In Defense of Plato

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Until recent years few reputations in philosophy and political theory seemed more assured of immortality than that of the author of The Republic. It has recently been charged, however, that Plato was the original designer of the Fascist state and a remorseless opponent of the open society. This book presents detailed consideration of Plato’s attitude toward elements in his cultural milieu: slavery, the unity of mankind, feminism, the status of Greek love, and other matters. Ronald Levinson concludes that if we are willing to look beneath the surface of dangerous analogies and crooked parallels we can still find that Plato was a man of deep integrity, a thinker of perennial fruitfulness, and one of the supreme masters of the poetry of thought.