Plato And Brave New World Comparative Essay

Plato’s political philosophy, The Republic, focuses on the ideal city-state, which contains a standard of justice, education, eugenics, and the idea of a cave allegory. Huxley’s novel Brave New World focuses on a dystopian state similar to Plato’s ideal city-state. Although Huxley dramatically differs from Plato’s ideal city-state with his class system, eugenics, justice, the status of men and women in high positions, and education in The Republic, the similarities in Huxley’s usage of Plato’s education, the cave allegory communal wives’ system, lead to a precise determination of Huxley’s inspiration. To begin with, Huxley has a substantial standard of hierarchy within the hierarchy of the class system within the state compared to Plato in his political philosophical

Ultimately, this difference leads to a less educated society in Huxley’s state compared to Plato’s ideal city-state. While Huxley and Plato differ on several particular cases of the state’s actions, there are similarities in those differences, including in education. To explain, in Plato’s Republic, attending school is mandatory, as found in Huxley’s novel. The notion of both Plato and Huxley mandating an education system for different objectives leads to a connection between the ideal city-state where the population obtains an education and the dystopian society within Huxley’s novel. Moving forward, Huxley’s and Plato’s societies also agree on the analogy of the cave allegory. To illustrate, Plato explains the cave allegory as a society bound into a chain of ignorance. When someone gets free from these chains and sees the truth about society, they want to return to the narrative they were trained in. Similarly, in Huxley’s novel, the controller in chapter 17 explains that he would seek scientific discovery in his younger