Question

is plato a fasist or non fasist

Answer 1

Short answer:

(1) Fascism originated in Italy in the early 1900’s, around WW1. Its a form of radical Nationalism. Its often associated with Benito Mussolini (1883–1945).

(2) Nationalism began to take root from the 1750’s, beginning in England.

(3) Plato lived 423–347 BC.

(4) Its not meaningful to assess if Plato had fascist-like ideology, in his Zeitgeist when fascism and nationalism did not exist. Even if Plato wore specific selected stripes of fascism, it means nothing ideologically. E.g. my subscribing to two of Marx’s body of tenets doesn’t necessarily make me a Marxist.

Answer 2

Well, the answer depends on how we define “fascist.”

The most common use of the word is simply “a form of government the speaker doesn’t like.” This is used mostly to attack people to one’s Right, and Plato was certainly politically Rightward of almost every Westerner living today, so I’m sure some Westerners do think Plato was a fascist.

A more useful, but very narrow, definition of “fascist” is to refer specifically to the Italian movement led by Benito Mussolini, and perhaps to a few other contemporary, more-or-less related movements in Europe. Plato had some fairly authoritarian ideas which may bear some superficial resemblance to Mussolini, but the populist element of fascism is, as far as I’m aware, entirely absent from our Greek friend. The nationalist element is also, again as far as I know, not considered by Plato. For at least these two concerns, then, he was not a fascist because fascism is too modernist.

There are other attempts to define “fascism” that we could go into, but ultimately, fascism is a product of the Twentieth Century, and reading Left/Right ideologies backward in time, especially that far, is very difficult and seldom productive. Rather than trying to pigeonhole as complex a thinker as Plato into one of these modern categories, I would encourage you to read Plato for yourself. Indeed, since his ideas have very much stood the test of time, it would be far wiser to judge modern ideologies like fascism, Liberalism, and so on by Plato’s standard, than to judge Plato by modern standards.