C 2017 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

MARK ZELCER*

I. INTRODUCTION

Plato’s political philosophy can be characterized as a quest for justice but-

tressed by an analysis of the ideal ruler, the best kind of government, the proper
education of citizens, and good laws. While Justice for Plato is an overarching
value with universal application, the details are generally couched in domestic
terms: how ought a polis be governed?, what is its proper form of government?,
what is the best arrangement of citizens in social classes?, etc. It is generally
understood that Plato laid out the internal structure of the ideal state by describ-
ing the class systems, the leadership roles, the governmental structure, etc., while
ignoring the international aspect of politics. This paper aims to sketch, modestly,
a defense of the view that Plato had a more expansive appreciation of some core
topics of what we now think of as international relations (IR) theory than he is
usually credited with.
At the very least our analysis will show an awareness of IR thinking in Plato’s
work, though without insisting that Plato, or any ancient thinker we discuss,
understood IR as completely separate from domestic politics.1 Like many mod-
ern political theorists, it is possible that IR is seen as a constitutive element of a
broader theory of domestic politics. Inter alia this essay showcases the role that
Plato’s Menexenus can play in broadening our understanding of his political
thought.

*Thanks to the Long Island Philosophy Society where an earlier draft was read, to Nickolas Pappas,
Andreas Avgousti, Stephen Rosow, and the Editor of this journal for thoughtful and helpful
comments which greatly improved the content of this essay.
1
Cf. for example, Moses I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (New York: Cambridge UP, 1983).

325
 MARK ZELCER

We deliberately articulate Plato’s views using contemporary (though hopefully

not overly anachronistic) vocabulary and familiar categories of IR. Reading
Platonic political thought in this way should allow IR theorists to see Plato as a
political thinker whose concerns extend far beyond questions of justice in the
domestic sphere and provide some historical antecedent to contemporary ques-
tions. We show that it follows that Plato can also say something about how
explanations work in the human sciences, and his view deliberately rejects those
of his predecessors. We can also attribute to Plato views, however rudimentary,
regarding the structure of the international system, the most stable distribution of
power in the international community, the nature of political sovereignty, and an
account of regime change. We will argue this by first examining some ideas of
Plato’s predecessors and their approaches to IR, then look to how Plato treats the
questions they asked. But first some terminology.

II. THEORIES OF CAUSES OF WAR

Kenneth Waltz2 describes a “levels-of-analysis” framework that organizes the-

ories of causes of war into three levels (“images”). Each theory is designed to
explain foreign policy decisions. A theory may locate the cause of war in (1) con-
ceptions of human nature, that is, as a “first level” condition that explains wars
via human personality characteristics, the psychological makeup of a political
leader, or humans in general, to account for war. Or, a theory explains the occur-
rence of war by appealing to (2) the domestic structure of the state, that is, as a
“second level” condition that appeals to factors associated with the particular
government and societies of the warring entities. They look to domestic institu-
tional structures, economic systems, regime structure, interest groups, public
opinion, and political ideology within a state to explain war. Finally, a theory
may appeal to (3) the (international) system of states, that is, as a “third level”
condition. These theorists will explain the causes of war via such external fea-
tures of states as the Hobbesian anarchic structure of the international political
and economic arenas.
This way of thinking is slightly dated and scholars subsequently adjusted this
taxonomy.3 It is also recent enough that it’s full articulation makes presupposi-
tions about the nature of the state that Plato cannot make. Nonetheless, Waltz’s
framework suffices for our concerns as we are mainly concerned with his termi-
nology, not his analysis. Nothing hinges in its correctness or whether or not it is
2
Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia UP,
1959).
3
See for example, Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (West Sussex, UK:
Wiley–Blackwell, 2010).

326
 PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

the final say on the matter, only on the fact that some thinkers have thought about
IR along similar lines. We aim to show that Plato has a related conception of IR.

III. SOME ANCIENT GREEK APPROACHES

The historians of classical Greece often made war the central motif of their
narratives. Homer’s Iliad, though not a proper history, tells the tale of the Trojan
War; Herodotus centers his history on the Persian Wars (480–470 BC) while
Thucydides focuses on the Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BC). The first explana-
tion of the Trojan War blames the will of Zeus for the conflict while later explan-
ations blame quarrels among the gods. In the Cypria Earth complains about the
large population living on her so Zeus causes a war to ease Earth’s burden. The
will of the gods as an explanation for the events surrounding the Trojan War is
ubiquitous throughout Homeric literature, though the proximate cause of the war
is ultimately personal: Paris kidnapped Helen.
Looking to more proper history, when explaining how the Persians and the
Greeks came into conflict Herodotus too begins, in the “archaeology” of his His-
tories, by surveying the mythic prehistory of both sides and looking for wrongs
that each was guilty of. He tells us, however, in a famous passage (1.5), that he
cannot judge the veracity of any of the mythical claims, so he begins where he
has knowledge of the actual facts and, like Homer, finds personal reasons.
The actual facts he discloses involve Croesus of Lydia (who collected tribute
from the Ionian Greeks, though was on relatively good terms with them) attack-
ing Persia and losing. The Ionians, who subsequently came under Persian rule
because of the loss, eventually revolted against the Persians. The Athenians, their
“kinsmen,” came to the Ionians’ aid against the Persians, making their first stand
at Marathon. Their victory precipitated the second Persian invasion.
But why did Croseus attack the Persians in the first place? Herodotus, eager to
investigate the causes of war (1.1), gives us two explanations which work on two
levels. The first explanation is psychological: Croseus was taking revenge for the
Persians’ mistreatment of his brother in-law. But he also provides a theological
“level” of analysis: a divine promise of revenge on the Lydian royal house was
made and needed to be fulfilled. This is typical of Herodotus’ historiography. He
gives us individual motives for each event where he invokes fate, the gods, or
human psychology as motives for human behavior, and he invokes greed, ven-
geance, and honor to account for the actions of states.4
Another important example of a Herodotean first level explanation comes at
the very beginning of the narrative. Croesus’ ancestor Gyges was a bodyguard to
4
Peter Derow, “Historical Explanation: Polybius and his Predecessors,” Greek Historiography, ed.
Simon Hornblower (New York: Oxford, 1996) 73–90.

327
 MARK ZELCER

the King Candaules. Gyges was compelled by the enraged queen to kill the king
and take the throne after Candaules insisted on disrobing the queen before Gyges.
The ensuing civil war over the legitimacy of Gyges’ rule also serves as a cause of
the war.5
Thucydides too sought to understand the causes of war (1.23).6 It is well
known that his account of the Melian Dialog anticipates modern political realism
by attributing to the Athenian delegate the claim that countries go to war out of
honor, fear, and interest (1.76.2). However, the picture we get from a cursory
reading of Thucydides seems misleading. Donald Kagan7 argues convincingly
that the casus belli of the Peloponnesian War, or one of them at least, was the
Megarian Decree, an edict barring Megarians from trading in Athens, essentially
amounting to an economic boycott. More importantly, he argues, Athenians
widely believed that the decree caused the war and that it was also an important
Periclean policy project. Pericles’ decree and by extension Pericles himself was
thus often taken to be personally responsible for the war. Nonetheless Thucydi-
des insists, in Pericles’ defense, that it was the growth of Athenian power and
Sparta’s fear of it, that was the “truest, but unavowed, explanation” for the out-
break of the war (1.23.5–6). Thucydides thereby rejects the consensus of his
contemporaries—that first level considerations are responsible for the war. He
does so despite the fact that blaming Pericles personally was a standard trope of
intellectual and popular discussion.
Thucydides also deliberately dismisses second level (domestic) considerations
as causes of war. Though he alludes to anti-Athenian factions within Sparta and
anti-Spartan factions in Athens, he fails to incorporate them in his discussion of
the cause of the war. Spartan anti-Athenian factions were doubly vocal when
Athens rebuilt their defensive walls. When Athens attacked Thasos, Sparta, unbe-
knownst to Athens, agreed to aid Thasos but was ultimately unable to because
they had to deal with an unexpected Helot uprising. Athens, still bound to help
Sparta because of the post-Persian War treaty, came to assist Sparta against the
Helots. But after Athens’ help, Sparta quickly dismissed the Athenians under a
specious pretext sparking a diplomatic crisis and exacerbating anti-Spartan senti-
ment in Athens, ultimately bringing down Cimon’s pro-Sparta regime. When the
Helots eventually escaped Sparta, Athens, seemingly to spite Sparta, helped
resettle them en masse thus further worsening relations between the two states.
In Kagan’s appraisal, the pre-war alliance between Athens and Sparta was not an

5
Aeschylus has Darius blame Xerxes’ hubris for his defeat at Salamis and also apparently for the war
itself (1125).
6
For an overview, see for example, ch. 3 of Perez Zagorin’s Thucydides: An Introduction for the
Common Reader (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005).
7
Donald Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History (New York: Viking Press, 2009), ch. 2.

328
 PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

alliance of states, but of factions within the states, neither of which was able to
resist their domestic political opponents indefinitely (45). Yet Thucydides denies,
or at least ignores all these domestic considerations as possible causes of the war.
Lendon8 independently argues that it was generally matters of prestige and rank
hierarchy between Greek city-states that typically led to war. A state would typi-
cally initiate or participate in a war within Greece only when honor demanded it.9
This is a third level though non-realist consideration that must be accounted for in
assessing interstate relations. It is also an explanation that would have come natu-
rally to Thucydides’ contemporaries,10 yet he ignores it completely. Lendon11 has
argued separately that Socrates’ contemporary, Xenophon, also employed non-
realist explanations for war in his history.
By ignoring these considerations as possible causal influences Thucydides
resists non-realist considerations in favor of what he explicitly called the “truest
explanation” for the war—international fear.12 Fear, incidentally, is an odd thing
to attribute to a state, as states do not experience fear; only individuals have emo-
tions. While this locution can be dismissed as a paraphrase for a certain kind of
public or diplomatic sentiment it is worth noting as we shall see that Plato
appears to respond to it.

IV. PLATO ON SOCIAL EXPLANATION AND THE CAUSES OF WAR

The previous section quickly sketched explanatory strategies of some of

Plato’s predecessors, whose works he likely knew well. Let us next turn to Plato
himself. The Cretan character Kleinias in the Laws makes the (now Hobbesian)
point that states are perpetually involved in undeclared wars of all against all
(626a). But what causes such war to turn into violent conflict? Plato is sometimes
said to hold that the cause of war is no more than human appetite or greed (pleo-
nexia). A state will be driven to war to escape poverty or when it “disregards the
limits set by our necessary wants” (Republic 2.372e–374a). The “city for pigs” is
seen as inadequate and will require furniture, pastries, and prostitutes. When
8
Jon E. Lendon, “Athens and Sparta and the Coming of the Peloponnesian War,” The Cambridge
Companion to the Age of Pericles, ed. Loren J. Samons (New York: Cambridge UP, 2009).
9
Cf. David Hume, “Of the Balance of Power,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary III (1754): 364.
10
Jonathan E. Hall, “International Relations,” The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare:
Volume I: Greece, the Hellenistic World and the Rose of Rome, ed. Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees,
and Michael Whitby (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008) 89–90.
11
J. E. Lendon, “Xenophon and the Alternative to Realist Foreign Policy: Cyropaedia 3.1.14–31,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies 126 (2006): 82–98.
12
Thucydides’ actual position, as opposed to his ostensive or stated position, is a matter of consider-
able debate, but the outcome of our analysis does not hinge on this. (For discussion see for example,
Jonathan J. Price’s Thucydides and Internal War [New York: Cambridge UP, 2001].) Our concerns
are exclusively with Plato’s understanding of Thucydides, not Thucydides’ actual position.

329
 MARK ZELCER

people want meat, they will require land for pasture, forcing them to take it from
others and defend it against those who want it for themselves.13 The military is
clearly an instrument of foreign policy. Phaedo (66b–d) and Timeaeus (121b),
like Isocrates,14 makes similar claims. But Plato’s view is more nuanced than a
quick reading would suggest.
Since Plato’s Menexenus chronicles Athenian wars and battles, it is the natural
place to look for Plato’s theory of their causes. Menexenus contains Plato’s ver-
sion of an Athenian funeral oration. It mirrors the format of Pericles’ funeral ora-
tion in Thucydides’ History in many ways. But Plato’s panegyric contains one
feature missing from all other surviving funeral speeches. It contains a history of
Athens, especially her wars and their causes, though somewhat convoluted, start-
ing with Athenian mythical prehistory and going on to some years after Socrates’
death.
The fact that Plato wrote a funeral oration at all should alert us to the fact
that he was dissatisfied with Thucydides’. After all, unlike the defense in the
Apology—a version of which was recited in court—neither Socrates nor Plato
ever delivered an actual military funeral oration. The purpose of the writing was
likely didactic.15 Assuming that Plato read Thucydides’ History of the Pelopon-
nesian Wars and even more likely, assuming Plato was cognizant of (and indeed,
a participant in) the post bellum debate about where to lay blame for the Pelopon-
nesian War, when Plato wrote about causes of war he was likely deliberately
responding to Thucydides’ analysis.16
To understand Plato’s views on the causes of war we need to know two things.
First, what is Plato’s social ontology? In other words, what does Plato take to be
the proper unit of analysis in the human sciences? Second, what explanatory rela-
tions exist between members of those ontological categories? The answer to the
first question will tell us who, in Plato’s view, causes wars. The answer to the
second will tell us what motivates those actors decided on by the first question,
to compel them to start wars.

13
Cf. Angela Hobbs’ “Plato on War,” Maieusis: Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honor of Myles
Burnyeat, ed. Dominic Scott (New York: Oxford UP, 2007) 176–94.
14
Peter Hunt, War, Peace, and Alliance in Demosthenes’ Athens (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010)
Appendix 2.
15
Gerald M. Mara, The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato: Classical Political Philosophy
and the Limits of Democracy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008) 133–34.
16
That Plato only discretely alludes to controversies about the war should be unsurprising given his
relation to the Thirty Tyrants. Similarly, Gabriel Danzig’s Apologizing for Socrates: How Plato and
Xenophon Created our Socrates (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010) offers an illuminating interpre-
tation of much Platonic writing in light of the post-trial debate following Socrates’ execution. Also,
despite the usual assumption that much of Plato’s work responds to earlier writers, historians are
rarely treated among them.

330
 PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

To answer the first question let us look to the discussion of the degeneration of
the state in the Republic. There we are informed that justice, or a specific
harmony in the ideal state, is the same phenomenon as justice in an individual.
Epistemologically, justice can be more clearly seen in the state than in an indi-
vidual, but ontologically they are on par.
Justice is the same for both because justice is in the structure and there is an
isomorphism between the individual and the state. This isomorphism is a func-
tion of their respective tripartite natures. An individual’s soul has three parts:
appetitive, spirited, and rational. Jointly, these three parts govern the individual.
Their harmonious functioning (i.e., when they are properly governed by the ratio-
nal part) makes for a just individual. A state has a ruler, an auxiliary class, and a
worker class. When they are in harmony (i.e., properly regulated by the ruler
class), the state is just. More formally, there are personality traits t1, t2, and t3
(i.e., reason, courage, and appetite) which when combined in the proper propor-
tions make up a harmonious individual, i. Collections of individuals (i.e., social
classes) i1. . . im, in. . . ip, ir. . . iw, when combined properly, make up a Just state,
s. Thus the isomorphism between s and i comes from the fact that i1. . . im serves
the same function in s that t1 serves in i. The same holds for in. . . ip and t2, and
ir. . . iw and t3.
So much for ontology. What about the reasons that individuals or states are
the way they are or transform from one type to another? The Republic gives
us an account of how such a change occurs. While doing so the text merges
states with individuals and recognizes no distinction between the transforma-
tion of the aristocrat to the timocrat, the timocrat to the oligarch, the oligarch
to the democrat, the democrat to the tyrant, and the transformation of a state
constitution from an aristocracy to a timocracy, from a timocracy to an oligar-
chy, from an oligarchy to a democracy, and a democracy to a tyranny. So for
Plato, change (the explanatory relations) in one ontological domain is identical
to change in another. The generally anthropomorphized causes he gives: igno-
rance, jealousy, greed, need for honor, etc., engender the changes. Nonethe-
less, these traits are used to explain both the evolution of individuals and of
states.
In the Republic, the explanation of any first or second level facts about society
is invariant on the domain of explanation. Plato can tell a story about how one
man, with a certain personality becomes a man with another personality (or leads
to a generational shift, anyway), and by this he can really mean to describe how a
city with one constitution becomes a city with a different constitution over the
course of time. The explanation of how a transformation comes about when A
becomes B and B becomes C is the same regardless of whether A, B, and C are
i1, i2, i3 (individuals), i1. . . im, in. . . ip, ir. . . iw (collections of individuals), or s1,
s2, s3 (states). Plato’s social ontology in the Republic countenances both

331
 MARK ZELCER

individuals and cities, but his point throughout is that the two are isomorphic.
What is true of the city regarding justice is true of the individual, and vice
versa.17
But while a disharmonious soul may lead to internal confusion and bad deci-
sions, and a disharmonious state means infighting, regime change, and civil war
(351d), the Republic left us without an analysis of inter-state warfare. Plato does
not assume that the ideal republic will be the only state that exists (the size of the
state alone precludes this), and his discussion of the ideal state regarding trade
and guardians suggests that even the ideal state may need to go to war or other-
wise interact with other states. So whence war?
Plato’s Menexenus provides an answer by adding an international layer to the
Republic’s two levels as follows: When we look at the chronicle of Athenian his-
tory in the Menexenus we notice along with numerous commentators18 how odd
it is. It includes some minor battles and omits some major ones; it exaggerates
Athenian victories and downplays Athenian defeats, etc. But why?
The historical account is jury-rigged in a very particular way to highlight a
third layer in Plato’s social ontology. His account of the history of Athens in the
Menexenus deliberately and somewhat ahistorically arranges the chronicle of
events in Athenian history to work out like this: (1) First Athens fights alone
against the Persians, (2) Then Athens fights alongside other Greeks against Per-
sia, (3) Athens fights against other Greeks, and finally, (4) Athens fights along-
side Persia against other Greeks. Moreover, the battles are also (ahistorically)
arranged in pairs of alternating land and sea battles.
This arrangement is either (1) sloppy, a hypothesis we can ignore; (2) ignorant
of Athenian history, which is unlikely for any Greek of that period, let alone a lit-
erate Athenian intellectual in Plato’s position; (3) deliberately mocking the idea
of doing history, though there is no reason in the text or Platonic corpus to make
us think that he would do that; or (4) is trying to arrange the chronology to make
some point. We assume the latter. The shape of the chronology should strike us

17
Analogies between individuals and states are common. For example, the right to national self-
defense (or sovereignty) is often justified by analogy with the individual right to self-defense (see,
e.g., Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), ch. 4). Political
thinkers like Hobbes and Locke compared individuals and states to justify specific types of govern-
ment. In classical literature we find authors from Aristophanes and Archidamus to Thucydides (see
James V. Morrison, “A Key Topos in Thucydides: The Comparison of Cities and Individuals,” The
American Journal of Philology 115 (1994): 525–41 and Xenophon comparing cities to individuals.
But only Plato appears to have a way of talking about the explanatory relations as a product of this
analogy. Only Plato seems to have taken this analogy seriously as an ontological point.
18
For example, Charles Kahn, “Plato’s Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus,” Classical
Philology 58 (1963): 220–34.

332
 PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

as deliberate. It seeks to emphasize, among other things, the three actors of world
history and their very specific ways of interacting.19
Like rationality, which is divided into reason and courage, and the guardian
class which is divided into guardians and auxiliaries, Greeks in the Menexenus
are divided into: “we Athenians” and (Other) Greeks. Wars take place, in various
combinations, between Athenians, other Greeks, and barbarians—the three actors
of world history akin to the three parts of a personality and the three classes in a
state. And as with souls and states, relations among the parts determine the his-
tory and evolution of the whole.20,21
More poignantly, in Republic 4, where Socrates compares parts of the soul to
parts of the city, he also points out that (1) Thracians and Scythians and “other
people to the north” possess spiritedness, (2) Athenians possess love of knowl-
edge, and (3) the Egyptians and Phoenicians possess love of money. So even in
the Republic Plato identifies whole peoples with personality traits, as if to clue us
in that this tripartite analysis that encompasses personality traits and regime
types, can also be applied on a third level—to whole peoples. It is not only whole
peoples but Plato groups them so that it is clear that we are talking about the col-
lection of non-Athenian Greeks, a collection of non-Greeks, and Athenians.
(Aristotle (Politics VII.7) similarly associates “races” with character traits,
assigning a superior temperament to Greeks.)
Thus Pappas and Zelcer22 show that Menexenus expresses a natural extension
of the Republic’s tripartite analysis: from souls and domestic politics to the inter-
national realm. It therefore suggests that Plato, who could have been aware of
some version of the levels-of-explanation problem from the debate over the Pelo-
ponnesian War, also believed that the way to resolve it was to show that there are
similar relations between states as there are between personality traits and social
classes. Hence, wars are explained in the same way that regime changes or gener-
ational character shift is explained: the three domains—soul, city, and world—
are isomorphic.
Using our earlier notation: Harmony between traits t1, t2, and t3, makes for jus-
tice in an individual, i. Justice between i1. . . im, in. . . ip, ir. . . iw makes for justice
in a state s, and harmony between s1. . . sn, makes for justice in the world, w. As
in the Republic, where there is disharmony when the wrong part of the soul or
19
Nickolas Pappas and Mark Zelcer, Politics and Philosophy in Plato’s Menexenus (New Jersey:
Routledge, 2015), ch. 8, provides a fuller defense of this reading of the Menexenus’ history.
20
Nickolas Pappas and Mark Zelcer, “Plato’s Menexenus as a History That Falls into Patterns,”
Ancient Philosophy 33 (2013): 19–31.
21
Why exploit this layer of ontology only in the Menexenus and not explicitly in the Republic?
Perhaps Plato did not want his audience to associate him with sensitive political questions or, he had
not yet developed the idea sufficiently to insert into the Republic, or he thought it a distraction.
22
Pappas and Zelcer (2013).

333
 MARK ZELCER

the wrong part of the city rules over the others (or the part that rules does a poor
job), so too in the Menexenus, disharmony (i.e., war) is caused when the wrong
element of the world dominates. It is the role of the guardian class to regulate the
city, reason to regulate the individual, and Athens, to regulate the world.
The ontological isomorphism also renders character trait vocabulary to explain
foreign policy decisions unproblematic for Plato. If there is some trait with
explanatory power on one level it will be explanatory (or have a counterpart) on
another in the same way that whatever justice is in a person, is just in a state. The
epistemology might be different, that is, it might be manifest differently in an
individual than a state, but it will have the same explanatory relevance. But
Thucydides, who denies all explanatory roles on the first or second levels, is only
justified in giving human character traits explanatory roles with respect to people,
not states.

V. HEGEMONIC STABILITY THEORY

There is an interesting corollary to this account. In Menexenus we see that

Plato takes disharmony to ensue when the wrong state (i.e., non-Greek, non-
Athenian) dominates the region (world) just as he explains in the Republic that
there is disharmony when the wrong class dominates the state. It falls out
then that in contrast with Waltz’s23 bipolar stability theory that argues that maxi-
mal global security is maintained when there are two dominant states, or
Morgenthau’s24 multipolar balance-of-power theory, Plato espouses a unipolar
stability theory of the conditions of peace of the kind ruled out by Waltz.25 Peace
is maintained when a single political entity maintains strategic dominance. More
precisely, Plato is describing a complex hierarchical institutionalized core-
periphery relationship with Athens as the central dominant hegemon, the other
Greeks in the next concentric circle playing a supporting (military) role, and the
remainder of the nations in the outermost position. While Athens is in a coercive
or at least highly influential relationship to everyone else, it is not, for Plato, a
Periclean colonial power. Plato repeatedly stresses the soft power that Athens
would wield in its role as educator to the world.26 This is in contrast, for Plato, to
Periclean policy which was designed to maintain Athenian strategic, economic,
and cultural dominance for the benefit of Athens, largely via the continued exer-
cise of Delian League military might.
23
Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus 93 (1964): 881–909.
24
Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among the Nations (New York: Knopf, 1948).
25
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979) 136.
26
See Pappas and Zelcer (2015), ch. 5, for a full discussion of education in the Menexenus, esp
pp. 110f.

334
 PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

In the Menexenus, Plato takes for granted (apparently as an empirical matter)

that there are three superpowers in his world: Athens, Sparta (and their alliances
of miscellaneous Greeks), and Persia (i.e., barbarians, non-Greeks). Stability and
order depends on who is in control and how they exert and maintain power. Any
multipolar world is unstable. As Plato’s historical chronology tells it, Athens
fought Persia (alone) at Marathon, Artemisium, and Salamis (240e–241b);
Athens and Sparta together fought Persia at Platea (241c); Athens and allies
fought against Persia at Eurymedon, Cyprus, and Crete (241c–e); Athens fought
Sparta at Tanagra, Oenophyta, and Spahgia (242a–c); Athens and her alliance
even ends up in a type of “civil war” characterized by internal betrayals and
treachery in Sicily (242e–243a); and finally ends with Sparta and Persia jointly
fighting against Athens at Mytilene and Arginusae (243c). Regardless of the
shape of their blocs of alliance, the disharmonious nations fought each other
because the proper order of hegemonic leadership was not instantiated. Peace is
only possible when Athens rules alone as world guardian. In the absence of such
rule we have the international anarchy described in the Laws (626a) where
“every state is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed
by heralds, but everlasting.”
The unipolar hegemon is ideally one dominant (guardian) power supported by
the “auxiliaries,” namely the other Greek city-states which function as the war-
rior class, or rather the group that wields a significant share of the “hard power”
of military might, while the “guardian state,” Athens, would work at maintaining
its superpower status and global stability. (Aristotle held a related view.)
Contemporary theorists are less concerned with the type of powers that make
up the two poles that promote maximum stability (though second image theorists
might). But for Plato, it is not merely the fact of a single hegemon that promotes
stability, it must be an appropriate hegemon. (A caveat: Athens is presented dif-
ferently throughout the Platonic dialogs. Whatever we make of the Republic
and its stance on democracy it must be understood as speaking, in some way, to
Athens. Similarly, for the fictitious portrayal of ancient Athens in the Critias.
The history presented in the Menexenus is not completely accurate. Putting a sec-
ond image spin on this, the idealization the Menexenus portrays should indicate
that when Plato puts Athens at the helm of the international arena, he may be
speaking about a unipolar hegemonic Athens that is as utopian as the Athens
implied by the Republic is dystopian. Recall that it is the democratic Athens and
its laws that Socrates speaks so fondly of in the Crito.)
Given Plato’s stress on the guardian’s role as educator of the two other social
classes—the auxiliary and the producers, and reason’s role as arbiter of the
other two parts of the soul—spiritedness and appetite, we can easily extrapolate
to Athens’ role as world hegemon. Peace is assured when the hegemonic power
can maintain it via the hard power of Athens the well trained “guardian state,”

335
 MARK ZELCER

the proper utilization of the soft power of intellectual and socio-cultural influ-
ence, and via proper control over the “auxiliary states.”
Although hegemonies are typically set up for the benefit of the dominant
power, Plato, like contemporary neoliberal interpretations of hegemonic stability,
sought the benefit of the periphery, even at the expense of the core. Perhaps this
is why Socrates’ original version of the ideal state is as austere as the lives of the
guardian class in the Republic. This idealistic approach almost appears to antici-
pate Young’s27 contemporary concern (lament?) that: “. . . hegemonic actors will
generally bear the burden of responsibility for the performance of imposed
orders, and any actor assuming the role of hegemon will almost inevitably have
to forego positions of moral or ethical leadership in the relevant society (285).”
Young believes that “imposed orders” like those Plato has in mind, “are designed
for the benefit of hegemonic powers, a condition that frequently leads to ineffi-
cient outcomes. . . (289)”
Plato’s notion of sovereignty is also evident here. Our contemporary paradigm
of sovereignty is constrained by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which made the
nation-state the ontological unit of political structure and also established the
inviolability of national boundaries. Since such a view of the nation-state made
war, even war on humanitarian grounds difficult to defend intellectually, the
United Nations recently devised the Responsibility to Protect paradigm28 to miti-
gate this difficulty, by reconceptualizing sovereignty as a responsibility of the
state towards the citizens and not as a right of noninterference against other
nation-states. Plato’s view differs from both of these. Plato repeatedly argues, for
example, in Menexenus and Timaeus, that enslavement (of Greeks anyway) must
always be opposed and that freedom must be championed, as in the case of
the Boeotians (242a).29 It is the responsibility of the hegemonic power to ensure
the freedom and proper management of all citizens even at the expense of the
superpower.
Given the way that Waltz30 understands political “interdependence,” we may
now understand the Platonic ideal world as consisting in an interdependent sys-
tem of related units where the costs and benefits are asymmetric—different units
benefiting and contributing at different rates; where the definition of
“interdependent” reflects the fact that war is the cost of extraction for some
27
Oran R. Young, “Regime Dynamics: The Rise and Fall of International Regimes,” International
Organization 36 (1982): 277–97.
28
Gareth Evans, “The Responsibility to Protect: An Idea Whose Time Has Come. . . and Gone,”
International Relations 22 (2008): 283–98.
29
This refers to the battle of Tanagra. The fact that Thucydides presents this event quite differently
shows how keen Plato is to emphasize the theme of freedom.
30
Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Myth of Interdependence,” The International Corporation, ed. Charles
Kindleberger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970) 205–23.

336
 PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

political unit from the system and is also the cost of violating another state’s sov-
ereignty. Sovereignty for Plato is then defined both by the right of a state to be
free of enslavement and as a guarantee of this by the hegemonic power.

VI. INTERNAL DEGENERATION, WAR, AND PSYCHIC BREAKDOWN

We have to answer two questions to understand what we can attribute to Plato

about explanations in the political realm. The first involves understanding Plato’s
social ontology or unit of analysis. The second involves the explanatory relations
between the units; what causes the actors to act the way they do? How to describe
the motivation of actors on the world stage to start wars? The breakdown of the
individual, state, and economic system all take on the same form, but what causes
this degeneration? By definition, stability maintains the status quo, and Plato
believes (Republic 5) that in a perfectly planned society stability can only be
maintained by state planning that follows mathematically perfect algorithms. But
such a program cannot be maintained by humans for long. Humans, whose expe-
riences are mediated by such crude factors as sense perception and whose output
is limited by the vagaries of the physical world, cannot maintain the perfection
necessary to keep a society stable. A crisis that breaks down the state is
inevitable.
Just as scholars like Skocpol, Young, and Mahler,31 among numerous others
attempt to describe the contemporary conditions of revolution and the dynamics
of regime change, Plato is similarly concerned with crises that break down the
state and, by extension, the global society. His analysis of degeneration of the
ideal state in Republic 8 from aristocracy to tyranny involves a number of kinds
of crises to explain civic collapse on both a domestic and international level.
Foremost is the idea that breakdown is a function of a shift in the elite or mar-
ginal elite and their ability or desire to appropriately wield power. They can fail
to properly allocate human resources, which ignites civil strife, class stratifica-
tion, and resource redistribution, or, more likely, they cease altogether to identify
with the larger goals of the ideal state. As we mentioned, the upper classes them-
selves can develop a lust for power and property and neglect to distribute them
appropriately throughout society thereby causing crises of all the kinds men-
tioned above.

31
Theda Skocpol, “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 18 (1976): 175–203, Young (1982), and Gregory S. Mahler, Compar-
ative Politics: An Institutional and Cross-National Approach, 2nd ed. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1995).

337
 MARK ZELCER

Modern transition theory is concerned with the move from totalitarian

“tyrannies” to democracy. Carothers32 for example notes that transitional democ-
ratization theory insists on three steps to democratization: “opening,” a society’s
first steps toward political liberalism; “breakthrough,” when democracy happens;
and finally “consolidation,” when the new regime becomes fully democratic and
stable. True or false, the methodological idea (and only the methodological idea)
that society (d)evolves in discrete stages, transitioning from one regime to the
next, has ancient antecedents by analogy in Plato’s description of the internal
degeneration of the state. Once we understand the ontological isomorphism, it is
natural to see the decline of the world community happen under conditions of
analogous social dynamics.
The transition theory in the Republic presents an ideal, and a way to
degenerate and move away from that ideal. Aside for telling us that to get
to the ideal, we would have to send away the adults and start from scratch
with young children who the guardians can easily influence (541a), the
Republic tells us little about how to move toward it from a non-ideal posi-
tion. The Republic describes how people become envious of others and
begin to desire money and honor, but Plato does not tell us how a person,
regime, generation, or group of people can improve. Presumably, an individ-
ual can become better by climbing out of the cave toward the light, and
become philosophical. One might expect that becoming worse and becoming
better are symmetrical. However, Plato does not articulate this, nor is it clear
how this might scale to the level of a state. Pessimism stemming from
human fallibility outweighs, in Plato’s imagination, faith in the human pro-
pensity for self-improvement.

VII. CONCLUSION

Timaeus opens with a summary of the highlights of the Republic (perhaps) fol-
lowed by a plea to examine its ideal state comparatively, looking at the regime
described there in relation to other regimes (19c). Socrates wonders how the ideal
state fares against other states in war and in foreign relations. Plato wants to test,
using methods that would be familiar to contemporary students of comparative
politics, the idea that an ideal republic will have a superior military and foreign
policy. Critias is unfinished and the planned sequel Hermocrates was never writ-
ten, so we do not know how Plato would have described the relationship between
ancient Athens of 11,000 BC and the fabled Atlantis, nor do we know what each
state represented. We are left only with interpretive difficulties regarding the

32
Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 5–21.

338
 PLATO ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

pieces of dialogue we do have.33 The remainder of the dialogue might have pre-
sented a more robust Platonic theory of political analysis. But alas, we must
make do with applying the domestic theories in the Republic to their isomorphic
international counterparts we can extrapolate from the Menexenus.
All of the above issues would need to be fleshed out for a fuller picture of Pla-
to’s IR theory to be complete.34 Nonetheless, we saw how Plato could address
some important questions that any comprehensive theory of IR must include. I
hope I have shown that Plato’s position on the explanation of events studied in
the social sciences, especially war and its causes, is more nuanced than is gener-
ally recognized. Plato recognized a unified explanatory schema that governs rela-
tions between the levels within his social ontology where the explanations on the
international level mirror the corresponding explanations on the domestic and
individual psychological levels.

State University of New York at Oswego

33
For example, Thomas Kjeller Johansen, Plato’s Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias
(New York: Cambridge UP, 2004) and P. Vidal-Naquet, “Atlantis and the Nations,” Janet Lloyd,
Tr. Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 300–26.
34
A complete understanding of Plato’s conception of IR would require fleshing out numerous other
issues as well. We only address those that have been overlooked in the scholarly literature and that
directly address what can be learned from taking seriously the Menexenus’ extension of the tripartite
analysis to the international sphere. Plato makes numerous statements about the practice, nature,
and conduct of war, a subject in which there is ample room to contrast him with his predecessors.
Hobbs (2017) for example, analyzes Plato’s stance on the inevitably of war in both the ideal and lux-
urious city, as well as the desirability of avoiding war in toto. Plato speaks also, briefly, to the weap-
ons and culture of war (Laws 625c–d), the former a subject contained in most every modern
convention and protocol governing warfare. Socrates was also famously involved in the trial of the
ship captains after the battle of Arginusae (see Debra Nails’ The People of Plato: A Prosopography
of Plato and other Socratics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2002) for a full account of the
trial of the captains). Plato’s allusions to the trial in the Apology may shed some light on Plato’s
views of the treatment of war dead and the conduct of war tribunals. Henrik Syse’s “The Platonic
Roots of Just War Doctrine: A Reading of Plato’s Republic,” Diametros 23 (2010): 104–23 dis-
cusses the Republic’s place in the history of just war theory generally. Issues about IR that do not
pertain to war are also germane. Socrates’ comments on exile in Crito can shed light on his thoughts
about emigration. Rebecca LeMoine’s “Foreigners as Liberators: Education and Cultural Diversity
in Plato’s Menexenus,” American Political Science Review 111 (2017): 1–13 addresses the role of
immigration and foreigners in Plato, Aspasia in particular. Thomas Pangle’s “Justice Among
Nations in Platonic and Aristotelian Political Philosophy,” American Journal of Political Science
43 (1998): 377–97 also contains a good general discussion of Plato on justice in the international
arena.

339