ยท The Greek
Plato is one of the key political philosophers in ancient Greece. He was a student of Socrates. He was interested in some of the following notions.
1. What is human personality?
2. What is justice?
3. What is the best political structure?
4. What is the meaning of knowledge?
All these thinkers are products of ancient Rome and Greece. This was a time of the great city states, of metal and experiments in centralized goverments. Greece was a place where few had personal choice by the nature of their social structure. This structure focused around oppression of the masses in educational, economics and physically by way of harsh cultural stratification and military force. It was thought only those of certain social classes had the mental ability to understand the nature world, human nature and how to organize or in their perception rule society.
These narrow peception influnced what these thinkers thought and wrote, as can be see in some of the ideas of Plato on justice or Aristoles notions of ethics or virtues. Both thinker tried to maked sense of the events of their times. This was a time of great wars, political conquest, and social change in Greece. Social control was not a matter of understanding the true nature of the human existance. Goverments sought to maintain social order of large groups of people. Perhaps the strenght of Rome was not in its conquest of other nations. but in its high value for the attainment of knowledge and its respect for political theories that enchanced the poltical power or cultural of scope of the nation, even in this time of oppression of the non ruling classes.
There is an assumption, as there is often today, that the uneducated or under classed must be kept far away from issues of the state. Plato’s focus on the ruling class learning philosophy and virtue did not seem to extend to the economic lower class. The notion that social class influences what and how much one should learn of the elements of social and personnel power, can be found in other parts of the world like Asia.