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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
It is notorious that great philosophers are apt to be misunderstood. Controversy rages about their work, and sometimes they are credited with completely contradictory views. Consider the sharply contrasted opinions of Plato's political thought by Sir Karl Popper, on the one hand, and G. C. Field and H. B. Acton on the other.
1 It is here that Hobbes (Lev. Chap. 30) makes his snide remark about the ‘contention between the Penners and the Pleaders of the Law’, the latter trying to circumvent the former, and usually succeeding.
2 Italics mine.
3 The Essentials of Democracy.
4 Plato's concord of the naturally worse to be governed by the naturally better. Republic IV.
5 Machiavelli is quoted here in a footnote as saying, ‘In truth there has never been, in any country, an extraordinary legislator who has not had recourse to God: for otherwise his laws would not have been accepted’.
6 In my Freedom and History.
7 This paper was read at the Fourth International Week of Philosophy at Curitiba, Brazil in January 1978, at a session in honour of Rousseau.
