… is from page 184 of Thomas Cahill’s delightful 2003 volume Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter:
Though such an “ideal” has little appeal to those who lived through the bleak twentieth-century utopias of fascism and communism, there seems always to be someone, somewhere who dreams of implementing a new version of Plato’s polis, a world of puritanical perfection, controlled by a narrow elite, who know what is best for everyone. Plato made the fatal error of equating knowledge with virtue and assuming that if one knows what is right he will do what is right.
George Will today likewise warns against this “Progressive” antipathy toward the messiness of politics when done in accord with America’s Constitutional rules (and, I would add, “Progressive’s” antipathy also toward the messiness of – or, more accurately, toward the messiness that “Progressives” perceive in – market processes, such creative processes that stubbornly refuse to craft the world into a form that resembles “Progressives'” clean theories).
