09-12-2019, 09:23 PM | #31 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Has anyone ever tried to create campaign based on Plato's Repuplic?
Quote:
So The Republic is not a Utopia in the sense of not reflecting real societies. What it is that it's disadvantages are to great to make up for the problems it averts.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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09-12-2019, 11:45 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Has anyone ever tried to create campaign based on Plato's Repuplic?
Quote:
Jane Jacobs writes about this in her short book Systems of Survival, which is about the need for the warrior ethic and the trader ethic to coexist, even though each regards the other as immoral.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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09-13-2019, 11:02 AM | #33 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Has anyone ever tried to create campaign based on Plato's Repuplic?
Quote:
"Shun Trading" and "Shun Force" is first of all, "Thou shalt not Steal" (a merchant can pack heat on the road but using it in the market is armed robbery, a guardian has nothing to sell except the power of his office and that belongs to someone else). For Guardians it is also a matter of being ostentatious, respecting hierarchy and making rich use of leisure. Some Guardian tasks after all are not to be done by a more senior guardian (no judge can be an executioner because it will make the state less impersonal, and I doubt it was Queen Elizabeth's lifelong dream to leave her throne to be a guard at a woman's prison). So it is not just trading tasks that are shunned but guardian ones with less status.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison Last edited by jason taylor; 09-13-2019 at 11:55 AM. |
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09-13-2019, 11:36 AM | #34 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Has anyone ever tried to create campaign based on Plato's Repuplic?
Quote:
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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09-13-2019, 12:14 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Has anyone ever tried to create campaign based on Plato's Repuplic?
Probably the least believable is the "philosopher-king". Though there have been Kings who were pretty good, or at least reasonably handy philosophers, (Alfred comes to mind) the realities of Kingship make it rather difficult to reconcile. At that Alfred, to a large degree was using scholarship as an operating tool to give birth to an infant civilization which is a Kingly task as well as a philosophical. Loving knowledge is all very well for a King but "intelligence" is more important than generic "knowledge" (the government of Britain would care more about the fact that Kim Philby is a traitor than the fact that Francis Bacon did not write the works of Shakespeare). Living a simple life is just not what Kings do unless they are required to slum it on a military campaign. While a King can go overboard on ostentation, a simple life is just not kingly and those kings who pretend to it are posing anyway which is not very simple.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison Last edited by jason taylor; 09-13-2019 at 12:26 PM. |
09-24-2019, 03:17 AM | #36 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Has anyone ever tried to create campaign based on Plato's Repuplic?
...late developing thought...
Doesn't 2000AD's //Mega-City One// have aspects of the Republic? Certainly the judges seem to be one of the most straightforward attempts that I'm aware of to create the guardian class in popular fiction. |
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