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Because the category of totalitarianism is associated with modern society, when the latest technical means allow the authorities to control every step of a citizen. For Plato, this was irrelevant. When he drew an ideal society, focusing on the education of citizens and their moral behavior, he hardly expected that anyone would consider it possible or even appropriate to impose all this through universal surveillance, petty guardianship, bureaucratic automatism and the inevitable harsh punishments. All this is generally alien and incomprehensible to a person of former times-that way until the middle of the 19th century.
I personally disagree with this opinion and consider it superficial. I may have been strongly influenced by Karl Gustav Popper. After the Open Society, I reread Plato's dialogues and became convinced that Plato was indeed one of the first philosophers of totalitarianism.
It is not surprising that his philosophy was carried away by many “powerful people” throughout the history of mankind.
Yes, in practice, the philosopher at one time suffered a complete fiasco. But in many other cases after the philosopher, his “system” surprisingly proved popular and relatively tenacious… from Hitler's fascism to Stalin's totalitarianism in the last century.
For a simple reason: Plato's project has never been implemented in the history of mankind, and therefore served as a philosophical exercise that makes you think about the essence of the state. While totalitarian projects (from the expression “total state” by B. Mussolini) were implemented, to varying degrees, but precisely in the real system of management and control, and were called “totalitarian” after implementation.
I think the reason is that it is very difficult for them to reconcile the fact that Plato, in fact, was at the origins of philosophy, that his ideas in many areas still make sense (there is a phrase that any dispute in history is a dispute between Plato and Aristotle), to reconcile the scale of his figure with the fact that, despite all this,he is really a totalitarian philosopher It's like spots in the sun, it's hard to accept that they are there, that the ideal is tainted.
There are many more idiosyncrasies to be found in relation to philosophy: the fact that philosophers supposedly solve the problem of the relationship between matter and consciousness (primary/secondary), then the problem of intersubjectivity. The question of Plato's “totalitarianism” also belongs to the category of pseudo-questions. When asked what kind of state he was talking about, he replied: there is no such state. Plato constructs a theoretical construct out of arguments about the state. Within it, an understanding of statehood arises, which is always concrete and does not happen in its pure form.
The separation of the concepts of totalitarianism and democracy is perfectly conditional, since the conceptual logic of the images created can in no way be implemented in reality. On the example of the Chinese Communist Party, we see an example of vivid conceptual totalitarianism or otherwise the lack of a political alternative, but people living in China are more free and generally less neurotic compared to the democratic freedom declared by Western countries, which is clearly visible in criminal statistics. In this case, there is an economic totalitarianism, which, because of debts and the framework of laws, makes people unhappy. And if we judge the world from our own personal experience of communication and put peace in the souls of people first, then the framework of classical political slang will blur and turn out to be myths like Greek history.