Athenian intellectuals - including Plato - on democracy

Plato, as a young man, began his writing career most likely being passionately provoked by the death of his mentor Socrates. He grew up in Athens through the political turmoil with the Peloponnesian War in its background. During that period, he must have witnessed a couple of fatal political wrong doings – the execution of eight generals in 406 BCE and of Socrates in 399 – both took place under the rule of democracy, which eventually led Athens to the defeat in the war. Plato must have formed his political views based on some intellectual anti-democrats during that time, including his mentor Socrates and one of whose pupils Xenophon. It is said that these intellectuals, including Plato himself, allegedly argued that ‘the majority of the people, because they were by and large ignorant and unskilled, would always get it wrong. In these intellectuals’ view, government was an art, craft or skill, and should be entrusted only to the skilled and intelligent, who were by definition a minority. They denied specifically that the sort of knowledge available to and used by ordinary people, popular knowledge if you like, was really knowledge at all. At best it was mere opinion, and almost always it was ill-informed and wrong opinion’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/greekcritics_01.shtml). 

Xenophon

Moreover, probably taking an example of Pericles into their account, they viewed that the masses were ‘easily swayed by specious rhetoric – so easily swayed that they were incapable of taking longer views or of sticking resolutely to one, good view once that had been adopted. The masses were, in brief, shortsighted, selfish and fickle, an easy prey to unscrupulous orators who came to be known as demagogues. Demagogue meant literally ‘leader of the demos’ (‘demos’ means people); but democracy’s critics took it to mean mis-leaders of the people, mere rabble-rousers’ (ibid). Ultimately, Xenophon concluded in a fictional conversation between Pericles and Alcibiades, in his work Memoirs of Socrates, that ‘democracy is really just another form of tyranny’ (ibid).

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/platos-republic-with-its-historical-background/