Who should govern? The best person for the job said Plato. His ideal state as envisaged in the 4th century BC was a republic ruled by philosophers like himself, with a warrior class to protect the state, and a producer class to serve it with services and skills. In Plato's Republic each citizen would have an occupation suited to his nature and abilities. And that so that everything could just take course, newborn babies would be taken away from their parents and raised by the state.
Tt took 2,300 years until Carl Popper radically contradicted this theory. In the open society and it's enemies (1945), he depicts Plato as the father of the tolertarian State. Popper was the first voice to criticize not so much Plato's answer to the question 'Who should govern?' but questions itself. According to Popper it wasn't about developing the system in which the 'best' ruled, the ideal system was one in which was possible to get rid of bad rulers. Of course it's possible to overdo the disposing: like the Italian's to have already had 60 different governments since 1946, or the Germans prior to 1933 for whom the frequent changes of government among other things instilted a deep mistrust of the parliamentary democracy and yet the only form of governement that enables a relatively painless removal of a bad government is democracy.
In a democracy you say what you like and do what you're told. Gerald Barry
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