system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
was socrates against democracy?

heard people say he was against it but he also defended it.. but if was against it, why so?
gpt
We don't have any evidence that the historical person Socrates who died in 399 BC was against democracy or had any views on the subject. Our evidence about this person tells us very little: that he died, that he was sentenced to death, that he was snub-nosed, that he tried to define the virtues, and so on. But nothing about democracy.

Many of his followers -- and some people who were not his followers -- wrote dialogues that featured a fictionalized version of Socrates. We don't know exactly to what extent it was fictionalized, because we don't know much about the historical person, but it is clear that it is fictionalized to some large extent, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the presentations of Socrates are in many respects mutually exclusive.

One of his followers, Plato, wrote dialogues that feature Socrates that criticize democracy. The *Republic* offers an implicit criticism and an explicit criticism. The implicit criticism is the one implied by Plato's own account of an ideal state, one that is introduced by the fictionalized character Socrates for the sake of identifying the virtues in the soul by means an analogy with the state. This implicit criticism is that democracy is imperfect because it lacks the virtues that we observe only in the ideal state, chief among which is wisdom, which exists in a state when its rulers have been educated such that they have done decades of math and philosophy. Since democracy doesn't require that the people with a share of the rule have the knowledge that results from this education system, it is imperfect. 

There is an explicit criticism which says that democracy is a political system built on equality, instead of virtue, and which inevitably deteriorates into tyranny on account of the diversity and disagreement that exists when everyone gets an equal share of the rule. In another work, the *Laws*, which doesn't feature Socrates, Plato argues that any legitimate political system is designed such that it exists for the sake of virtue. Democracy doesn't do this, and so Plato doesn't even really think of it as a legitimate political system in this text.

Equality is the central feature of democracy that Plato exploits when developing his explicit criticism. Athenians were quite proud of the equality built into Athenian democracy, especially after the reforms made by Cleisthenes at the end of the 6th century. Here is what Thucydides attributes (perhaps apocryphally) to the great statesman Pericles:

> Our polity does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. It is called a democracy, because not the few but the many govern. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.

There is a further criticism of democracy in the *Statesman*, another Platonic dialogue, one in which Socrates is present but hardly active (and the criticism is not given by him). This criticism is in keeping with the spirit of the *Republic*'s implicit criticism, namely, that the ideal ruler is one who has a certain knowledge and expertise, in virtue of which someone has a legitimate claim to political authority. Plato does not think that it is plausible that this expertise exists in a large enough body of people in any given state for a democracy to be ruled by such statesmen. It is wildly unlikely that any given state will have a large amount of experts in any given subject, after all. Therefore, democracy is not viable for allowing the rule of the true statesman and only the rule of the true statesmen.