"Demo: … If the best-qualified experts disagree, why should we make them guardians? Incidentally, how would your guardians settle their disagreements--by majority rule? Aristos: A nice debating point. But you mustn't assume that expert technicians are qualified to be guardians. Most of them probably aren't. The guardians would have to be carefully trained and carefully selected for their special qualities of knowledge and virtue. Plato devotes an extraordinary amount of attention in The Republic to the education of the guardians, and every serious advocate of guardianship since then has done likewise. Unlike the haphazard process of selecting leaders in your democratic system, recruiting and educating the future guardians is a central element in the idea of guardianship. Demo: But how would you go about that? Your solution gets more and more demanding. It's not for nothing that Plato's Republic is generally dismissed as a utopia."
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Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (1989), Ch. 4 : Guardianship
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)
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Republic (Plato)
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