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Describe the goals and uses of political science (citizenship and democracy) and political actors. An elitist Plato, opposed to democracy and hostile to the masses, fills the literature. In the midst of an extensive philological and grammatical commentary on Plato's Republic, James Adam (1902, 2. 24, ad loc. 494 a) includes the following brief but telling observation: "The theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy. " He writes this in response to an interchange between Socrates and Adeimantus concerning the access of the many to the idea or form of the Good, during which Socrates claims: "It is impossible for the multitude to be philosophic. " Only a few will have access to the forms (eide). (1) A profound inequality of rule and authority seems to follow from that unequal access. I could begin with Adam's assertion that the theory of ideas is not a democratic philosophy, but the basis for my argument derives from a very different perspective, an epistemological one that has nothing to do with the capabilities, or lack thereof, of the many to attain a vision of the Good. Rather, I focus on the theory of the forms as a mechanism for categorization, opposing epistemologically, politically, and psychologically the openness of democracy. While Adam and numerous others see elitism in the Platonic theory of the forms because the many cannot ascend to a philosophic vision, (2) I attend to the opposition between democracy and that theory to illustrate how Socrates' discussion in Book 8 of the Republic points to democracy's dependence on a "formlessness" that challenges claims of equality and of identity within democratic regimes.
The epistemological critique of democracy that derives from the theory of the forms points to very different challenges than those that motivated the judgment by Adam and others that the theory of the forms is not a democratic philosophy. For them, a hierarchy of intellectual skills justifies a hierarchy of political rule, and since the highest level of intellectual skill is required for an apprehension of the forms, a regime that distributes power equally to those who can ascend and those who cannot, must fail. The parable of the boat from the beginning of Book 6, for example, captures this argument vividly. There, the somewhat deaf ship-owner of limited vision who knows little about seafaring allows him to be drugged by the quarrelsome sailors. Though they never learned the skill of navigation, they are eager to control the ship. Meanwhile, the true pilot is scorned as a useless "gazer at the heavens" (488 a- 489 e).
The discussion of democracy in Book 8 does not address that issue at all. Rather, it presents democracy as a regime that in its insistence on freedom and equality is a regime of formlessness, one that lacks eide. The theory of forms insofar as it is explicated in Book 6 is in part the basis for our capacity to categorize - to recognize similarities and differences so that we can distinguish one person or object from another and recognize as well what unites them. On this rests the foundation of mathematics, our capacity to count, to add, to subtract, and our capacity to discriminate, to separate the good from the bad, the noble from the base, the citizen from the non-citizen. Democracy in its openness in Book 8 lacks this capacity for adding and for discriminating and thus lays out the tensions and dangers inherent in regimes founded on formlessness and on principles of equality.
Claims of equality necessarily entail claims of inequality, of who is not equal. Eide enable us to typologies, to define equal and unequal, but eide also can tyrannize. The openness of democracy is the escape from that tyranny, but at the same time it may leave us lost without the grounds to make choices or structure the world in which we live. Thus, the epistemological critique of democracy in Book 8 points to the tensions underlying current debates concerning "identity" politics and the "politics of difference. " In a contemporary world that cares deeply about equality, the formlessness at the heart of democratic principles creates profound contradictions about how to implement such claims. Likewise, contemporary demands that identity, self-assertion of form, be acknowledged stand in tension with the openness of democratic "formlessness. " The freedom we and Socrates in Book 8 associate with democratic regimes entails the rejection of tyrannizing eide; but we cannot function either politically or intellectually without eide. Socrates' examination of democracy as a regime of formlessness helps us understand the limits and contradictions of claims of equality and identity in democratic regimes - of an equality that effaces the eide and of an identity that entails the assertion of eide.
Book 8 traditionally stands as the book that traces the decline of regimes, but attention to that aspect has led scholars to ignore the equally strong focus that Plato places on typology, on the five forms (eide) of regimes and their human counterparts. (3) Socrates traces the movement from aristocracy to tyranny and the parallel personalities, how each one comes into being (the genetic analysis), but he also identifies the different eide of political regime and how we can distinguish one from the other (the eidetic analysis). Among the eide of regimes is Socrates' bizarre description of democracy, one that seems to have little to do with Athenian democracy as practiced in the fifth or fourth century B. C. (4) or with the mechanisms of self-government (the sharing of rule, isonomy, the assembly, the juries) that we may associate with the institutions of democracy past and present. Democracy is instead a regime of freedom and a radical equality arising from the absence of eide, the very concept that controls the structure of Book 8. In Socrates' elaboration, this means that democracy, according to its fundamental principle of freedom, is the regime that is incapable of introducing typologies into the epistemological and political realm. The discussion in Book 8 thus subverts the book's apparent intention to give forms to regimes - as well as perhaps the philosophic explorations and claims of the previous books.
A democracy true to its principles of equality and freedom must resist the tyrannizing of eide, the boundaries and limits that define citizenship and the relations of parts. It must resist the typologies and forms that are part of a Platonic philosophical order. The conflict between philosophy and democracy is an epistemological one, not only a moral one. There often is a tendency among democratic theorists to avoid the theoretical complexity raised by typologies that which asserts the need to search for differences at the same time as identifying similarities; such endeavors may foreclose addressing the more tractable aspects of democratic theory. Dahl (1986, 191), for example, prefaces a discussion of procedural democracy: "Since their origins in classical Greece, democratic ideas have been plagued by the problem of inclusion: what persons have a rightful claim to be included as citizens with full and equal rights to participate in governing the association. My strategy will be to leave this problem unsolved in order to set out the assumptions and criteria of procedural democracy. " Charles Beitz (1989, 5) writes a magisterial volume on political equality, beginning with the exhortation: "For although nothing is to be gained by claiming that equality is not part of the definition of democracy, any philosophical theory of democracy that failed to take up the grounds of and content of political equality would be seriously deficient. " Nevertheless, we hear little about the content of equality, and Beitz concludes by emphasizing the indeterminacy of his theory, avoiding the question of "whom, " though he thoroughly addresses the question of "how. " A devotion to equality creates the difficulty of identifying the eidos of the citizen for both.
American politicians are used to public attention on their private lives. In Germany, however, a politicians private sphere has always been regarded as a journalistic taboo. On the basis of an unspoken agreement, German politicians could be sure that the media would not publish incriminating information even when it was common knowledge amongst journalists. There are several reasons for this kind of restraint. One is the German right to privacy, or better, the legal interpretation thereof. Another is how journalists see their role and the relation between the media and the State.
Finally, there has always been a notorious coziness between journalists and politicians in Germany fostered by the so-called hothouse atmosphere that was characteristic for Bonn as long as the government had its seat there. According to the Anglo-Saxon view on press freedom, which rejects any regulation of the press, even if supportive in nature, the public interest ranks higher than the individuals right to privacy. In Germany, as in other West European countries, the right to privacy instead gets more weight. The individual private sphere is defined by German law as being worthy of protection. Hence, in the case of politicians this right to intimacy must be weighed against the informational interest of the public. In recent years, the relation between journalists and politicians has changed.
What was once called a symbiotic relation has been judged as having become parasitic. Journalists now complain about being exploited by politicians. Politicians complain about the way they are treated by the media. The taboo that protected politicians in their private sphere seems to be disappearing. Several reasons can be given for this development: one is the fact that politicians themselves more and more use the private for political strategy; another is the changes in the German media system.
Schroeder was not the first politician to use the private for political strategy, and he is not the only one. However, the 1990 s made the private side of German politicians more visible than ever. For example, when he was still prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony, he and his former wife were known to entertain an open house and were therefore also called the Clintons of Lower Saxony. When the couple split, the whole country had the chance to follow the divorce in the media. The 2002 national election campaign was another proof of the new popularity of exploiting the private for appealing to voters.
For the first time the wives of the top candidates played an important role in the campaign and also got much attention from the media. There are good reasons for the fact that politicians talk about private matters in public and thus feed the media with something that these happily indulge in, and that, vice versa, the media readily step over the imaginary borderline between the public and the private. From the perspective of the political actors, privatization in the sense that the candidates are presented in private roles and their private environment rather than in their political role, serves four functions: humanization, simplification and distraction, emotional ization and the striving for a celebrity status. Humanization is a classical image strategy of political actors. Politicians try to appear more human, more personable, more like you and me, thus seemingly close to their voters, like someone familiar. This strategy is preferred for image work with stiff, arrogant or cold types of politicians.
Using privatization to simplify and distract is one way of dealing with complex political issues that are difficult to convey to the electorate. Political programs and solutions for political problems are therefore preferably associated with and symbolized by persons. The politician stands for the program. Personalization facilitates the presentation of politics by the political system. At the same time, the political system adapts to the necessities of the media and of television in particular which cannot present politics in an abstract way but has to deliver pictures.
The personalization of the political is also an adaptation to the voters who prefer to orient themselves towards persons and not towards abstract programs. Furthermore, personalization is used to distract from uncomfortable issues. Certain issues are better avoided, particularly if there is not much leeway for decisions or if they are difficult or unpopular, and personalization is a strategy to distract from such topics. The aim of a strategy using privatization as emotional ization is to generate general sympathy and create emotional bonds. This is a consequence of the weakening of traditional partys ties. Since socio-demographic characteristics have lost their explanatory power for party identification and the voting decision and short-term factors have gained increased importance, parties employ niceness and feel-good factors in an attempt to create emotional ties.
Finally, politicians use their private life as a strategy to establish, maintain and increase their celebrity status. Fame is a necessary capital for politicians. The celebrity status guarantees media attention since it is also one of the journalistic selection criteria. Commercialization, mainly due to the introduction of commercial broadcasting in Germany in the mid- 1980 s, has had a notable effect on the electronic media.
Just as other media products, politics has to hold its own on the market, its success being measured by ratings. Depoliticization trivialization and privatization are the consequences of certain attention and adaptation strategies adopted by politicians in order to stand up to the competition with other and more attractive offerings. Today, gossip and human interest is no longer the strict domain of the tabloid press. The commercialization of the media fostered the human interest format.
The human interest format offers issues that are exciting and easy to understand by way of personalization and presentation of individual cases, with references to everyday life and a reliance on the emotional. With their interest in the private life of political celebrities, the media, led by commercial television and the gossip magazines, profit from the overall shift of the borderline between the private and the public, but in doing so they also foster the trend. This has consequences for the political actors: The understanding of what is public interest today reaches far into what was once defined as private sphere. The changes in the relation between politicians and journalists have also been attributed to the new situation after the government moved to Berlin during the 1990 s. In particular, there is fierce competition among the many media that are represented in the German capital. Because the political actors themselves have started to instrumentalist their private life for their own presentation, this also serves as a justification of the journalists when they cross the borderline between the public and the private.
Thus, when the story about Schroeder broke out in early January, many people argued that he had no right to complain because he himself had used the private for political strategy again and again. When they use their private lives in image-building, politicians seemingly invite further glimpses into their private sphere. Nevertheless, when staging their private lives, they try to maintain control over what becomes public. In the same way that a cleverly staged political event usually challenges journalists to investigate further, the staging of private lives challenges journalists to go beyond what is offered to them. However, pointing to the strategies and thus making politicians the scapegoat is a too easy way to avoid thinking about where the public interest ends and where the private sphere of a politician begins. The politician who opens his private sphere in the interest of his image embarks on a difficult tightrope walk between closeness and distance.
By demonstrating his closeness to the electorate, and thus giving up his distance, a politician presents her / himself as a human like you and me. However, the loss of this distance is a deadly sin for each politician, said Max Weber. Those who present themselves as too human and ordinary will have problems to further recommend themselves for leadership. Bibliography: Turned-Part, Judith. 1999. "Creating Citizenship: Youth Development for Free and Democratic Society. " Youth Development for Free and Democratic Society, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Wallas, Graham. 1908. Human Nature and Politics. London: London School of Economics. American Political Science Association in association with The Gale Group and LookSmart.
Craig, Stephen C. , and Stephen Earl Bennett, eds. 1997. After the Boom: The Politics of Generation X. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Plato Republic
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