The Concept of a Holistic Development Constitution in Light of Plato’s Theory of Gradual State Decline

Abstract

Today, society faces a number of challenges driven by excessive consumption and extreme proliferation of utilitarian and radical individualistic ideals. This study is focused on searching for new constitutional models that would mitigate social and environmental risks of the consumerist era. To this end, the author has conducted a comprehensive review of relevant Ancient Greek concepts. In the 5th and 4th centuries BC, Greece put forward the first abstract notions of the ideal and material realms, as well as of individualism and collectivism. Particular attention is given to Plato’s theory of inevitable constitutional decline, its causes and potential solutions. Re-examining the classical holistic methodology — where the whole is larger than the sum of its parts — now seems as essential as ever before. Although such an approach is foreign to contemporary world steeped in division and individual’s alienation from nature, society and other individuals, classical holistic principles remain quite relevant, as they are largely aligned with the 20th century notion of sustainable development, which sees economic, social and environmental challenges as intrinsically linked, without dividing them into separate realms. Due to this perspective, the author has been able to come up with a general normative framework that also takes the fields of ethic and aesthetic — separate, but linked by a complex interrelation system — into account.