Permanent Expatriate

Both Plato and Nietzsche are famously critical of democracy. Nietzsche’s disparagement of democracy is much more oriented towards its corrosive effect on philosophy as a way of life, however, where Plato suggests that democracy is actually conducive to the philosophic life. What, then, is the decisive difference between ancient and modern democracy? The most obvious difference is the fact of the mass society and the technology that exists in symbiosis with it. Ancient democracy was conducted face-to-face by citizens who all know each other and cared what everyone else thought of them and, when you voted, everyone saw you vote. It is the easy anonymity with which we moderns sate and express our private passions that gives rise to Nietzsche’s last man and the death of philosophy.