They Elected Their Kings, They Elected Their Emperors: Democracy Is Older Than You Think

Students hear of ‘democracy’ often for the first time in connection with ancient Athens. Those who have the opportunity to study closely, however, are often disappointed to find out that the Athenian version of democracy was exclusive: only a small number of people were voting citizens, and every effort was made to keep than number small.

The exclusive nature of Athenian democracy is significantly different from the inclusive democracy which has guided American political thought for more than two centuries.

Next, the Romans experimented with partially democratic systems. During the Roman Monarchy, from 753 BC to 509 BC, the Senate elected the kings, who were installed for life onto the throne. During the Roman Republic, from 509 BC to 27 BC, there were a few faint elements of democracy in the elections of consuls and tribunes; censors sometimes elevated elected magistrates to the Senate.

But a full-throated systematic democracy, with the free elections of representatives, was still in the future.

The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) would be one of the first — perhaps the first? — political institutions to have a truly elected leader. The reader will remember Voltaire’s old joke: The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Instead it was a secular middle European defensive confederation.

Charlemagne was crowned emperor of most of Europe in 800 AD, and after his death, his dominions were ruled by several generations of his descendents on a hereditary pattern. This Carolingian dynasty eventually dissolved into chaos. The dominions were regrouped and reorganized into what would become the HRE.

The HRE followed an ancient pattern from middle and eastern Europe in which kings were elected, often by a council of feudal lords. The feudal system was localized, with many lords each having his own small territory. The lords were obligated to the peasants who lived on their land; legal documents detailed the responsibilities of the lords to the peasants. The lords functioned as representatives of the peasants in electing a king.

Thus Conrad of Franconia was elected in 911 AD, and his successor, Henry the Fowler, in 919 AD. Here is a clear and early case of an elected leader.

England introduced the notion of limited government in several documents. In 1100 AD, Henry I issued a ‘Charter of Liberties’ (also known as The Coronation Charter or The Statutes of the Realm). In 1215, King John consented to the Magna Charta. In 1689, Parliament issued a Bill of Rights which limited the powers of the monarchs. While the English enactment of limited government is a profound precedent, it happened in the absence of elected executive leadership.

In the HRE, and in areas bordering on the HRE in eastern Europe, elected leadership brought about a de facto limited government, if not de dicto or de jure. The emperors of the HRE were not absolute rulers in the style of the Roman Empire. They needed to seek a consensus of those who elected them before taking actions.

The feudal lords who began electing kings, and later emperors, slowly redesignated themselves over the years as ‘princes’ and, to distinguish themselves from other princes, as ‘electoral princes.’ These princes often held the upper hand, and it was the emperor who had to answer to them, and not they to him. The emperor of the HRE was then an elected representative whose task was to do the will of the people.

Note the vocabulary in historian Martyn Rady’s account of political events on the geographical margins of the HRE:

The Transylvanian principality was the creation of the Hungarian king, John Szapolyai, elected in 1526 as a rival to Ferdinand. Unable to make good his claim to the whole of the kingdom, Szapolyai had retreated to the highlands of Transylvania, which was internationally recognized in 1570 as an independent principality under its own prince, who was elected by the Transylvanian diet.

The word ‘elected’ appears twice in a short paragraph.

John Zapolya, an alternate spelling of Szapolyai, was elected King of Hungary in 1526, and remained king until his death in 1540. During his reign, a counter-claim was made by Ferdinand I, who was already archduke of Austria, and who was elected king of Hungary in 1526. That’s right. Two different guys were elected to the same office in the same year. How did that happen?

The monarchs were elected by “diets” which were congresses or conventions or some kind of legislative assembly. It turns out that there were two diets in Hungary. One was the parliament of the untitled lesser nobility or gentry; this diet elected John. The other was the higher aristocracy, magnates, or barons; this diet elected Ferdinand. John and Ferdinand were supported by different factions of the nobility in the Hungarian kingdom. Each thought himself to be rightfully king of Hungary.

It’s a complicated and confusing story, but it points to the importance of elections in that time and place. Democracy can be messy.

For present purposes, what’s important is not the complicated and intricate details of Transylvanian and Hungarian politics, but rather the fact this was all done by electoral politics.

While ancient Greece and ancient Rome may have had a system with a few democratic elements, their leaders were not purely the result of voting. On the other hand, the HRE and some of the late feudal systems of central and eastern Europe had leaders who were placed into office purely by voting. The supremacy of the vote can be seen in elections in which the voters (at that time called ‘the electors’) did not function as a mere “rubber stamp” approval of some previously anticipated outcome, but rather were defiantly independent of expectations.

In 1292, the electors chose Adolf of Nassau to be the emperor of the HRE. In 1312, the electors chose Henry of Luxembourg to be the emperor of the HRE (upon taking the throne, he became known as Henry VII).

Both the election of 1292 and the election of 1312 demonstrated the independence of the electors. In both cases, many observers expected the election to go to a member of the Habsburg dynasty, but the electors exercised their freedom to vote otherwise.

The same is true of Conrad of Teck, formally known as Conrad II of Teck, who was probably elected to be emperor — the documents surrounding his election are ambiguous — but was assassinated “within forty-eight hours of his election,” as Martyn Rady phrases it, if indeed he was actually elected at all.

So the electors had real power — the power of the ballot. That’s democracy.

To be sure, suffrage was far from universal. In the years up until 1257, the number of electors was relatively large, but also undocumented, unknown, and varying. In the pre-Merovingian and Merovingian times, quite large numbers of electors took part in the process; but the exact number is not known.

Gradually the number of electors sank. Between 1257 and 1648 — i.e., until the end of the Thirty Years’ War — the number of electors was seven. Between 1648 and 1806 — i.e., until the end of the HRE — the number grew gradually to ten.

Despite the often relatively small number of electors, the process was truly democratic. This was a pivotal moment in history: major leaders — perhaps the leaders of the most powerful political entities on earth — were chosen democratically.

Like freely-elected leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these elected leaders of earlier centuries could not do whatever they wanted — they could not act arbitrarily or capriciously. They answered to the constituency who elected them.

So it was that these early instances of true democracy were directly linked to early instances of limited government. The emperors of the HRE did not act with the unquestioned absolute limitless authority and power of the ancient Roman emperors. After being elected emperor, they continually had to negotiate and compromise with those who elected them, as is clear in the following narrative reported by Martyn Rady:

Rudolf was forced to back down, agreeing in 1606, in the Treaty of Vienna, to full religious freedom in Hungary. Sensing his weakness, the Bohemian diet obliged Rudolf to make similar concessions, including the right to hold Protestant services on crown and church lands. In the Letter of Majesty of 1609, Rudolf agreed that a permanent sub-committee of the diet, known as the Defenders, should police the religious settlement. He promised that, ‘Henceforth no free noblemen or inhabitants of towns or villages, including peasants, should be forced by a higher authority or indeed anyone, be they churchmen or laymen, to give up their religion or be compelled to change religion in any way whatsoever.’ Rudolf gave similar rights to the townsfolk and nobilities of Upper and Lower Austria.

Officially known as Rudolf II, he became emperor of the HRE in 1576. But as the text above shows, he was continually compromising with his subjects. An unavoidable result of truly free elections in increased liberty for the electors.

In sum, it can be argued that the antecedents of modern political democracy, as it is known in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is found not in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, but rather in the central and eastern European elected monarchs, and subsequently in the HRE.

An Early Arabian Cathedral: Reconstructing the Design of a Lost Architectural Style

Yemen is the southwestern coast of the Arabian peninsula, a strip of land measuring a little over 100 miles from north to south, and a little over 500 miles from east to west. For reference, the area of Yemen is about 200,000 square miles, a little larger than Montana and a little smaller than Texas. The city of San‘a’ is located in Yemen.

Because the name of this city is originally written in Arabic script, it is also sometimes transliterated into English as Sanaa, as San’a, or as Sana.

In this city, a ruler named Abraha built a grand church. Likewise, for reasons of transliteration, his name is sometimes also spelled Abreha, Abrahah, or Abrahah al-Ashram. In the middle of the sixth century, probably around 567, he caused a structure to be built in an architectural style, “the equal of which neither Persians nor Arabians have ever built,” in his own words. This church has been the object of intense study by historians.

William Hugh Clifford Frend proposed the date of 567 as likely for the building of the church, but this must be regarded as an approximation.

Two historians, Barbara Finster and Jürgen Schmidt, wrote a detailed investigation of the church, including an analysis of, e.g., the building materials used in its construction:

Als Abraha seine Kirche plante, schrieb er an den Qaisar, d.h. an Justinian, und bat ihn um Unterstützung für sein Bauvorhaben. Dieser sandte ihm daraufhin Handwerker, Marmor und Mosaiken. Da auch der Yemen über Marmorvorkommen verfügt, muß Justinian einen speziellen Marmor geschickt haben, vielleicht den schön geäderten prokonnesischen Marmor oder bereits vorgefertigten Säulen.

This structure must have been impressive, because of the high quality of the materials used to build it, and because of the direct involvement of Justinian.

The church no longer exists. It, along with all the other churches in the area, as well as Christian schools and seminaries, was destroyed when Islamic armies invaded the area from the north.

The church as San‘a’ is a reminder of an era, prior to the rise of Islam, when the Arabian peninsula was inhabited by large numbers of Christians, who lived peacefully alongside Jews, animists, and Zoroastrians.

Given the surviving written descriptions of the church’s architectural details, the two historians were able to produce diagrams of the building. The building was surrounded by a plaza or courtyard:

Die Kirche selbst umgab im Abstand von 200 Ellen ein Peribolos mit einem mit Marmorplatten ausgelegten Hof, der möglicherweise Nebengebäude einschloß. Weiträumige Höfe, die vor allem Prozessionen dienten, sind für äthiopische Kirchen überliefert, und es ist anzunehmen, daß auch in San‘a’ Raum für den tawaf geschaffen werden mußte.

The church was an impressive structure, and the indoor and outdoor processions and ceremonies were grand events. The destruction of the church was a tremendous loss to the history of art and architecture.

Luther Fuels the Resistance Movement: Jumping a 400-Year Gap

Martin Luther died in 1546. How did he play a role in energizing an underground network inside Germany working to undermine and disable Hitler’s vicious plans?

The secret organizations which undermined the National Socialist war effort and saved the lives of thousands of Jews were composed of a diverse array of individuals. Lutherans worked with Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Eastern Orthodox believers. Some members of the resistance were not primarily motivated by spirituality, but rather came from aristocratic families or from the military.

Many underground operatives, including famous leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl, were motivated by their Lutheran faith. Others weren’t explicitly Lutheran, but encountered Luther’s thought as they worked with their fellow anti-Nazi conspirators.

How did Luther contribute to this resistance? As historian Uwe Siemon-Netto write, it was Luther’s “ceaseless admonition to speak up in the face of governmental evil,” and “his unequivocal opposition to all wars of aggression — and his advice to soldiers to disobey orders that violate God’s commandments.”

In the early 1930s, when Hitler began to seize power, the demographics of Germany resembled those of many other countries at that time, and throughout both the preceding and subsequent decades: The population could be grouped into those who seriously engaged in their spirituality, and those who were content to be nominal members of some church.

Those who understood, internalized, and acted on their spiritual principles, found themselves obliged to oppose Hitler both with their words and with their deeds.

Those who made no effort to shape their lives and actions according to the Christian faith, and who made no effort to understand the ethical commitments which this faith entailed, were content to sit idly by as the National Socialists started wars and murdered Jews.

The resistance movement was explicit in citing its spiritual motives as it opposed Naziism. Uwe Siemon-Netto explains that “uniformly Lutheran countries, such as Norway, based their resistance to tyranny on Luther’s theology.”

John Steinbeck’s novel about the Norwegian resistance movement captures this in a passage describing the home of an underground member. In the house hangs a painting of Christ as bringing hope.

Luther was certainly not the only source of thought for the movement. Augustine was often cited, and contemporary German clergy from a diverse range of theologies — Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran — formulated argumentation which revealed why significant and concrete actions had to be taken against Hitler. From these sources and others, the resistance assembled an intellectual framework justifying their actions: sabotage which slowed the manufacturing of weapons, vandalism which slowed military supply lines, misinformation which confused military intelligence assessments, printing forbidden texts to alert the public to the evils of National Socialism, and the organized escapes which took Jews out of Germany and into safe countries.

By contrast, the Nazi leadership was uniform in its opposition to Christianity. The Nazis occasionally co-opted Christian words or ideas to hide their true intentions, but this was a cynical exploitation of Christianity, not in any way an embrace of it. Some National Socialist leaders had be raised in the Christian tradition, but they explicitly rejected Christianity when they joined the Nazi hierarchy, as Uwe Siemon-Netto writes:

The ex-Catholics in the top Nazi leadership rejected the Catholic faith of their childhood in favor of forms of religiosity that would not pass doctrinal review by theologians of any serious Christian denomination, with many, such as SS leader Heinrich Himmler, embracing a rabidly anti-Christian variety of neo-paganism.

While individual narratives are complex, the big picture is clear: dedication to the Christian faith was a major component of the intellectual foundation of the anti-Nazi resistance movement.

The Mayerling Incident: Facts vs. Speculations

The deaths of Mary Vetsera and Crown Prince Rudolf can be explained simply: On Wednesday morning, January 30, 1889, they were found dead inside a locked room in the Crown Prince’s hunting lodge in Mayerling, a small village southwest of Vienna. The circumstances have driven investigators, on that day and for the last 135 years, to conclude that the event was a murder-suicide pact, in which Mary Vetera asked Rudolf to shoot her before he shot himself.

While the basic report is clear, the further details are muddy and complicated. What was the motive — what were the motives — for this horrifying act? Who may have had knowledge or suspicions about it beforehand? One of the factors for the lack of clarity about these further questions was an organized coverup orchestrated by the Habsburg dynasty.

A number of individuals are involved in the events: Rudolf’s wife, Crown Princess Stephanie, who was wounded by the illicit affair between Rudolf and Mary, and who yet needed her marriage to Rudolf to maintain her status near the very top of the dynasty; Rudolf’s mother, Empress Elisabeth, who had been habitually disengaged in her son’s life and thereby perhaps by means of this neglect created a psychological neediness in him; Rudolf’s father, Emperor Franz-Josef, who relationship to Rudolf was distant and disparaging; and Mary’s mother, Helene von Vetsera, who raised her daughter to be an ambitious social climber. To these main figures is added a long list of other family members, a number of various government officials, and a handful of friends.

“Even after more than a century, the subject of Mayerling remains controversial,” note co-authors Greg King and Penny Wilson. The case presents “few known facts” but many “divergent ideas offering alternative explanations.” King and Wilson venture some hypotheses:

Despite the rather obvious hurdles involved in tackling an historical affair and two mysterious deaths clouded by decades of controversy, we believe that we’ve been able to reach some new conclusions offering a starkly different take on the liaison between Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera.

The complexities of investigating the Mayerling case are amplified by the secretive reaction of the Habsburg dynasty. Documents relating to the deaths of Rudolf and Mary have disappeared in some cases, or remained state secrets for many years in other cases.

The royal family had motives to suppress information which might fuel narratives unfavorable to the dynasty, and had motives to promote accounts of the incident which cast the family in a more favorable light. To which extent did the dynasty act on those motives?

Given Rudolf’s geopolitical importance, diplomats and governments around the world produced fevered speculation in large quantities, further muddying the investigative waters. While the case was a personal tragedy, it was also a matter of state.

The starting point for all hypothesizing was the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera on January 30, 1889 in the family’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. The event seemed prima facie to be a murder-suicide by gunshot wound. Letters written by Rudolf and Mary were found, seemingly confirming the murder-suicide hypothesis.

Soon, however, alternative narratives appeared. One version supposed that Rudolf had secret connections to a Hungarian nationalist group, and that when it seemed that these connections might come to light, Rudolf chose suicide rather than have his political entanglements exposed. Another version posited that a member of the royal family murdered both Rudolf and Mary, and that the dynasty was engaged in a coverup to protect the murderer.

The passage of decades has been a double-edged sword: one the one hand, the motives of defending the dynasty’s honor and of geopolitical relevance of Rudolf and his death have faded, lessening the tendency to manipulate the narrative in order to serve either, or both, of those purposes. On the other hand, some of the physical evidence, living witnesses, and relevant texts have gradually ceased to be.

Historians Greg King and Penny Wilson write:

More than 125 years have passed since the tragedy at Mayerling. Shifting stories, deliberate lies, wild theories, and the disappearance of evidence have shrouded the story in seemingly impenetrable layers of mystery. Absent documentation, history can only speculate about what happened between Rudolf and Mary at that isolated lodge. But enough remains, when coupled with modern forensic evidence and psychological analysis, to weave together a plausible version of events, one that not only fits within the framework of known facts but also offers a believable and ultimately devastating reconstruction of those final, fateful hours.

King and Wilson go on to offer scholarly support for the most sober interpretation: that they only two people in the room were Rudolf and Mary, that there was no third-party murderer, and that it was a combination of political and personal stressors, with the added factor of Rudolf’s personal dissipation, that pushed him to, and beyond, the idea of suicide — and Mary with him.

Rudolf’s life, as King and Wilson write, was falling apart, both personally and politically. Mary had become fixated on Rudolf and could imagine no future without him. Rumors add the possibilities that Mary was pregnant with Rudolf’s child, that Mary was actually Rudolf’s half-sister by means of a youthful indiscretion on the part of Emperor Franz-Josef, or that Mary had been infected by Rudolf with a sexually transmitted disease. It is not possible to prove or disprove any of these possibilities.

Politically, Rudolf encountered perpetual frustration: The Emperor failed to take seriously any of Rudolf’s policy views or suggestions. Rudolf was on track to become Emperor, but it would be another twenty-five years before that could happen: twenty-five years of waiting and of being unable to shape policy. Rudolf feared that, when he finally might become Emperor, it would be too late: that, by such a time, the European situation would have deteriorated so far that meaningful reforms could not succeed. Rudolf was correct: the dynasty would fall in 1918. Rudolf believed that he could have saved the dynasty by reforming it.

Beyond the speculations about the nature of the two deaths are the speculations about the ripple effects those deaths had on world history. Had Rudolf lived, he would have had a hand in imperial politics for the next twenty-five years, and then he would have become emperor. Could Rudolf have exerted enough influence in his father’s government to avert WW1? Even if he had been unable to prevent the war, would he have been able to find a better end to it if he’d taken the throne upon his father’s death in November 1916 — two full years before the war’s end?

Franz-Josef had planned for Rudolf to succeed him on the throne. After Rudolf’s death, the next person in the line of succession was Archduke Karl Ludwig, who would have been emperor had he not died in 1896. Karl Ludwig’s son Franz-Ferdinand then became the heir to the throne until his death in 1914. When Franz-Josef died in 1916, the throne was passed to Karl, who was a nephew of Franz-Ferdinand and a grandson of Karl-Ludwig. So it was that Emperor Franz-Ferdinand outlived three different men, each of whom was slated to be his heir.

The sad deaths of Rudolf and Mary leave many questions which will probably never be conclusively answered. The case continues to attract attention both because of its human interest and because of its location in history as a point of contact between a variety of geopolitical and sociopolitical trends.

Linguistics: A Safe Haven for Academics During the Soviet Era

Teachers, professors, researchers, and authors found that life could be difficult and dangerous during the Soviet Socialist era, from 1917 to 1991. Harassment, imprisonment, and even death were inflicted upon those whose writings or lectures were deemed to be contrary to communist orthodoxy.

Even those who desired to conform to the Marxist-Leninist dogma could run afoul of the government agents who monitored the print media, because the standards changed constantly and without warning, and such standards were not always made clear. In some cases, this ambiguity was deliberate, giving the government a method to persecute any academician arbitrarily, because a case could be made against anyone, no matter what she or he had, or had not, written. In other cases, this shifting and invisible sand of standards was the result of competition between various branches of the Soviet government and the result of opportunistic adjustment in the government’s understanding of Marxist-Leninist as applied in concrete situations.

Teachers and professors, then, lived in constant fear. On the one hand, they were expected to give lectures and publish writings. On the other hand, at any moment, with no warning, these writings and lectures could be investigated because they were suspected of promoting Marxist too weakly. These attacks were not limited to political content. A professor might write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and find himself being arrested, because the essay was perceived as not being Leninist enough in tone. A teacher might present to students about the change from paleolithic society to neolithic society, and find himself in jail because his teaching was alleged to depart from communist orthodoxy.

The system was rigged: the government could simply declare that a publication failed to be enthusiastic enough in its promotion of Marxism. No evidence was required, and if evidence was given, it was subjective allegations, and no counter-argument was permitted. The system could be exploited by competing colleagues who could accuse each other of not energetically proclaiming Marxist doctrine. The process could be manipulated to serve the purposes of personal grudges.

Seeking some measure of protection from these arbitrary allegations and investigations, some academics discovered that there were safe zones within academia: disciplines like mathematics and linguistics. Soviet Socialist authorities figured that these fields were so abstract that they would have no political relevance.

This general situation, and the specific instance of Vitaly Shevoroshkin, are explained by author Robert Wright:

Linguistics has long been a haven for Soviet intellectuals of a contrary sort. In the pre-Gorbachev era, when the study of history and economics and nearly everything else involving human beings was tailored to exacting Marxist specifications, the study of language was exempt. It had been deemed in 1950 to have no connection with ideology (and had been so deemed by no less an authority than Joseph Stalin, who considered himself something of an expert on language). So linguists were free to say whatever they wanted — about language, at least — without fear of rebuke. Naturally, the discipline attracted a number of people with a disdain for authority, and developed a culture that tended to reinforce this disdain. Maybe, then, it isn’t surprising that Vitaly Shevoroshkin, a linguist at the University of Michigan who immigrated to America from the Soviet Union in 1974, has spent much of the time since then waging a guerrilla war against the orthodoxies of Western thought.

An academic who escaped from the Soviet Union knew what serious persecution was: it could mean years in a labor camp. By contrast, if his linguistic hypotheses were unpopular in America, as a tenured faculty member, the worst it would mean was encountering some disdain from a few colleagues: a laughably minor consequence.

Shevoroshkin went on to champion some radical propositions in linguistics, encountering the skepticism of his colleagues. The skepticism didn’t bother him; they weren’t, after all, going to throw him into the Gulag. Decades later, some of Shevoroshkin’s views have gained general acceptance; others are still hotly debated. But making controversial statements about historical philology probably saved his life: had he made equally controversial statements about economics or political theory, he probably would have frozen to death in Siberia.

Plato the Fascist: Was He Serious or Satirical?

A philosopher presents a detailed program for an ideal society: that’s what Plato’s Republic seems at first glance to be. But careful readers often suspect that something very different is afoot: is Plato joking?

The idea that the Republic is an extended comedy seems foreign to those who’ve cut their teeth on the ponderous nineteenth-century scholarship which treats Plato, and the entire Greco-Roman classical canon, with great reverence. Such scholarship attributes great gravitas to Plato, and considers it unlikely that he’d play such a prank.

The text leaves the reader with a choice: either Plato was joking or he was serious.

This choice, however, points to a less comfortable option: if Plato were serious, then he advanced a blueprint for a society that would be both cruel and bizarre. Couched in Plato’s friendly prose are details which would violate any level-headed concepts of justice or human rights.

Plutarch’s account of Lycurgus and the Spartan constitution seem mild compared, e.g., to Plato’s prescription that a child should never be allowed to know who her or his parents are, and that the parent should never be allowed to know who their child is.

There are details about Plato’s plan for an ideal civilization that are so strange and brutal that the plausibility of the Republic as a scheme for social engineering is stretched to the breaking point.

Among these oddities are some self-destructive recommendations by Plato that the activities of writers be severely restricted. Such limits would presumably apply to Plato himself, and, as author Hans Magnus Enzensberger explains, would be the basis for government oppression of written creativity. Enzensberger shows what the literal effects of Plato’s text would be:

The state decides what poets may or may not write — that is a nightmare as old as the Occident. Decency and good behavior must be observed. The gods are always good. Statesmen and officials may not be disparaged in public. Praise be to heroes, no matter what. The crimes of our rulers are not fit subjects for poetry but for committee meetings behind closed doors. Protect our youth! Therefore, there must be no portrayal of unbridled passion unless it is authorized by the state. Irony is forbidden. There must be no effeminacy. Poets, being born liars, are to be assigned to the public-relations detail. The control commission not only assigns topics; it also decrees what forms are admissible and what tone of voice is desired. The demand is for harmony at all costs; this means “good language and good harmony and grace and good rhythm” — in a word, affirmation. Nuisances will be exiled or eliminated, their works banned, censored, and mutilated.

Indeed, Enzensberger makes Plato guilty for a number of problems in Western Civilization’s treatment of creative writing:

These familiar maxims, formulated in a small Balkan state more than two thousand years ago, can be found at the root of all European discussion of poetry and politics. They have since spread across the entire world. Dully, monotonously, brutally, they clang through history with the terrible regularity of a steam hammer. They do not question what poetry is, but treat it simply as an instrument to influence those held in subjugation, as something to be used at will in the interests of authority. Hence the tenacious life of these maxims, for they are tools of power — the selfsame thing into which they are trying to turn poetry. For this reason they are passed from hand to hand through history, like bludgeons, fungible, easily detachable from the philosophy from which they were hewn. Not only do they serve Platonism as cudgels against Aeschylus and Homer, but they serve every political administration.

But Enzensberger’s indictment of Plato is valid only if Plato was sincere in his instructions. Is there a chance that Plato was joking?

The likelihood that Plato did not intend for his directions to be taken literally increases with the consideration that Plato, as an author, would have suffered greatly under his own rules. Consider the constraints mentioned in the text of the Republic, as worded in Jowett’s translation:

The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mold the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.

Plato goes on to suggest that even the texts of Hesiod and Homer be redacted:

The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence.

Through the mouthpiece character of Socrates, who is clearly in no way related to the actual Socrates, Plato asserts that such stories are “not to be repeated in our” republic:

We shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives.

Whether the stories are taken as literal or figurative does not matter to Plato: in either case, they must be eliminated: “​​These tales must not be admitted into our” Polis, “whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not.”

This censorship is in no way a self-censorship, or one informally imposed by social custom, but rather a statist enactment:

The founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them.

A translation by Paul Shorey confirm’s Jowett’s rendering: “We must not accept from Homer or any other poet the folly of such error.” The state will determine what is true, and will eliminate any text which asserts an untruth. Plato writes that the state “will not approve” or “permit our youth to hear” certain passages from Aeschylus. Plato has named at least three major poets as earning censorship. This amounts, if taken literally, to a frontal assault on the Greek canon.

Which is a good reason not to take it literally.

In his other dialogues, Plato demonstrated affection and respect for Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus. Yet in the Republic he instructs the audience to redact, censor, and ban them from his polis. Either he is guilty of blatant self-contradiction, or his comments in the Republic are meant as satire.

The text of the Republic goes on to assert that the state will forbid an individual to “assert” certain things “in his own city if it is to be well governed.” This would be “one of the laws” and “speakers and poets will be required to conform” to it.

Plato goes so far as to assert “we” will not “allow teachers to use” Homer and Aeschylus “for the education of the young.” This proposition does such great violence against Greek sensibilities that it certainly urges the reader to suggest that Plato is joking.

Likewise, a translation by George Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve, shows the strict censorship which Plato proposes: “We must supervise such stories and those who tell them.” Plato writes: “We’ll expunge” and “delete” texts which are displeasing to the state. “Names for the underworld must be struck out.” Not only will the state forbid poets to write certain things; the state will also require them to write other things: “We’ll compel the poets.”

Francis Macdonald Cornford also confirms what is in Plato’s text: “We shall have to prohibit such poems and tales and tell them to compose others in the contrary sense.” In these words, Plato goes beyond censorship and conscripts the writers into the service of propaganda:

Then we must not only compel our poets, on pain of expulsion, to make their poetry the express image of noble character; we must also supervise craftsmen of every kind and forbid them to leave the stamp of baseness, license, meanness, unseemliness, on painting and sculpture, or building, or any other work of their hands; and anyone who cannot obey shall not practice his art in our commonwealth.

After deciding that most of the other arts — sculpture, painting, music — should also be subject to strict censorship, Plato concludes that “we could not but banish such an influence from our commonwealth.”

The reader, then, is left with a choice: Either Plato is making a joke — an absurd joke, a provocative joke — or Plato is proposing the most ruthless type of censorship.

On the one hand, history teaches us that such extreme and inhumane censorship is indeed possible: one need only to consider activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who sought to forbid the reading of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Thomas More, Mark Twain, and others.

Censorship is merely one of the brutal measures prescribed in the Republic. Taken together, the sum of the ordinances in the text would constitute a fascist totalitarian program which would locate Plato among the bloodthirsty likes of Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and Daniel Ortega.

On the other hand, Plato has already demonstrated his ability to write comedy in the Ion, one of his most humorous dialogues.

Surely, a poet who calls for the banishment of poetry and a creative author who calls for the rigid regulation of creativity must be writing ironically. If Plato’s program were enacted as written, most of his dialogues would be condemned and he would be exiled.

If Enzensberger is correct in seeing Plato as a serious totalitarian, and if Plato was therefore not joking, then the implications for civilization are indeed as grim as Enzensberger paints them.

But if Enzensberger is wrong, and Plato is merely joking — it will be a separate question as to whether his joke is funny — then generations of scholars have misdirected their students into a literal reading of the Republic.

The Blessings of Chaos: The Noisy Public Square Keeps Humanity Humane

As in the past, so in the present: the obiter dicta which an author places into the mouths of fictional characters serve as vehicles for aphorisms on a wide variety of subjects, applying to situations well beyond the central plot of the book in which they appear.

In the novel Persepolis Rising, author James S.A. Corey takes the opportunity to do precisely this, when one character in the book endorses a totalitarian government because parliamentary processes can become bogged down and stuck in discussions. Impatient with such legislative processes and eager for quick and decisive action, the character says, "There has to be a way to come to a final decision."

In response, the interlocutor offers this epigram:

No, there doesn't. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It's messy and undignified, but it's when we're at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there's just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.

James S.A. Corey, which is actually a nom de plume for a two-man writing team, offers an analogue to Winston Churchill’s famous quote:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

Churchill spoke in 1947; Corey wrote in 2017. The sentiment holds. People who are otherwise reasonable and rational can be seduced into totalitarianism in several different ways; one of them is the simple desire to see things done in an orderly way paired with a distaste for squabbling chaos. Thus it is that totalitarianism sometimes sneaks in under the disguise of being scientific or technically proficient: “let the experts decide.”

But the price of order achieved by means of dictatorship is too high.

By placing the word “final” into mouth of the character who advocates totalitarianism, Corey alludes to Hitler’s National Socialism and its Endlösung — the “final solution.” The word Nazi is simply an abbreviation for the German phrase for “National Socialism.”

As a fiction author not constrained by the academic’s duty to insert all manner of qualifications and cite relevant antecedents, Corey is able to move on with his plot after briefly reminding the reader of a truism about freely elected representative bodies, and of the need to patiently endure annoying and even painful political processes: the alternative is far worse.