The platonic sophocracy in three perspectives: Republic, Politics and Laws Between participation and belonging

Abstract

Plato chooses "epistemic capacity" as the evaluative criterion to guide the hierarchization of the aristocracy he conceived as the only form capable of definitively ridding human sociability of evil. Necessarily led by one or a few wise men, Plato proposes a Sophocracy as the best possible political regime. It is a social organization that is simultaneously composed of different classes and must necessarily consist of a cohesive whole that thinks and acts according to the same sense of the good, the beautiful, and the just. Plato then develops this same Sophocratic conception in three works – Republic, Statesman, and Laws – from three complementary perspectives presented respectively by different protagonists – Socrates, the Stranger of Elea, and the Athenian. We intend to propose a question regarding the still extremely prevalent naturalization of the politic hierarchic principle as the only possible way to think about sociability, not only human, but in the broadest possible way, including, in the questioning of the good life, the entire environment inhabited by the most diverse living and inanimate beings.