who inspired him to take up a life of philosophy and to form his own theories and ideas?
A fairly standard answer to this question is that in his earlier works Plato does remain faithful to the historical Socrates, not reporting his words verbatim, but certainly capturing his distinctive way of doing philosophy and showing the reader the kinds of views he held and the arguments he used to defend them. As he developed, Plato went on to form his own views, over a wider range of topics than Socrates had ever investigated, but until the last years of his life still retained Socrates as the principal spokesman.
At any rate, the dialogues range over a very large number of themes, but ethics and politics are some of the dominant ones. It is here, of course, that we find his discussions of leadership.10 He retained an interest in the subject throughout his life, and in this book we shall be looking at a range of dialogues that are thought to span the early, middle, and later stages of his career.
His most famous work is the Republic, which is also one of his longest. It was probably written in mid-career, and, although Socrates is the main interlocutor, the views he expresses are most likely those of Plato himself, not the historical Socrates. As its title suggests, it is a work of political philosophy, and is best known for its account of what Plato considers to be the perfectly just state. In constructing this ‘ideal’state, he directs much of his attention to the kind of rulers it needs, and those whom it should avoid, and it is here that some of the most famous proposals of the work are to be found: for instance, his view that women should be allowed to rule alongside men, which was very radical for its time.
Because the work is full of passages about leadership, it contains several of the models that we shall be discussing: the doctor, navigator, shepherd, artist, and teacher. There is also a dialogue written somewhat earlier, the Gorgias. In this work he contrasts the true political leader with the demagogue, and puts the doctor model centre stage. Later on, we shall look at three dialogues Plato wrote after the Republic. Two are overtly about politics: the Statesman and the Laws. In the first we find the model of the weaver, while in the second (written right at the end of Plato’s life) we find the doctor and the teacher from before, but now synthesized into a composite model.
The other dialogue we consider is the Phaedrus, whose primary topic is the use of words, whether spoken or written, to influence others. It is here that we find the model of the sower, a thought leader who manages to use words not just to change the present, but to create an enduring legacy for the future.
The Republic
Since we shall be focusing so much on the Republic, it will be useful to have a brief introduction here. Consisting of ten ‘books’ (i.e. chapters), this is a work about justice. It begins with an attempt to define justice and quickly leads into an argument between Socrates and one of the sophists, Thrasymachus, who has a highly distinctive take on the value of being just. Justice, despite all the fine words that have been spoken in its praise, is a mug’s game: when you fulfil your obligations, like keeping your promises and paying your dues, it is usually your loss and someone else’s gain. Anyone who knew their own interest, and was skilled in achieving it, would avoid justice like the plague. The only truly happy person is someone who is unjust, a point epitomized by the tyrant: someone who manages to enslave others to his own will. Throughout the argument, Socrates takes the opposite point of view, and tries to persuade his Thrasymachus that justice is in fact in our interest.
For our purposes, the importance of this argument lies in what it has to say about a leader’s motivations: for Thrasymachus, the leader acts purely in his own self-interest. To this end he creates rules of justice for his subjects obey, but only so that they will better serve his interests. (Hence it is not in their interest to obey such rules.) By contrast, Socrates insists several times that true leaders rule only in the interest of their citizens, and to make this point he appeals to the figures of the doctor, navigator, and shepherd, whom he thinks also act only for the benefit of those in their care (patients, passengers, sheep).
At the end of Book 1, Thrasymachus gives up: he is unconvinced, but unable to find a way of refuting his opponent. Yet it seems that Plato was dissatisfied with Socrates’ defence of justice here, because from Book 2 onwards he has two other interlocutors (his brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus) press Socrates for a more convincing defence of justice. So they start all over again, first trying to define justice and then explaining why we should care about it. The subsequent discussion operates at two levels, sometimes focusing on what it means to be a just individual, at others on what it is for a state to be just. In the latter case, this means describing an ideal state, and it is this aspect of the Republic that we shall be
examining.
To see what justice in a state is like, imagine trying to found one that is completely just. What would it look like? What sort of constitution would it have? Would it be a democracy, for instance? Who would its leaders be, and how would its resources be distributed? What sort of education would its citizens have? What differences, if any, would there be between the way men and women are treated? Plato begins his account of the ideal state in Book 2 by arguing that, since no one is self-sufficient, states exist in order to serve our mutual needs (369a–b). But these needs are best met if each person specializes in one task (rather than diffusing their energies over several), and this task is the one for which they are best suited by nature and temperament. In general, Plato thinks there are three kinds of task economic, military, and ruling. Hence the state has three corresponding classes of citizen, called ‘producers’, ‘auxiliaries’, and ‘guardians’.
This arrangement, in particular the principle of specialization, explains one of the most notorious features of Plato’s political philosophy: his rejection of democracy. Everyone will contribute to the state according to their natural abilities: if, at root, your talents lie in one direction, you will be trained in that profession and serve the interests of the state that way, whether as a soldier, farmer, or doctor. But you will not be allowed any share in political decision-making simply because you are a citizen. After all, we wouldn’t hand over decisions about how to make ships to just anyone, only to those with the appropriate skill. So why should we think any differently when it comes to matters of the greatest importance political decision-making?
As a result, whenever Plato discusses leadership, as he does very frequently in the work, he puts a great deal of emphasis on the need for expertise. This leads into the question of what exactly the leaders’expertise consists in (Books 5–6), and how they acquire it (Book 7). The need for expertise will be a recurrent theme in this book, especially with the models of the doctor, navigator, and teacher. It also raises problems: the leaders’ expertise creates a gap between them and their followers. The gap may be so large the leader might seem alien to their followers; and the decisions they make on the basis of this expertise may appear incomprehensible and unpalatable. What will induce the followers to accept them?
Another feature of the ideal state is the importance of harmony and unity among its citizens; for Plato, this explains what makes it ideal. The citizens will all be focused on the common good, empathizing with each other’s pleasures and pains, like a single body where pain felt in one part is felt throughout (V 462a–464b). The question arises as what will ensure such harmony among the citizens, and many of Plato’s detailed proposals about education (Books 2–3 and 10) and the distribution of resources (Books 3–4) are intended to answer it. In the light of his own experience, he was painfully aware that such an ideal might seem impossible to realize. But this vision of social harmony was one he thought should be pursued hence his interest in the leader as artist, who works with his materials to make them approximate his model as closely as possible. Also, because Plato’s vision is all about harmony and balance between the different elements in the state the parts of the ‘body politic’ it also fits with the model of the doctor: as we shall see in the next chapter, the Greeks thought health lies in the correct balance or harmony between different bodily elements (the four ‘humours’).
This is only a quick sketch of the ways in which the Republic will be relevant to us. We shall dip further into the work as appropriate: the importance of social harmony will be important in Chapters 2 and 4 (the doctor and the artist); expertise in Chapters 3 and 5 (the navigator and the teacher). We do not wish to overload our account of each model, so when it comes to narrating Plato’s views we shall stick to what is strictly necessary in the main part of each chapter, but then provide interested readers with more details in Appendices 1 and 2.
Plato’s biography
These are the different dialogues we shall be discussing. But not all the works that have been handed down under Plato’s name are dialogues. We also have a collection of thirteen letters, all purporting to be written in his own person, and often containing biographical information. The problem is that we cannot be sure if they are authentic or if they were forged (a common practice in antiquity). Some are definitely fakes (because they contain highly improbable or anachronistic claims), but there is one that has long fascinated scholars: the Seventh Letter. In it, the author (Plato?) explains why he went into philosophy in the first place.
As a young man he intended to enter public life, but abandoned his ambitions after experiencing the political chaos following the end of the Peloponnesian war, especially the rule of the thirty tyrants and the appalling treatment of Socrates by the restored democracy in 399. Instead of going into active politics, he spent his time reflecting on how a state should be governed, who should lead it, and what kind of leaders they should be.11
But most of the letter is taken up with a different tale about how, much later on, Plato was invited by a politician in Sicily to educate its young ruler, Dionysius II. Here was an opportunity to implement the proposals he had made in the Republic. Would he take the bait and finally venture into practical politics? In the event he yielded to temptation, with disastrous results: Dionysius proved to be shallow and corrupt, wholly incapable of fulfilling Plato’s ideals of political leadership. He eventually fled the island in despair, and the politician who had invited him was eventually assassinated.
We do not know how much of this is true, even if it makes a good story. But if we trust the letter, we would have to conclude Plato’s attempts at political leadership were a disaster. Perhaps he was just not cut out for the role; or maybe the task of reforming Sicily would have defeated anyone. Either way, he would have been better off staying in Athens. The moral of the story might seem to be that Plato was great as an other-worldly intellectual, but he should never have dipped his toe into the ‘real world’.
Actually, this is not quite true. We mentioned above that Plato’s philosophical career included not only his intellectual work (in a narrow sense), but also the establishment of the Academy, an institute of higher education and research. The range of disciplines included philosophy of course, but many others, e.g. mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology. Given this breadth of interests, it is quite appropriate to see the Academy as a small-scale university. What is so interesting about the Academy is its legacy. One of his first batch of students was Aristotle, and long after Plato’s death his school continued to have a deep influence on the
development of philosophy. So it has to be remembered that Plato, whose views on leadership are the inspiration for this book, was himself a leader who managed to create an institution that endured for about three hundred years (until it was disbanded after the Roman invasion of 88 BCE). In this respect, Plato was the archetypical sower.12
Notes
According to Thucydides, Pericles described the Athenian empire as a tyranny in 2.63, as did Cleon in 3.37.
Gorgias 517a–519b 2.65.
Gorgias 516d–517c.
At least, according to the evidence of Plato’s early dialogue, the Laches
This encounter is depicted in Plato’s Protagoras.
Plato Apology 30e
Apology 23c–d
Gorgias 521d.
Plato uses different Greek words to describe a leader One is hēgemōn, which parallels our word ‘leader’ by coming directly from the Greek verb for ‘lead’ or ‘guide’. Another term is archōn: a ruler, or one who holds office. A less common word is prostatēs, which can also mean a ‘protector’: someone who stands in front a group and defends their interests Plato uses the word in this narrower sense when he says a tyrant, however powerful, is not a prostatēs (Republic Book 8, 566d).
324b–326b.
This chapter has given only an outline account of the background to Plato’s philosophy Readers in search of further introductions to some of the topics discussed here will find plenty of resources available. For an overview of Athenian history in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, see Cartledge (2011) ch 8, esp 72–9 A useful introduction to Athenian democracy can be found in Lane (2014) 95–115, esp 103–8 On the sophistic movement and its historical context, see Dillon and Gergel (2003) ix–xix and Adamson (2014) 77–83. The literature on the historical figure of Socrates is vast, but Adamson (2014) chs 13–14 and Lane (2014) 133–50 provide good entry points; Cartledge (2016) 175–80 discusses Socrates’ run-in with Athenian democracy. Some biographical details about Plato can be found in Adamson (2014) 102–8 and Thesleff (2012). For overviews of the Republic, see Lane (2014) 155–71 and Scott (2008); there is also a book-length introduction by Pappas (1995) and an engaging account of the work, with particular reference to its legacy, in Blackburn (2006).
2
The Doctor Plato
Overview
Plato first develops the model of the leader as doctor in one of his early works, the Gorgias. But it is also important to the Republic and resurfaces in his final work, the Laws. In this chapter we shall focus on the Gorgias and the Republic, leaving the Laws until later.
One point the doctor captures is that a leader is someone who serves the interests of their followers: it is clearly built into the very nature of the medical profession that doctors work for the good of their patients. Plato insists on this at the beginning of the Republic, when he is attacking the view that true political leaders serve only their own interests (341c–342e). It is to counteract such cynicism that he deploys the doctor as a parallel: it is simply not in the nature of the medical profession to work for anything other than the good of its patients. The same, he argues, applies to professionals in the political realm. Plato also invokes the ship’s captain to make the same point: again, they work purely for the safety and well-being of their passengers and crew.
We shall pick up this theme again when we look at the captain in the next chapter, and especially in Chapter 7, when we turn to the model of the shepherd (protector of the flock). But in this chapter we shall concentrate on features specific to the doctor model. Most pressing is the following question: if the leader is analogous to the doctor, what are the analogues of health and disease in an institution or in the people who constitute it? Once this is answered, we can ask what exactly it is that the leader as doctor does to promote and maintain institutional health.
Institutional health as balance
The Gorgias
In the Gorgias, Plato deploys the medical analogy at two levels: in the individual and the state. For our purposes, it is the institutional level that matters most, but to follow Plato’s train of thought we need to start with what he says about the individual. His point is that, just as there is a good condition for a person’s body, there is also one for their mind or psyche, to use the Greek word. Certain things bring pleasure in the short term, without being necessarily good for us. Psychic health consists in desiring things only in so far as they benefit us. Psychic disease, conversely, involves having desires for the wrong things (certain kinds of pleasure) and being unable to restrain them. It is the job of the doctor of the psyche to help us restrain such desires and reduce their strength, if not eradicate them altogether. Plato expresses this idea by saying that the doctor attempts to impose order (kosmos) on our desires or, to put it another way, find the appropriate balance between them (see e.g. 503d–508a). In ancient Greek medicine, health was very much a matter of achieving the right balance between different bodily elements. Called ‘humours’ (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), each one had a different nature, and a different effect on the whole system. If one of them was too dominant or too feeble, the body as a whole would suffer. Plato is taking this idea and applying it to the moral and psychological health of the individual.1
He also applies this reasoning at the level of the state. As a collective, the citizens might be pursuing the wrong goals, or at least certain goals too strongly at the expense of others. The role of the ‘doctor’, now standing as an analogue for the political leader, is to moderate such desires, and refocus the citizens on more sustainable goals. This is where Plato’s critique of the Athenian empire comes to the fore (as mentioned in Chapter 1).2 The supposedly great leaders of Athens, such as Pericles, pandered to the citizen’s desires for imperial expansion, and with it the increasing amounts of tax that the subject states were forced to pay. This actually had the effect of making the state yet more aggressive and its citizens increasingly intractable. The ‘leaders’ failed to lead in the true sense (they were effectively led by the people); they failed to rein in the citizen’s maximizing desires and achieve an orderly balance of objectives that would have kept Athens secure and sustainable. They allowed the city to pursue short-term gratification, whose effects only became known long after those leaders had died (515e–519b).
The Republic
In the Republic, Plato continues to apply the medical analogy to the moral and psychological well-being of both individual and state. In the case of the individual, he argues that each of us is a complex of different elements, psychological humours, if you like. We have physical desires or appetites (typically for food, drink, and sex); we experience emotions pride and anger, for example; but we also have the power of reason to form judgements and intentions about what is best to do for ourselves and others. It is all too easy for these different forces to come into opposition: our appetites are sometimes too strong, perhaps destructively so, as are our emotions. Both can easily come into conflict with reason and each other. Rationalist as he was, Plato thought that our lives go best when we use our reason to work out our good, and
then keep our appetites and emotions in tune with this. Such is the life of psychological health a harmonious balance between the different elements within us (cf. Book 4, 444b–e). This involves a life of moderation, where appetites are pursued only within strict limits, and emotions follow the call of reason not the other way around. Allowing our appetites and emotions to grow too strong is self-destructive, and a form of disease. The more they are indulged, the stronger they become, and the more they disrupt reason’s ability to deliberate about what is really in our interest. Indulging in strong emotions or appetites feels good in the short term; but there is always a price to be paid later on.
As in the Gorgias, the Republic also applies this type of analysis at the collective level. Plato describes a state (sounding suspiciously like Athens) that is forever increasing its ‘appetites’ the range of pleasures its citizens can indulge, and their variety and novelty (372e–373e). He is clearly thinking of the way an imperial metropolis like Athens could continually import ever-increasing and exotic enjoyments for its citizens. This maximizing approach leads the state to annex neighbouring territories, requiring ever more military adventures, and so inviting counter-attack. Such a city Plato describes as ‘diseased’,3 just as he had done in the Gorgias. By contrast, a healthy state would be one that lives within its means, keeps its population from growing too large or too small, and insists on harmonious relations both within and without (372c).
In all this, the Republic continues the thought of the Gorgias: political health involves the balance and moderation of the citizens’ desires. But in the Republic, Plato also applies the analogy of civic health and disease in a slightly different way. Any state will include a great diversity of citizens, with different temperaments, skills, professions, and so on. In the ideal state examined in the Republic there are, broadly, three types of citizens: the ‘producers’ (charged with securing the material necessities of life), the ‘auxiliaries’ (the military, responsible for the state’s defence), and the ‘guardians’ (the leaders of the state). The health of the state consists in each group sticking to its prescribed role, co-existing in a spirit of mutual trust. No one group should feel that the others are encroaching upon it in a way that undermines its well-being. Conversely, a diseased city (or indeed any kind of organization) would be one in which one group becomes too dominant and so undermines the successful functioning of the whole.
If this is Plato’s conception of political health, the task of the leader as doctor is all about finding a balance. On the first version of the model, there are different and competing goals that need to be balanced: if the state is suffering from some kind of disease, the problem may be that it is too fixated on one goal (or set of goals) at the expense of others. The political doctor needs to balance the citizens’ desires, taking particular care to restrain those that arise naturally, but are focused on short-term satisfactions.4 On the second version of the model, a balance needs to be found between groups within the state. These might be factions within it: some have become too powerful and are inhibiting the functioning of the others. So there is a need for establishing harmony between them. In fact, when he stresses this point, Plato goes beyond the need for mere harmony and order. As he makes clear in a number of places in the Republic, the ultimate goal is the unity of the state.5 This idea will be important to one of our case studies below.
So the leader needs to find a diagnosis; to do this they take stock of competing goals or conflicting groups, assess their relative importance to the state, and then do a health check on the current balance of power between them. This requires working out which ones have become too dominant and which need building up.
This process is especially important when we apply Plato’s notion of the doctor as leader to modern businesses and non-political organizations. Every one of these organizations have groups and individuals who are outside the organization who can affect whether or not the organization is successful. Leaders of the organization must balance or harmonize the interests of these groups, called ‘stakeholders’, if it is to achieve its objectives or purpose.
The problem of persuasion
Of course, it is not just a matter of reaching a diagnosis; the leader has to find some way of implementing it. They need to get the citizens to take the cure. At this point, we run into an obvious practical difficulty, one that Plato takes almost masochistic pains to expose. The leader has probably identified strong but damaging desires in the citizens, or groups among them that are too strong. These all need to be confronted so that the appropriate balance can be restored. It is inevitable that any leader who attempts this will run into opposition, possibly vehement. How can it be overcome?
In the Gorgias, Plato highlights this problem, but without offering a solution. As well as using the dialogue to propose the model of the doctor confronting the patients with a diagnosis they will not like, he also articulates the opposite viewpoint. According to this, it is never a good idea to obstruct the will of the people; anyone who did so would incur their wrath and be left defenceless against the onslaught that would inevitably follow. Instead, one should adopt the opposite strategy and assume the role of flatterer. Like the doctor, the flatterer is keenly aware of what the people desire, but takes the opposite step, indulging rather than confronting them. This is the figure of the political demagogue, whom we mentioned in Chapter 1. Much of the Gorgias is concerned with the contrast between the demagogue and the true political leader. In fact, Plato has another analogy: the chef who, instead of curing the body and promoting its good (health), gratifies it and promotes its shortterm pleasure. In response to those who think this a promising model of leadership, Plato points out that demagogues eventually become unstuck: they may indulge short-term desires, but the result is that the people become more demanding and less tractable as time goes on (515e–516c).
But if we are not to go down the route of the demagogue, do we instead bravely persevere with the role of the doctor? In the Gorgias there are several warnings about the dangers of opposing popular opinion, and the dialogue alludes to Socrates’ own fate (his trial and execution, described in Chapter 1). Towards the end of the dialogue he actually claims to have been almost the only Athenian who practised the true art of politics (521d), presumably referring to his own role as a public intellectual and would-be reformer. Knowing what was eventually going to happen to him, the reader can draw the obvious moral: you take on the
role of political doctor at your peril.
In the Republic, Plato is also pessimistic. If you live in a democracy like Athens, and have any principles, you would stay out of politics, because attempting to put your principles into action would be met with violent resistance. Instead, you should stay out of public life, like someone sheltering behind a little wall in a storm (Book 6, 496d). This is not so much an answer to the problem of persuasion as an admission of defeat. Fortunately, Plato returns to the problem in the Laws and seems more optimistic about a solution. More on that in Chapter 6.
Objectivity and expertise
There is one more implication of the doctor model that we need to highlight. Medicine is a science, and it is a matter of objective fact whether a certain state of the body constitutes health or not; that something is bad for us, medically speaking, means that it tends to promote disease, and this too is a matter of objective fact. If the leader is analogous to a doctor, and there are institutional equivalents of health and disease, the implication seems to be that these too are matters of objective fact.
Where the institutions are political, this assumption involves some controversy. Put strongly, the point might be that there are certain ways of life that are better or worse for the citizens than others, and it is the job of the political leaders to ensure that people live the lives they ought to. Plato certainly signed up to this approach; when he castigates his fellow citizens for having the wrong desires, he does so as if they are objectively wrong. But more the liberal-minded would venture to disagree. Surely it is up to individuals to determine what sort of lives they lead (within limits), not the state. Even here, though, one might say that certain kinds of political organization are better than others at allowing citizens to pursue their own ends autonomously. So there is still room for objectivity in how the state should be managed: some kinds of educational provision, for instance, are better than others at ensuring that the citizens flourish (in whatever paths they choose to pursue).
A closely related implication is that, on the doctor model, the leader needs expertise. Doctors are scientifically trained; they pass exams and obtain qualifications from recognized bodies; many of them continue to do research while still practising. How well does this apply to leadership? Once again we walk into controversy where political leadership is concerned. In what sense are politicians experts? Experts in what, exactly? People can of course take degrees in political science, sociology, law, and economics. Perhaps these are the analogues of biology, physiology, and anatomy. But the link seems less tight. Someone could be a successful political leader without any degrees in the social sciences; and another person with a distinguished track record in them might be useless in politics. As far as business is concerned, leadership in most modern organizations is rarely a scientific or objective matter. And yet, according to the doctor model, a leader must simultaneously have specialist expertise as well as deep organizational knowledge. Without such expertise, the leader will simply not be credible to the members of the organization or to external stakeholders.
For the moment we are just flagging up these issues. But we shall give some examples of what might count as a leader’s expertise in politics and business in our case studies below; and we return to the theme of leadership and expertise in the next chapter, where it is a central feature of the navigator model.6
The doctor. Key principles:
D1. The leader works for the benefit of their followers, not to pursue their own selfinterest.
D2. The leader has to find a balance: either between the various objectives of the organization, or between groups that constitute it.
D3. The leader confronts the tendency to favour short-term goals.
D4. The leader needs technical expertise.
D5. The leader faces a difficulty in persuading people to accept the cure.
Case studies
Plato’s model of the leader as doctor, caring for patients, based on expertise and a view of health, and being detached from the pressure to conform, is very relevant as we look at our modern institutions. His worry about the philosophy of maximization without constraints is alive in our current conversations about business and politics. To illustrate let’s examine two modern leaders who exhibit some of the characteristics of the doctor.
Roy Vagelos and river blindness
Roy Vagelos was CEO of Merck and Co. Born in 1929 to Greek emigrants in New Jersey, he received a partial scholarship and left his family’s small restaurant to pursue a career of a doctor.7 He trained as a biochemist and surgeon, obtaining his M.D. from Columbia University. After becoming a university professor, he authored more than one hundred scientific papers and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Upon joining Merck, he became the head of its research laboratories.
Merck is a very large and successful pharmaceutical company, originally German, but now based in the United States. In the 1980s, its scientists had recently discovered a compound that could be used to alleviate the symptoms of river blindness, a disease that
affected tropical areas of the world, especially in Africa and Central and South America. At that time, there were about 85 million people in thirty-five countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America at risk. Over 300,000 people had already become blind because of the disease, and a million more suffered from different degrees of visual damage; 18 million were infected but without serious symptoms so far.8
The cause: a parasitic worm carried by a tiny black fly which bred along fast-moving rivers…. When the flies bit humans the larvae of a parasitic worm entered the body These worms grew to more than two feet in length, causing grotesque but relative innocuous nodules in the skin. The real harm began when the adult worms reproduced, releasing millions of microscopic offspring, known as the microfilariae, which swarmed through body tissue A terrible itching resulted, so bad that some victims committed suicide After several years, the microfilariae caused lesions and depigmentation of the skin Eventually they invaded the eyes, often causing blindness 9
The testing, development, and distribution of Ivermectin (the potential drug for people struggling with river blindness) would require tens of millions of dollars in investment over ten to fifteen years. Unfortunately, the people suffering from the disease lived mainly in small settlements in developing countries and could not afford it.10
Roy Vagelos, head of Research and Development and himself a doctor, decided to go ahead with the project. Once it was completed, he was sure that he could find sponsors in governments to help Merck deliver the drug so that they could recoup at least some of their costs. As the project progressed so did Vagelos, becoming Chairman and CEO of Merck. After much effort to find partners with little success, Vagelos decided that the problem was so severe that Merck had to fund the distribution of the drug on its own. Since 1987 Merck has given away more than 2.9 billion doses of the drug, and eventually found a number of partners to help. ‘Today, the MDP [Mectizan Donation Program] is the longest-running, disease-specific drug donation program of its kind.’11 However, the financial burden of manufacturing and distribution has fallen largely on Merck.
The role of balance (D2); the leader confronts the tendency to favour short-term goals (D3).
Looking at Vagelos’ handling of this crisis, we can find many similarities with Plato’s leadership model of the doctor. To start with, there is the notion of corporate (or, more broadly, societal) disease. The leadership model of the doctor is only applicable when there is some sort of illness at issue. In this case, corporate America was suffering from a disease that conceptualized business as primarily about profits, money, and shareholders. But what about the other stakeholders who were affected by the choices of business leaders? Should leaders care for these stakeholders as well? Economist Milton Friedman famously said that the only responsibility of the executive was to maximize profits for shareholders.12 Merck had not fallen prey to this disease as it had a history of both increasing profits and pursuing a purpose that stated that ‘medicine is for people not profits’. However, even in a well-managed and high purpose-driven company like Merck, there was pressure to make profits.
