The Negative Judgment That Democracy Isn't Inevitable

If we're the democratic society and we're going to take Socrates at his word, that means we're heading for tyranny. I don't read Plato as that kind of determinist who would say that there are political and historical or indeed spiritual or psychological forces that make a single trajectory inevitable. And in Plato's own day, there is indeed flip-flopping between democracy and tyranny, or at least in Plato's memory. So it's not as though it's a single straight arrow where that leaves us in terms of the other kinds of constitutional transformation that might be possible.