Plato’s Academy as political think tank

If you thought Plato was just an theoretical philosopher, think again…

Plato (left) and Socrates (right) in front of the modern Academy in Athens. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

Plato’s Academy is arguably the most famous institution of higher learning in the history of humanity. And rightly so. Even though it certainly was nothing like the modern university, it gave us the very word, “academic,” to indicate the pursuit of intellectual excellence. (Naturally, the same word is also used disparagingly, as in “this is just academic”…)

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “Academy” comes from the Greek Akadēmeia, meaning “the grove of Akadēmos,” a legendary Athenian from the Trojan War tales, who was the original estate-holder of the site. I have visited the modern remains of Plato’s Academy and the tiny nearby Plato Museum, and although there isn’t a lot to see there, one can easily conjure a sense of awe at the thought that so many philosophers have walked among the original buildings that eventually became today’s ruins.

When reading Robin Waterfield’s excellent and highly recommended biography, Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy, I discovered a whole new dimension to the ancient Academy that I was not aware of: it functioned as a political think tank of sorts, more than occasionally moving from simple policy advice to actual political intervention, sometimes without shying away from employing force!

Apparently, over several years the Academy produced a number of what might be called international political troubleshooters. It turns out that pretty often a ruler would ask Plato for advice on how to conduct his internal affairs or his foreign policy. Plato would then select one of his students and put him in charge of that particular consultation. This makes sense in the light of the fact that, in the Republic, Plato writes that the training program for philosophers should culminate with fifteen years of practical politics:

“[They are required to] go back down into that cave and take charge of warfare and whatever other areas young people should be responsible for, so that they gain as much practical experience as everyone else.” (Republic, 539e)

In a sense, as I was saying, the Academy in this respect worked as a modern think tank is supposed to (but often doesn’t). In my Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, I wrote that the first generation of think tanks appeared in the early 1900s and was the product of the preoccupation of a small number of rich entrepreneurs with providing sound, rational advice to the government at a time of increasing complexity in both domestic and foreign policy problems. People like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller provided large permanent endowments to these groups, which made them essentially independent from government support (and, therefore, influence) and also freed them from the necessity of continuously raising private money (again emancipating them from possible leverage by their own initial donors).

That is how groups like the Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation came about. They operated according to the model of a “university without students,” attracting scholars from across the political spectrum, sharing the ideal (if not always the practice) that reason reaches across ideologies. The results of these efforts were significant in shaping American society during most of the twentieth century, producing, for example, a national budget system, as well as studies on the causes of warfare.

It was not at all a bad idea, and as such, predictably, it didn’t last. After WWII, and especially beginning with the 1970s and ‘80s, think tanks largely became advocacy groups pushing a particular ideological viewpoint, including the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, the libertarian Cato Institute, and the conservative Heritage Foundation (the people who brought you the Trump-friendly “Project 2025”).