Although the question of how to keep power in check— Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who will guard the guardians themselves?”)—is as old as it is urgent today, it still hasn’t fully entered public awareness. Plato himself didn’t trust in the moral superiority of his philosopher-kings and imposed on them a strictly communal way of life: no private property, no families, no personal wealth. He did not imagine external institutions or independent oversight, like those built into our modern democracies. We, however, have learned more than the great thinker: two thousand years of church history have made it clear that even giving up property and family life may do nothing to curb ambition or prevent abuse of power. If anything, the appetite for power seems often to grow even stronger among professional ascetics. Plato’s own bitter experiences in trying to put his political theory into practice in Syracuse—where, instead of guiding the ruler, he is said to have been sold into slavery after conflicts with Dionysius I—may have left their mark on his later thinking. His Laws read as far more realistic than the famous Republic, in which his political philosophy comes across as utopian and psychologically naïve. Without a realistic view of human psychology, however, there can be no realistic political philosophy.
The most sympathetic and original—perhaps also the most desperate—answer to the problem of controlling power has come from anarchism. It simply banishes power from its world altogether, as if power could be made to vanish with a bold abracadabra: Ni Dieu ni maître! Power is evil; no one must wield it.
