Socrates Censorship Analysis

An analysis of Socrates’s censorship reveals its merits as well as its many shortcomings and provides valuable evidence of Plato’s own opinion regarding censorship in society. Foremost, Socrates’s censorship efficaciously controls mass ideology through the filtering and editing of certain ideas in literature, implying that Plato himself regards literature as a powerful indoctrinating force and a possible source of threat of dissent to a political regime. Additionally, Socrates provides a convenient definition of “greatest harm” against a city, stating that the “greatest evil-doing against one’s own city is injustice” (Plato 113). Consequently, as injustice is the opposite of justice which regards the “money-making, auxiliary, and guardian classes doing what’s appropriate, each of them minding its own …show more content…
Socrates propounds that “it is by nature fitting for [philosophers] both to engage in philosophy and to lead a city, and for the rest not to engage in philosophy and to follow the leader” (Plato 154), intimating that the philosopher is the rightful ruler as he is “the [lover] of the sight of truth” (Plato 156). Another somewhat perturbing facet of Socrates’s censorship is the implication of an autonomous censoring authority. As even the guardians are subject to censorship, Socrates’s mode of social control requires an external, absolute agent determining and overseeing the censorship of the Just City which affords a single entity enormous power over an entire state and invites the potential for abuse of the censorship system for an ulterior agenda. Lastly, Socrates’s censorship bears an unmistakable semblance of tyranny in its infringing on citizens’s rights, selective infanticide, and its propagation of sanctioned “breeding” of gold-souled