Even in democracies, there are fascinating relics of the Platonic image of the guardians. The democratic United States has its process of ‘judicial review’, whereby the legal mandarins of the Supreme Court oversee and strike out democratically voted legislation. This is done in the name of the Constitution, this being a document to whose meaning the legal mandarins alone have privileged access. The parallel with a priesthood and its private access to the truth of the sacred texts is not hard to detect.
