The most famous vision of a just society is that of Plato in "The Republic". Here Socrates proposes a clear divison into classes (not necessarily hereditary of Guardians (who rule), Auxiliaries (who assist them) and everyone else, who undertake all the economic tasks. To secure this, all children,male and female, are to be taken away from their parents at an early age and carefully educated to fulfil their allotted roles. All cultural activity is to be rigidly controlled to preserve them from any dangerous influences. Such a society would need to have only a minimum of contact with the outside world, and of course could never progress; but Plato had no concept of progress
Plato's vision has haunted political theorists ever since; and it has been to some extent implemented in Nazi and Communist states, and even in the 19th century British public school system. Jonathon Swift attempted to portray a Platonic society in the fourth section of "Gulliver's Travels", where Gulliver visits the land of the H.....; the intelligent horses. Here conformity has become so general that there is no longer any need for a police force: the horses all think and behave in exactly the same way, and have apparently done so for countless generations. Gulliver appears to admire it, but it is for us today a depressingly sterile picture.
In past centuries, a well-ordered society was often compared with a human body, where all the different organs had their own particular part to play: the eyes saw, the brain thought, the stomach digested food, and so forth. The body would only function if each part fulfilled its proper role: it was no use the feet hoping to be eyes! The analogy was plain: the different social classes should "know their place" and not aspire to partcipate in government! In fact, society in pre-industrial England did give all classes appropriate roles: the landowners were Justices of the Peace, the farmers and craftsmen took their turns as parish constable or surveyor of highways, and the very poor were called out to labour on the roads. Service was more or less compulsory and unpaid. In emergencies all might be called upon to serve in the militia, as officers or rank-and-file. The system worked passably in the villages, but broke down entirely in the new urban areas.
The conservative vision of an ideal society therefore consisted of kind masters and loyal, faithful servants. It is well portrayed by Dickens in the relationship between Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller. It is said that King George V got on well with Ramsay MacDonald, the first British Labour Prime Minister, because the King saw MacDonald essentially as a faithful Highland ghillie and MacDonald was happy to play that role.
Marx and Engels pointed out that feudalism was natural and inevitable in a society where, because of low agricultural productivity, anything up to 90% of the population were, of necessity, peasant farmers, whereas Liberalism emerged as a philosophy with the growth of capitalism form the end of the Middle Ages.
Liberalism, in the writings of Locke, Jefferson and others, stresses individual freedom and independence, with minimal state interference. It works best in a society without extremes of wealth and poverty; a society of small farmers, craftsmen and shopkeepers without undue social snobbery, inherited authority or deference; and where the belief was that anyone could succeed through honest hard work and determination. Such a society did indeed exist in the small towns of the northern states of the USA in the latter 19th century: the society of Tom Sawyer and "Little Women", though it never really applied for Blacks and Native Americans. Young people might find the atmosphere stifling, and those who would not conform to the prevailing social norms could find themselves ostracised.
In the vast industrial cities, peopled by mass immigration, these ideals had no relevance, and Socialism and Communism emerged in the first half of the 19th century in response to these new pressures. They were always urban-based ideologies and never attempted to have much appeal to the countryside. Marx denounced liberal individualism as a fraud as far as the mass of the working class were concerned, and looked towards a new form of society after the revolution, though he never attempted to describe it in any detail. It was clear that socialism, even without a violent revolution, would involve massive redistribution of property away from individual ownership, and although Marx famously predicted that the state would "wither away", what in fact emerged was a vastly expanded state, with more economic and organisational power than ever before. A future Socialist society is often portrayed by opponents as a vast beehive or anthill, where individuality has been abolished. There seems no doubt that for a socialist society to work we would all have to be less dominated by the desire to benefit ourselves and our families; more driven by commitment to the wellbeing of the entire community, and indeed of the whole world.
Fascism is entirely different from liberalism and socialism in that it denies human equality as a fundamental principle. Humans, in this ideology, are not equal, and it is only right that the superior elite should rule: some have the necessary "will to power", and the majority do not. Democracy is not only wrong but, by giving power to the mediocre majority, is also inefficient. Hitler asked why we never see democratically-run armies or companies. He maintained that the most effective governmental structure is a military one: the officers do the planning and give commands, the sergeants enforce discipline and the rank and file do as they are told. He made the valid point that this was essentially how the Communist Party ran the Soviet Union.
John Rawls in his "A Theory of Justice" (1971) stressed the need to be governed by the concept of "fairness". Robert Nozick in his "Anarchy, State and Utopia" (1974) argued the need to respect the absolute rights of the individual, which should not be overridden even by the democratic majority.
In the 1930s, as country after country in Europe succumbed to dictatorship, the notion that a "managerial society" was more efficient than a democratic one. In the optimistic 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "end of history" and the final triumph of western liberal capitalism was proclaimed. The issue appears now to be in doubt.
