Plato and Hobbes: Two bad metaphors for society—and a better one | Chandran Kukathas | Big Think

Looking over the history of thinking about metaphors to describe a good society, I felt that they were too, you know, metaphors that dominated with which I was unhappy. One is a very old metaphor what you find in Plato's Republic, and this is the metaphor of the ship of state. The way to think about a society, Plato suggests, is to think of it as a ship. It's on the ocean, it's got to navigate difficult waters, it's got to find a destination.

But on the open sea, you know, people don't really have much choice but to, you know, put their lives into the hands of those who know how to navigate, to know how to run a ship. It means putting their lives in the hands of a captain, you know, or a commander. Now, this particular metaphor for a society, the ship of state, suggests that what we have in the real world in every society is a kind of a closed society, okay, with a purpose or a direction to go.

Everybody there is somehow there, you know, without any possibility of escape or any possibility of anybody joining that society, and they're, you know, in precarious circumstances. So they need somehow a system of authority, okay? So, this metaphor really depends upon there being a closed society before we can start thinking about, you know, how to manage it, and diversity has no place in this other than the fact that people have different skills, which all have to be coordinated to a single end.

The other prominent metaphor in the history of thought is a slightly different one, and this is found in Hobbes's Leviathan, which conceives of political society on the analogy of a body. Okay, the Leviathan is the term Hobbes used to describe the state, and the state is made up of all the parts which go to form the single whole. That single whole is made up of all the different persons who live essentially as a collective to authorize the exercise of power by this single entity.

Once again, the conception of society here is of a kind of unitary structure. Okay, and what I wanted to do was think about how we understand society without our assuming a closed structure or a closed society. Because in the real world, people come and go, not only because they are born, there are succeeding generations, but also because people move from one jurisdiction to another, but also jurisdictional boundaries change.

I mean, if you look at the borders of the world over its history, or even over the last century, you can see how dramatically these borders have changed. Very, very few countries have not had their borders change. I mean, think about Europe, for example. In 1900, there were 20 states in Europe; now there are, I think, 55. And in between, there were so many variations. But if you go back 500 years, you will see that there were about 700 different principalities.

So the boundaries are always changing, and there's always movement across boundaries. So if you're theorizing about how one should live, to assume a closed society seems to me a very limiting assumption. So what I wanted to suggest was that a good society is in which what you see is a diversity of people's living across jurisdictions that change all the time, and those moving across boundaries themselves will be people with different ethical commitments as well as the capacity to change those commitments.

And so what you needed was a metaphor that describes this kind of society. So my thought was that what we see really is a kind of archipelago, which is a collection of islands that are in some sort of proximity to one another across the seas, of which, you know, people move all the time. The archipelago itself, as I understand it, is one that's made of a violence which themselves come into existence and go out of existence depending on a whole range of things, from tides to climate change.

So this is, I think, a way of understanding the world which is quite different from that of, I think, much of classical philosophy. And I think even within the liberal tradition, the norm has been to think about society by trying to theorize it as a kind of closed and fixed entity. And I've wanted to say no, it's really something quite different.

This, I think, is something that strengthens reasons for thinking about it in terms of norms of toleration rather than norms of justice because norms of justice basically say we figure out what is right and then we enforce it. Whereas the norm of toleration says we disagree about what's right, let's continue to debate this. Maybe, from time to time, we'll have to settle the question, but let's not think in terms of finding the one right answer.

So that, I think, is the reason for my thinking about things, you know, according to the model of the archipelago. And the reason for calling it the liberal archipelago is partly because when I imagine its opposite, I think of Solzhenitsyn's idea of the Gulag Archipelago. Maybe it's something that people aren't so familiar with nowadays, but in the 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote his great masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, to describe the system of labour camps to which political prisoners were sent across the Soviet Union.

And in these special camps, people had no freedom to leave; they were simply constrained or confined into these camps, and they were ruled from above. This was very much the model of a kind of closed society. What I wanted to say was that the opposite of this is, you know, it's still an archipelago of different communities, but it's a liberal one because people are free to move across from one to another to find the place which most suits them, which most accommodates their own way of living.