Plato, critique of democracy

Is a political system based on individual freedom desirable? For Plato, no: 2,500 years ago, he already saw democracy as a chaotic political organization leading to disorder, then tyranny.

Plato's political theory can be read as the transposition, into history, of his metaphysical doctrine opposing the imperfection of the sensible world, changeable and unstable, to the world of Forms, immutable and perfect. In Book VIII of The Republic, after defining the perfectly just political regime, Plato turns his attention to the regimes that actually exist, tracing their evolution through a process of decadence. Each new regime is born of the corruption of the previous one, and in this hierarchy, democracy occupies penultimate place, just before the tyranny it engenders.

For Plato, decadence