Plato and Hobbes: Two bad metaphors for society—and a better one | Chandran Kukathas | Big Think

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CHANDRAN KUKATHAS

Chandran Kukathas holds the Lee Kong Chian Chair of Political Science and is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. He was previously Chair of Political Theory and Head of the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Hayek and Modern Liberalism (1989) and The Liberal Archipelago (2003). His next book, Immigration and Freedom, will be published by Princeton University Press.
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Transcript: Looking over the history of thinking about metaphors to describe a good society I felt there were two metaphors that dominated with which I was unhappy. One is a very old metaphor which you’ll find in Plato’s Republic and this is the metaphor of the ship of state. The way to think about a society Plato suggests is to think of it as a ship. It’s on the ocean. It’s got to navigate difficult waters. It’s got to find a destination. But on the open sea people don’t really have much choice but to put their lives into the hands of those who know how to navigate, to know how to run a ship. It means putting their lives in the hands of a captain or a commander. Now this particular metaphor for a society, the ship of state, suggests that what we have in the real world in every society is a kind of a closed society with a purpose or a direction to go. Everybody there is somehow there without any possibility of escape or any possibility of joining that society and they’re in precarious circumstances so they need somehow a system of authority.

So this metaphor really depends upon there being a closed society before we can start thinking about how to manage it. And diversity has no place in this other than the fact that people have different skills which all have to be coordinated to a single end. The other prominent metaphor in history of thought is a slightly different one and this is found in Hobbes Leviathan which conceives of political society on the analogy of a body. The Leviathan is a term Hobbes uses to describe the state and the state is made up of all of the parts which go to form the single hull. That single hull is made up of all the different persons who live essentially as a collective to authorize the exercise of power by this single entity. Once again the conception of the society here is of a kind of unitary structure. And what I wanted to do was think about how we understand society without assuming a closed structure or a closed society. Because in the real world people come and go not only because they’re born, there are succeeding generations but also because people move from one jurisdiction to another, but also jurisdictional boundaries change.

I mean if you look at the borders of the world over its history or even over the last century you see how dramatically these borders have changed. Very, very few countries have not had their borders changed. I mean think about Europe for example. In 1900 there were 20 states in Europe. Now there are I think 55 and in between there were so many variations. But if you go back 500 years you’ll see that there are about 700 different principalities. So the boundaries are always changing and there’s always movement across boundaries. So if you’re theorizing about how one should live to assume a closed society seems to be a very limiting assumption. What I wanted to suggest was that a good society is one in which what you see is a diversity of peoples living across jurisdictions that change all the time and those moving across the boundaries themselves will be people with different ethical commitments as well as the capacity to change those commitments. And so what you needed was a metaphor that describes this kind of society. So my thought was that what we see really is a kind of archipelago which is a collection of islands that are in some sort of proximity to one another across the seas of which people move all the time.

And the Archipelago itself as I understand it is one that’s made up of islands which themselves come into existence and go out of existence depending on a whole range of things from tides to climate change. So this is I think a way of understanding the world which is quite different from that I think of much of classical philosophy. And I think even within the liberal tradition the norm has been to think about society by trying to theorize it as a kind of closed and fixed entity. And I wanted to say no, it’s really something quite different. And this I think is something that strengthens our reasons for thinking about it in terms of norms of toleration rather than norms of justice.