This week inThe Atlantic, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein posed a question:

当一个曾经是开明进步典范的社会，在许多公民的共谋下，有倒退到不宽容和不理性的危险时，会发生什么?社会上不知所措的成员该如何回应?他们是以礼相待，抵抗，撤退，甚至离开吗?

Goldstein is wondering what a citizen should do when they feel like democracy has failed. How should we react when the people around us have vote in a way we find horrible? Though that sentiment might apply to many citizens in the modern world, Goldstein looks at a much older example: the vote to execute Socrates.

Goldstein describes how in 399 B.C.E., Athens was worn down from war, and seeking to Make Athens Great Again, the citizenry found a scapegoat in the old philosophical gadfly Socrates. Finally fed up with his criticism of Athen's claimed moral authority, a jury of 501 citizens voted to execute the old man.

After the vote—which represented trial by a jury of peers, a pinnacle of supposed democratic justice in the ancient world—Socrates's greatest student, Plato, was inconsolable. Disgusted with his once-beloved city, he left Athens and traveled far and wide, venturing down to Egypt to study astronomy, and to southern Italy to study with the mathematically mystical Pythagoreans.

戈尔茨坦评论了柏拉图的政治理论在他的旅程中是如何变化的，然后思考了柏拉图最终回家意味着什么。后来，柏拉图回到雅典创办了他的学院，戈尔茨坦称之为欧洲第一所大学。

The journey of Plato might well reflect the soul-searching many citizens are experiencing right now—but, even in the best of times, reading about the famous philosopher’s reaction to injustice can serve us all well.

Read the whole article:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/making-athens-great...