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consider its application to women athletes and women administrators. Plato starts
by dividing the citizens into three classes: 1) the guardians or rulers, 2) the soldiers,
(Auxiliaries) and 3) the artisans or common people. In Plato's Utopia, the
guardian rulers are carefully selected as the brightest and best of the auxiliary or
soldier class. That is, the guardians have all of the attributes of the soldiers,
strength, power, keenness of sight and wit, as well as the great intellectual ability
which is cultivated by a careful course of academic and physical training. The
guardians alone have political power, and they rule on behalf of the rest of the
community, a community which readily accepts the authority of the guardians because
it is in their interest. The guardians accept their role as rulers as a responsibility.
They are not permitted to own private property or to accrue any personal
benefit from their role as guardians.
I would argue that that we can strike a broad comparison with the Olympic
Games and the Olympic Movement. For our purposes let us consider the IOC as
the guardians and Olympic athletes as auxiliaries or soldiers. As in Plato's Utopia,
it is the gate-keepers or administrators of the Olympic Movement alone who have
political power.
The purpose of selecting a ruling elite was to ensure that political decisions
were made in the best way possible. Plato believed that democracy vested too
much power in the hands of an uneducated populace too likely to be swayed by
rhetoric or influenced by 30 second sound bites on the television. Plato's solution
was an elite meritocracy whose members were to be inoculated against the desire
for personal power. The inoculation was to come in the form of a healthy dose of
philosophy delivered through a lifetime of education and reflection.
Plato's division of society into the three classes of Guardian, soldier and artisan
is predicated upon the idea that the most efficient way of running the community
is to divide up tasks on the basis of aptitudes. Some people will be better at one
thing than another, so an efficient community will encourage specialization and division
of labour. Just as some people are more suited to be cobblers than farmers,
others will be more suited to be rulers and guardians. The role of education will
be to build on naturally occurring strengths and all members of the community
will live and work in harmony knowing that each function is being performed by
the person best suited and best trained for the job.
This division of labour on the basis of aptitude leads to the principal objection
to Plato's suggestion that the most important role in the community, that of Guardian,
can be filled by women as well as men. The objection, and it is one we still
hear, is that women are by nature different. But this objection is not, by itself sufficient.
As Plato points out, what is required is not merely the identification of a
natural difference, but rather the identification of a difference that is relevant to the
task under discussion.
Plato puts it like this:
"Yet we might just as well, on this principle (that different natures should have
different jobs), ask ourselves whether bald men and long-haired men are of the
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