Compare And Contrast Plato And The Allegory Of The Cave

In his well-known “Allegory of the Cave”, the Greek philosopher Plato used the analogy of people lost in a cave to explain his belief that only enlightened philosophers should rule, since only they could truly understand the world. When I compared Plato’s ideal government to the workings of a modern democracy, I realized how different these two are. The U.S. government relies on the rule of the people, and does not limit voting rights or the pursuit of public office to any particular class. If Plato’s belief were applied to this democratic system, in which every citizen assists in ruling, then every citizen should be a philosopher or, as the Schedler Honors College website puts it, a “citizen-scholar”. Specifically, citizen-scholars have the