The Republic and its Theory of Justice
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THE PLAN AND MOTIVES OF THE REPUBLIC
The Republic, which was composed in the maturity of Plato’s life, somewhere about his fortieth year, and therefore, better than any other dialogue, represents the fulness of his thought, has come down to us with a double title – ‘the State’ (πολιτεία, or, in Latin, respublica; whence the name by which it generally goes), ‘or concerning Justice’. In spite of these two titles, it must not be assumed that it is a treatise either on political science or on jurisprudence. It is both, and it is yet more than both. It is an attempt at a complete philosophy of man. Primarily, it is concerned with man in action, and it is therefore occupied with the problems of moral and political life. But man is a whole: his action cannot be understood apart from his thinking; and therefore the Republic is also a philosophy of man in thought and of the laws of his thinking. Viewed in this way, as a complete philosophy of man, the Republic forms a single and organic whole. Viewed in its divisions, it would almost seem to fall into a number of treatises, each occupied with its separate subject. There is a treatise on metaphysics, which exhibits the unity of all things in the Idea of the Good. There is a treatise on moral philosophy, which investigates the virtues of the human soul, and shows their union and perfection in justice. There is a treatise on education: ‘the Republic’, said Rousseau, ‘is not a work upon politics, but the finest treatise on education that ever was written.’ There is a treatise on political science, which sketches the polity, and the social institutions (especially in respect of property and marriage), which should regulate an ideal State. Lastly, there is a treatise as it were on the philosophy of history, which explains the process of historical change and the gradual decline of the ideal State into tyranny. But all these treatises are woven into one, because all these subjects as yet were one. There was no rigorous differentiation of knowledge into separate studies, such as Aristotle afterwards suggested, rather than himself made.1 The philosophy of man stood as one subject, confronting as equal or superior the other subject of the philosophy of nature. The question which Plato set himself to answer was simply this: What is a good man, and how is a good man made? Such a question might seem to belong to moral philosophy, and to moral philosophy alone. But to the Greek it was obvious that a good man must be a member of a State, and could be made good only through membership of a State. Upon the first question, therefore, a second naturally followed: What is the good State, and how is the good State made? Moral philosophy thus ascends into political science; and the two, joined in one, must climb still further. To a follower of Socrates it was plain that a good man must be possessed of knowledge. A third question therefore arose: What is the ultimate knowledge of which a good man must be possessed in order to be good? It is for metaphysics to answer; and when metaphysics has given its answer, still a fourth question emerges. By what methods will the good State lead its citizens towards the ultimate knowledge which is the condition of virtue? To answer this question, a theory of education is necessary; and indeed, since a readjustment of social conditions seems necessary to Plato if his scheme of education is to work satisfactorily, a reconstruction of social life must also be attempted, and a new economics must reinforce the new pedagogics.1
It has been suggested2 that the mainspring of the Republic is Plato’s aversion to contemporary capitalism and his desire to substitute a new scheme of socialism. This would make of the Republic an economic treatise; and the author of the suggestion enforces his point by attempting to show that in contemporary Greece the struggle between oligarchy and democracy represented a struggle of capital and labour,3 and that in Plato we find a vivid sense of the evils of this struggle and an attempt to deal with those evils by means of socialistic remedies. Hence, he thinks, comes his attack on private property, and his proposal to abolish the use of money.1 Aristotle, equally with Plato, is brought into line with this theory; for though Aristotle does not commit himself to the socialistic attack upon property, he nevertheless (it is urged) advocates a simple economy in kind (Naturwirthschaft); he attacks money in the very spirit of Plato; and he even goes beyond Plato in attacking trade as a species of robbery. The objection which naturally occurs – that such a theory means the importation of modern socialism, which is a revolt against a complex system of production, into the far simpler conditions of the economic life of the Greeks – is met by the reply that those conditions were not simple. Credit was highly developed in the city-state: overseas trade was abundant in a city like Corinth. Usury was not merely the loan of money to needy farmers, but a vast system running through commerce; and the attacks of philosophers on interest (zins) indicate a socialistic propaganda, such as is today connected with attacks upon profits (Kapitalzins). Whatever may be the truth of the view of Greek economics which such a theory postulates, it is difficult to agree with the view of Greek political thought which it suggests, or to admit that the reform of the State proposed by Plato is meant as an economic reform of an economic evil. Plato may touch upon economic questions; but he always regards them as moral questions, affecting the life of man as a member of a moral society. He may speak, for instance, in praise of division of labour; but we soon learn that division of labour concerns him, not as a method of economic production, but as a means to the moral well-being of the community.
But while we may disagree with the application of considerations of political economy to the Republic, we must none the less admit that its practical motive is a fact. It is written in the imperative mood – not by way of an analysis, but rather for warning and counsel. The Republic is in many respects a polemic – a polernic directed against current teachers and the practice of contemporary politics. The teachers against whom it is directed are the younger generation of Sophists, of the type already portrayed in the Gorgias. It was they, and not Socrates, who in Plato’s view were the true corruptores juventutis, by the lectures they gave and the training in politics they professed to give; and if Greece was not to follow in the paths they had indicated, their hold on the young must be destroyed, and their teaching must be refuted. They had preached (so it seemed to Plato) a new ethics, or ‘justice’, of self-satisfaction; and they had tended to revolutionize politics accordingly, by making the authority of the State a means to the self-satisfaction of its rulers. In opposition to such tenets Plato taught a conception of justice as a quality of the soul, in virtue of which men set aside the irrational desire to taste every pleasure and to gain a selfish satisfaction out of every object, and accommodated themselves to the discharge of a single function for the general benefit; and he taught a corresponding conception of politics which made the State no longer the field for the self-satisfaction of its ruler, but the body of which he was a part and the organism in which he had a function. No longer should individualism infect the State: on the contrary, a spirit of collectivism (for the Platonic reaction runs to its extreme) should permeate the individual. No longer should the ruler use the State for his own ends: the State should demand of the ruler, if it were necessary, the sacrifice of his private ends, if indeed he had ends distinct from those of the State, to the interests of the general welfare. But in truth there was no such necessity, and there was no such distinction. In a true State the individual can secure his own ends in securing those of his fellows; ‘he will have a larger growth, and be the saviour of his country as well as of himself’ (497 A). The old harmony of the interests of the State and the individual, interrupted by the teaching of the Radical Sophists1 (as it was also interrupted by the teaching of Cynics and Cyrenaics), is thus restored in the teaching of Plato, but restored on a new and higher level, because it has been elevated into a conscious sense of harmony. In this connexion Plato, radical and reformer as he may elsewhere appear, is conservative enough. It is his mission to prove that the eternal laws of morality are no mere ‘conventions’, which must be destroyed to make way for a regime of ‘nature’; but that they are, on the contrary, rooted beyond all possibility of overthrow in the nature of the human soul and in the system of the universe. That is why a psychology of man and a metaphysics of the world enter into the plan of the Republic. Its author has to show that the State cannot be regarded as a chance congeries of individuals, to be exploited by the strongest individuality; but that, on the contrary, it is a communion of souls rationally and necessarily united for the pursuit of a moral end, and rationally and unselfishly guided towards that end by the wisdom of those who know the nature of the soul and the purpose of the world.
But this, which is the true idea of the State and its natural and normal condition, was exactly what, in Plato’s view, contemporary States were not. The spirit of excessive individualism had infected not only theory, but actual life; and the Sophists were only popular, because they had caught what was in the air.1 The States of contemporary Greece seemed to Plato to have lost their true character, and to have forgotten their true aim. In opposition to their actual character, and to the aims they actually pursued, he turns as definitely radical, as, in opposition to sophistic views, he shows himself conservative. Thinking mainly of the Athenian democracy in which he lived (and at the hands of which Socrates had died), he finds in contemporary politics two great and serious flaws.2 One is the ubiquity of ignorance masquerading in the guise of knowledge: the other is a political selfishness which divides every city into two hostile cities, standing ‘in the state and posture of gladiators’ over against one another. To create efficiency in the place of amateur incompetence – to replace selfishness and civil discord by harmony – these are therefore his aims and ‘specialization’ and ‘unification’ are therefore his watch-words. To these two aims the political teaching of the Republic is addressed; and as means to these ends even its apparent eccentricities, such as the advocacy of community of wives, acquire meaning and find justification.
Ignorance was to Plato the especial curse of democracy. Here, instead of the professional, the amateur was predominant. In Athens especially democracy seemed only to mean the right divine of the ignorant to govern wrong. Any man might speak in the Assembly and help to sway its decisions: any man, whatever his capacity, might be appointed to executive office by the chance of the lot. Besides the inefficiency which it entailed, and the parade of a false equality which it involved, such a system was to Plato unjust. Justice meant, in his eyes, that a man should do his work in the station of life to which he was called by his capacities. Everything has its function. An axe which is used to carve a tree, as well as: to cut it down, is an axe misused (cf. 353 A); and a man who attempts to govern his fellows, when at best he is only fit to be a tolerable craftsman, is a man not only mistaken, but also unjust – doubly, indeed, unjust, for not only does he not do his own proper work, but he shoves the better man aside.
But nothing impressed Plato more in contemporary politics, and nothing more surely drove him along the path of reform, than that violent spirit of individualism, which sought to capture the offices of the State for the better fulfilling of its own selfish purposes, and divided every city into two hostile camps of rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed. This was the special vice of oligarchy. The ruling body always tended to dissensions within its own ranks; and it was always in a state of opposition to its subjects. An oligarchical city was a city set in two camps, each spying for an opportunity against the other. And the root of all evil was the love of money. It would have been well if this passion had been confined to private life; but it infected politics. The rich who sought to be still richer monopolized office for the sake of the advantage which its corrupt use might give them in their private enterprise: they seized the authority of the State for the sake of the ‘spoils’ which it might bring.1 The State, whose essence it is that it should be a neutral and impartial arbitrator between the different interests of different classes, became itself the tool of one of these classes. The government, instead of binding class to class, merely accentuated their differences by adding its weight to strengthen one class against the rest. No wonder the State was divided against itself, or that, as Plato says, in every State there were two separate States. ‘Not one of them is a State, but many States; for any State, however small, is in fact divided into two – one the State of the poor, the other that of the rich—and these are at war with one another’ (422 E).1
Political selfishness was not the fault of oligarchies only. Democracy itself was not exempt from this vice. Its supporters indeed viewed it as the true State, where man was equal to man, and an impartial law ruled all – a State which served no particular interest, but did justice to every class. Democracy represented the whole community: oligarchy represented a part. Democracy made room for the rich in finance, the wise in council, the masses in decision.2 But what struck Plato, and indeed Aristotle, was, that the citizens of a democracy not only paid themselves from the coffers of the State by the wages which they received for political services, but also used their authority to pillage the rich, confiscating their estates upon spurious issues, or plundering them more subtly by heavy ‘liturgies’. They too, like the governing class in an oligarchy, made politics into a source of economic gain. It is this confusion of economics and politics, alike in oligarchies and in democracies, that lends to Greek civic strife its fury. Political struggles may be moderate, and the combatants may act by legal form: it is the social war in which passions are as bitter as gall. Greek civic strife (στάσις) meant such a social war; and constitutional opposition readily turned into a Jacquerie.3 Hence it became the mission of political philosophy, in the hands of Plato, to rehabilitate a strong and impartial authority, which should mean, not the rule of the rich over the poor, or of the poor over the rich, but of something either above or at any rate combining both. Whereas ‘men came to public affairs hungering for their own profit thereby’, and, ‘as a result, struggles for office arose which grew into civil war’,1 there must be unselfish government and civic harmony.
There were, then, two factors – a certain amateur meddlesomeness (πολυπραγμοσύνη) which its friends called many-sidedness (εὐτραπελία), characteristic of democracy, and a political selfishness, resulting in constant disunion, characteristic both of oligarchy and of democracy – which suggested to Plato the direction of future reform. It is from the common error of amateurism that Plato starts in constructing his ideal state; and in opposition to the gospel of many-sidedness he enunciates that of specialization. The Sophists had, to some extent, been apostles of many-sidedness; and Hippias of Elis, as we have seen, had given a practical demonstration of its meaning, when he appeared at Olympia in ring and cloak and shoes of his own making. Yet they had also felt that it was well for a man if he had been trained in the profession he intended to pursue; and they had also attempted to give some training themselves for the profession of politics. Socrates, again, had insisted upon knowledge as the necessary basis of action; and the Socratic conception of government, as an art which involved special knowledge, had especially influenced Plato. Nor were the tendencies of actual life altogether adverse to a doctrine of specialization. The professional soldier and the professional orator were already beginning to appear. The victory of a professional force of light-armed troops in 394 B.C. had already shown the efficiency which the new tendency could impart; and though a Phocion might, at a still later day, appear as both orator and soldier, he was noted by his contemporaries as an exception. It was the day of Iphicrates and Isocrates – the day in which professional training had replaced the fresh improvisations of a Themistocles or a Cleon. But the teaching of Plato goes far beyond any preceding teaching or tendencies. He divides his ideal State into three classes, the rulers, the fighters, the farmers – the men of gold, the men of silver, and the men of iron and brass. Each of these has its appointed function, and each of these concentrates itself entirely upon the discharge of that function. Government, defence, sustenance – the three necessary functions of the State – are all made into professions and assigned to professional classes. It is only with the governing and fighting classes that Plato is really concerned; but these he is careful to train for their work by every means in his power. Primarily he trusts to an education which shall train them thoroughly for their duties: secondly, not quite content with spiritual, he has recourse to material means. He suggests a system of communism, so ordered that it shall set the time and the minds of these classes free from material cares, and shall enable them to give themselves fully to the acquisition of knowledge and the discharge of their function in the community. He deprives both the administration and the army of private property, and seeks to consecrate them to their public duties by freeing them from any temptation to engage themselves in other interests.
The way of specialization was also to Plato the way of unification. If a separate class were appointed to the work of government, there would hardly be any room for the old struggle to capture the government. If each class abode within its own boundaries, concentrated upon its own work, no class would readily come into conflict with another. Civil dissension had been rendered possible by the want of specialization. Because there was no proper government ready and able to do its work, there had been the conflict of selfish aspirants for office: because there had been in every State a number of men with no settled function or regular place – men who had more than one place, or no proper place at all – there had been all the jostling and turbulence which had culminated in civil war. With specialization these things would cease; each class would work at its appointed function in contentment: selfishness would disappear, and unity would pervade the State. Those who confine themselves to the discharge of their function, cannot be selfish. Selfishness (πλεονεξία) consists in going outside one’s own sphere, and trespassing upon that of another; and a governing class duly trained in its proper duty will never commit such trespass. But Plato provides a further guarantee than training. Not all who have been trained for government are allowed to join the governing class. To make the assurance of unselfishness doubly sure, he reserves office for those, and only those, who, under a system of trials and temptations, have held firm to the belief that the weal of the State is their own weal, and its woe their own woe. And besides these spiritual means – besides this training for a special work, and this selection of those whom the special training has shown to be most unselfish – there is finally the material guarantee of communism. Rulers who have no home, no family, no possessions, have no temptation to selfishness: they have nowhere to carry their gains, nobody upon whom to spend them, no interest in making them.1
The conclusion of the whole matter would seem then to be this, that each should do his own appointed work in contentment. But this in Plato’s eyes is justice or, in the other words, the true principle of social life; and therefore the Republic is also called ‘a treatise concerning justice’. Its purpose is the substitution of a true conception of justice for the false views which common error and sophistic teaching had contrived to spread. Whether he is combating the theory of the Sophists, or seeking to reform the actual practice of society, justice is the hinge of Plato’s thought, and the text of his discourse. It remains therefore to inquire, what were the views of justice which he found current, and what were the reasons for which he rejected those views: in what way he justified the conception which he advocated, and what were the results to which that conception led. In the course of this inquiry we shall be expounding in detail what has already been sketched in outline – the polemic of Plato against the current conceptions of justice, and his reconstruction of the State with a view to realizing his own conception of its nature. We shall see how, beginning as it were dimly with the practical principle of specialization, Plato throws fresh and fresh lights on its meaning, until finally we realize that in specialization justice itself may be found – for justice, being seen, is nothing more and nothing less than man’s performance of the part which the purposes of society demand that he shall play.
THE PRIMA FACIE THEORIES OF JUSTICE
[1] The Theory of Cephalus: Traditionalism (327–36 A)
The first conception of justice2 to be considered in the Republic is that which underlies traditional morality. The exponent of this conception is first of all Cephalus, a metic (or resident alien) living in the Peiraeus, and the father of the orator Lysias, in whose house the scene of the dialogue is cast. To Cephalus, looking back over a long life, and thinking of the old ways and opinions, justice seems to lie in speaking the truth and paying your debts (331 C). Departing ‘to look after the sacrifices’ he makes his son and heir Polemarchus the heir of the argument; and Polemarchus, faithful to his father and the tradition of the elders, champions the old view of justice in a slightly altered form, which makes it consist in the giving to each man of what is proper to him (332 C). The use of the word ‘proper’ leads, in the course of the discussion, to the assumption that justice is an art – an art which gives good to friends, and evil to enemies – and this assumption overturns the definition adopted by Polemarchus. If justice is an art or capacity, it is, like other arts or capacities, capable of doing two opposite things. The doctor who has most capacity in preventing has also most capacity in creating disease: the best guardian of a camp has also the greatest capacity for stealing a march on the enemy. If justice is a capacity or accomplishment, it is capable, no less than medical skill or military ability, of being used in opposite directions; and the just man will be equally able to guard or to steal a deposit, and to be just or unjust at will.1 Again, it is easy to speak of giving good to friends and evil to enemies; but what if the friend is only a friend in seeming, and an enemy in reality? Must one still rigidly follow the definition, and do him good, or may one use discretion, and do him evil? And finally, whatever may be said about doing good to friends, is it ever just to do evil to enemies? Men who are injured deteriorate; and it can hardly be just to make a man worse than he was. Faced by these consequences, Polemarchus is led to abandon the definition of justice as the art of giving good to friends and evil to enemies; and Plato concludes the argument with the suggestion that the definition must have been invented by a tyrant like Periander, or an absolute monarch like Xerxes, ‘with a great opinion of his own power’ – a suggestion that prepares the way for the definition of justice as ‘the interest of the stronger’.
Justice, or righteousness (Plato implies in this argument) is after all not an art, in the sense of a technique which may be empirically acquired, and used at will in one or other of two opposite directions. It cannot be empirically acquired, for it is not a matter of the lesser knowledge, which comes by use and wont, but of the greater knowledge which is based on a grasp of principle, and clinched by a reasoning reference to a cause. Tradition, which is simply inherited empirical opinion, fails in the face of any difficulty; its ancient maxim of doing good to friends and evil to enemies, or, as Hesiod pithily wrote,
ceases to guide us as soon as we become uncertain (and that we are sure to do) who is our friend and who is our foe, and who has given and who has not given. Nor, again, can justice be used at will in opposite directions. It is a quality of the soul and a habit of the mind, rather than a technique; and it is a quality and a habit of such a character that he who has once attained it can act only in one way, which can never be the way of injuring others, or of causing deterioration in any man, whether friend or enemy. And lastly, true justice connotes the idea of service, and that in turn connotes the idea of a social whole to which that service is rendered. Traditional opinion is blind to this implication. It conceives justice merely as a relation between two individuals, and a relation based on individualistic principles. The type of which it thinks is the self-centred individual, with abundant means at his disposal, who can requite his friends and retaliate upon his adversaries. That is why Plato regards the traditional opinion of justice as the sort of thing which a Periander or a Xerxes would invent; and that is why, he seems to suggest, it passes into the revolutionary opinion which Thrasymachus is next made to expound.
[2] The Theory of Thrasymachus: Radicalism (336 A–354 C)
While Cephalus and his successor in the argument have represented the traditional morality of ancient Greece, Thrasymachus represents the new and critical views of the later fifth century. He is treated by Plato as the spokesman of the Radical Sophists, and as such he is made to take up two positions and driven from each in turn. (1) Understanding by justice (what is understood throughout the Republic) the standard and rule of action for a man living in a community, he defines it as ‘the interest of the stronger’. In other words, might is right; a man ought to do what he can do, and deserves what he can get. This is to identify jus with potentia, after the manner of Spinoza; but while Spinoza, somewhat inconsistently, limits the potentia of each individual by the imperium of a State which enforces a peace consisting in rational virtue, Thrasymachus, logically enough, argues that the imperium of a State merely lays down as the law whatever is to its own interest, and simply makes into justice, in virtue of its superior power, the right which it claims as the strongest. The standard of action for a man living in a community is thus, according to Thrasymachus, the will of a ruler who wills his own good; and this, he maintains, is what one must inevitably see, if one looks at the facts with an unblinking eye. For while every man acts for himself, and tries to get what he can, the strongest is surest to get what he wants; and as in a State the government is the strongest (or else it would not be the government), it will try to get, and it will get, whatever it wants for itself.
(2) But if justice thus consists in whatever is for the ruler’s interest, it follows that, for everybody other than the ruler, justice may be further defined, according to a popular definition, as ‘another’s good’. To be ‘just’, in the popular sense, is to be a means to the satisfaction of the ruler: to be ‘unjust’, in the popular sense, is to act for the satisfaction of oneself. But there is no reason, in the view of Thrasymachus, why it should be just for the ruler to get his own way, and yet, at the same time, unjust for others to do the like. What is true of the one is true of the rest: the real standard of action for any sensible man is to satisfy himself; and therefore, if we use the terms in their conventional sense, injustice, and not justice, is the real virtue and the true wisdom for all sensible men. Injustice is a better thing than justice; the unjust man is a wiser man than the just. The truly wise man is he who will be just, and satisfy his ruler’s selfish desires, if he must; but who, if he can, will be unjust, and satisfy his own. In a word, the ordinary sense of moral terms must be inverted, if they are to correspond with ‘reality’.
We have already seen (supra, p. 82) that the view of Thrasymachus presents an ethical nihilism more thorough-going in reality, if in appearance less drastic, than the new master-morality which Callicles is made to expound in the Gorgius. Both Callicles and Thrasymachus are representatives of the revolt of an awakened self-consciousness against the traditional morality in which it has hitherto passively acquiesced, but which it now brings to the bar of its new sense of self for judgement. The new sense of individuality is keen and urgent; and it finds in traditional morality nothing more than a number of limitations on its play. In the hands of Callicles it is made to enunciate, with a fresh naïveté, a new doctrine of justice – to do whatever one can, and to seek whatever one likes. In the hands of Thrasymachus it becomes more cunning and saturnine: its doctrine is a doctrine that justice consists in obeying authority wherever one must, and in pleasing oneself wherever one can. Those who, like Plato, seek to expose the errors of this extreme individualism must answer by urging a truer conception of the nature and the ‘rights’ of human individuality. They must show that the self is no isolated unit, but part of an order with a station in that order; and that fulness of expression and true consciousness of pleasure are to be found only in doing one’s duty in the station to which one is called. This is the ultimate answer which Plato gives, and writes the Republic in order to give. For the present, however, he satisfies himself with a logical refutation. He takes the two positions which are advanced by Thrasymachus – that a government governs for its own advantage, and that injustice is better than justice – and deals with them each in turn. To the former view he opposes the Socratic conception of government as an art. All arts, he argues, are called into existence by defects in the material with which they deal. The physician attempts to remedy the defects of the body; the teacher those of the mind. The aim and object of every art is the well-being of its material: the perfect teacher, for instance, is he who has remedied all the defects, and elicited all the possibilities, of his pupil’s mind. And therefore the ruler, so far as he acts as a ruler, and in accordance with his art, is absolutely unselfish: his one aim is the well-being of the citizens who are committed to his care. It is indeed true that as one in need of subsistence – as a man who pursues the art of earning a livelihood – he may seek his own advantage, and earn a wage by the work of his office; but this he does not do as a ruler, or as practising the art of government, but as an earner of wages, and as practising the art of wage-earning. This is Plato’s answer to the first position of Thrasymachus. To the second he answers by an argument designed to prove that the just man is a wiser, a stronger, and a happier man than the unjust. He is wiser, because he follows the old Delphic teaching, and recognizes the need of acknowledging a limit. He seeks indeed to compete with others (πλεονεκτε
ν); but he does not, like the unjust man, seek to compete with everybody, or to compete for the mere sake of competition. Competition in itself is not his aim. His aim is absolute excellence (ἀρετή); he only competes with those who fall short of that, and he only competes with them as it were incidentally – not because he loves competition, but because he loves excellence. His aim is to do better than the bad, but not to do better than the good, with whom he is perfectly content to be equal, and whom he is happy enough to be like. But this is the mark of wisdom in all walks of life. The wise doctor or musician is he who does not seek to ensue competition, but rather to ensue excellence; and the just man, who has this mark of wisdom, is necessarily wiser than the unjust, in whom it is absent.1 Wiser than the unjust man, because he thus acknowledges the principle of limit, the just man is also stronger. Even if a number of men would fain be unjust, to get the strength for an unjust action they must be just; they must stand shoulder to shoulder, and act justly by one another.
Stronger than the unjust man, in the strength of a principle which binds him to his fellows, the just man is also, last of all, the happier man (εὐδαιμονέστερος). The argument by which Plato proves this last attribute of the just man is one of supreme importance. Everything, he argues, has its appointed function (ἔργον), which cannot be discharged, or cannot be discharged equally well, by any other thing (352 E). Here we touch that doctrine of specific function which, as we shall see, is the very hinge of the Republic and the fundamental basis of its theory of justice. From the doctrine of function Plato naturally turns to that of virtue or excellence (ἀρετή). The virtue or excellence of anything consists in its adequate discharge of its appointed function. The virtue of the eye is clear vision: the virtue of the ear is good hearing. Now the soul has its appointed function; and the soul has its corresponding virtue or excellence. That function is life (τὸ ζ
ν), and that virtue or excellence is good life (τὸ ε
ζν). Nothing can discharge its function if it is deprived of its virtue; and the soul cannot discharge its function if it is destitute of its proper virtue. The soul, therefore, can only discharge its function if it possesses the virtue of good living – the virtue which is also called by the name of justice. But if the soul possesses the virtue of good living, or justice, it also possesses happiness (εὐδαιμονία), which ensues inevitably on good living; and the soul which is more virtuous, or in other words more just, is also the happier soul. And since happiness is more profitable than misery, it follows that justice, as it is a happier, is also a more profitable state than injustice.1
In these arguments there are implied deeper conceptions, which Plato ultimately unveils. The theory of justice as the force which gives coherence to any association of men, the theory of a special function appointed for every thing, are theories which are developed to their full consequences in the later books of the Republic. But as they stand, these arguments are logical in character. They show us Plato playing with the Sophist at their game of words, and beating them at their own game. They are destructive, and not constructive: they tell us why we should not believe in Thrasymachus’ view of justice; they do not tell us in what conception of justice we ought to believe. They have hardly done away with the uneasy feeling that though the brutality of the Sophist may be brushed aside, the fact remains, that justice is something to which human nature does not instinctively take, something as it were unnatural, and only present in man because it has been put there by convention, and is kept there by force. This is the ordinary feeling of society: this is the tone manifest in public opinion. Accordingly Plato turns to the criticism of such opinion; and, in order to show that justice is grounded in human nature, and is the natural order or adjustment of the human soul, he leaves his logic for psychology, and deserts his analysis of terms for an analysis of human nature.1
[3] The Theory of Glaucon: Pragmatism (357–67 E)
The new point of view is stated by Glaucon, for the express purpose of being met and countered by the logic of Socrates. Without adopting the position of Thrasymachus, that justice is the will of the strongest when directed towards his own interests, Glaucon contends, in the same spirit as Thrasymachus, that justice is an artificial thing, the product of convention. Stating practically the view advocated by modern writers of the school of the social contract, he argues that in a state of Nature men do and suffer injustice freely and without restraint. This state they find intolerable; and three consequences ensue. In the first place, the weaker, finding that they suffer more injustice than they can inflict, make a ‘contract’ one with another neither to do injustice nor to suffer it to be done. Secondly, in pursuance of the contract, they lay down a law, the ‘conventions’ of which are henceforth the standard of action and the code of justice. Finally, and as the result of this contract and these conventions, human nature abandons its real instinct, which is towards self-satisfaction, and consents to be perverted henceforth by the ‘force’ of the law. Justice is the child of fear: ‘it is a mean or compromise between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation’ (359 A). Thus while Thrasymachus had grounded justice on the instinct for domination, and defined it as the interest of the stronger, Glaucon would ground it on the instinct of fear, and define it as the necessity of the weaker. He still follows the line of thought followed by Thrasymachus, but he begins as it were at the other end, and adopting as his basis the fears of the weak rather than the appetites of the strong, he arrives at a definition the converse of that of Thrasymachus.
The whole of this theory, which is not only that of Glaucon, but also that of modern writers such as Hobbes2 – and indeed it is the prima facie theory to which our first instincts naturally spring – has been met by modern thinkers point by point. In the first place, there never was any actual or explicit ‘contract’; there is and always will be a condition of things, which is a condition of tacit and implied contract. There is always on the one hand, a mutual recognition of rights among the members of a community, to which men have tried to give expression, but which they have only succeeded in ossifying, by talk of a ‘contract of society’ between each and all for the institution of a State in the sense of a political society – as if political society were ever ‘instituted’; and there is always, on the other hand, a will of the subject that his sovereign should rule, and a recognition by the sovereign of his dependence on that will, which has been equally stereotyped by similar talk of a ‘contract of government’ between subject and sovereign for the institution of a State in the sense of a government – as if government were not an essential attribute of political society, which is itself in turn an essential attribute of human nature. Secondly, law as a whole is nothing ‘conventional’ or artificial, in any sense of those words which is reasonable. If one means by conventional anything created by man, then law is certainly conventional – but so, too, is everything else, save ‘rocks and stones and trees’. If again one means by conventional the conscious creations of man, and if one opposes such creations to instinctive developments, then many laws will be conventional, and many natural; but there is no great gulf between the two, because man does not consciously create on totally different principles from those along which he instinctively develops.1 AS a matter of fact, law as a rule has first developed, and then been created, if one may speak in a paradox: it has first been a custom, and then a code. At any rate, it is entirely erroneous to oppose the stage of instinctive development to the stage of conscious creation, as if they were contraries: man is a unity, and cannot have acted in two entirely opposite ways. But as it is used in ordinary speech, the term ‘conventional’ is not applied in either of these senses. When we speak of conventions, we mean neither any creation of man, nor any conscious creation of man, but any creation of man which no longer fulfils the purpose for which it was created, but still claims a right of existence; and in this sense law as a whole is certainly not conventional, though individual laws may be.1 Finally, the basis of respect for law, and of the authority of law, is not ‘force’, but will. Laws are valid, because they enshrine the will of the members of a community to do what they feel they ought to do. They are strong, not in proportion to the force ready to execute them, but in proportion to the amount of readiness to obey them. What looks like force (as when we speak of the ‘enforcement’ of the law by way of punishment upon an individual) is really the assertion of that individual’s right will, even against himself, at the expense of his will to do wrong.
But Plato’s method of answering Glaucon’s position is simpler and more elemental. He realizes that in all the views hitherto considered – that of Cephalus and Polemarchus, that of Thrasymachus, and that of Glaucon – there is a common element. They have all treated justice as if it were something external – an accomplishment, an importation, or a convention: they have none of them carried it into the soul, or considered it in the place of its habitation. Accordingly he sets himself to prove that justice does not depend for its origin upon a chance convention, or for its validity upon external force – that, on the contrary, it is from everlasting to everlasting, and is strong with the majesty of itself – by simply showing that it is the right condition of the human soul, demanded by the very nature of man when seen (as he must be seen) in the fulness of his environment. Justice thus becomes something internal. Whereas it had been regarded by Thrasymachus and Glaucon as something outward – a body of material precepts confronting the soul, and claiming to control it in virtue of a power external to it – it is now regarded as an inward grace, and its understanding is shown to involve a study of the inner man. But instead of attempting at once an analysis of the human mind, Plato adopts a method which at first sight seems curious. If we had to read a manuscript, he suggests, of which there were two copies, one in a small minuscule, and the other in uncials, we should certainly attempt to read the copy which was written in uncials. Justice is like such a manuscript: it is one and the same, bur it exists in two copies, and one of these is larger than the other. It exists both in the State and in the individual; but it exists on a larger scale and in a more visible fashion in the State. Accordingly Plato proposes to consider justice first as it exists in the State, in its broadest and strongest lines; and not only so, but to consider it as it exists in a nascent State,1 in its simplest and clearest form. And therefore, that justice may be made manifest, he builds an imaginary State from the beginning, and enters definitely upon the ground of political speculation.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE IDEAL STATE
Before we examine the ‘republic’ which Plato proceeds to construct, it is all-important that we should be sure of the meaning of the parallel which he suggests between the State and the individual. The use of physical analogies, as we have seen, is characteristic of the Republic; but this is no physical analogy. It is not a parallel of the State and the human body, such as Hobbes, for instance, draws in the Leviathan, or Spencer in his Principles of Sociology. The external and material have been left behind when we reach this part of the Republic, and what Plato is concerned to discover is an indwelling spirit of justice. The parallel which is here drawn is thus a spiritual parallel. It is a parallel between the consciouness of man, whether acting as a whole or in its several capacities (of appetite, for instance, and of reason), and the consciousness of a State, as expressed in the whole mind of the community or in that of its separate classes. But the word parallel is misleading, even with the proviso that it is to be understood spiritually. For it implies that the State and the individual are separate things, which can be conceived apart, and compared together. They are not. One cannot draw a distinction between the consciousness of man and the consciousness of the State. The consciousness of the State is just the consciousness of its members when thinking as members. The courage of the State, to take a particular instance of this consciousness, is simply the courage of individuals thinking and acting as members of the State. Each of these individuals may show an individual courage, when he is met by a ruffian in the street: each of them also (along with his fellows) shows the courage which Plato calls the courage of the State, when he faces its enemies in the field. But the courage of the individual and that of the State are both resident in the same consciousness. Why then does Plato first study this consciousness in its social aspect? Simply because, as a consciousness common to a large number of minds, it is a clearer and a larger thing, and because it issues in outward action of a more visibly imposing kind.
In a word, therefore, Plato, attempting an analysis of the human soul, and seeking to discover thereby the essential need of justice for its well-being, sets himself to study the soul as it acts in its social aspect, because he believes that all social phenomena are its products, and because he believes that these products are so recognizable, that they form the best clue for the understanding of the soul from which they spring. ‘States do not come out of an oak or a rock, but from the characters of the men that dwell therein’;1 and this being so, he who wishes to study the characters of men will do well to study their States. For all the institutions of man are merely so many expressions of his mind. His institutions are his ideas. Law is part of his thought: justice is a habit of his mind. These things have outward and visible signs – a written code, a judicial bench; but the inward and spiritual thought which makes them and sustains them is the one reality. It is hard to think oneself away from the visible, and to regard it as the mere vesture of thought: it is easier to see justice in maces and parchments, than to see it as a living thought. Yet that we should thus turn inward – that we should leave the conception of Glaucon, and follow Socrates in seeing justice in the mind of man – is the great step which we have to make. It is the step which Plato and Aristotle both made; and herein lies their contribution to political thought for all time.
In constructing the State from which he proposes to illustrate the nature of the soul, Plato presupposes a certain amount of psychology in advance. He makes to some extent a petitio principii.2 The State being a product of the human soul, its construction proceeds along lines suggested by a conception of the human soul as a threefold thing. For this conception, as indeed for much else in the Republic, Plato seems to have been indebted, as we have already seen (supra, p. 56), to the Pythagoreans. One of the Pythagorean doctrines was the doctrine of the Three Classes – lovers of Wisdom, lovers of Honour, and lovers of Wealth – and this doctrine possibly implied a correlative doctrine of the Three Parts of the Soul: Reason, Spirit, and Appetite. At any rate this doctrine of the triplicity of the soul, whatever its source, is the foundation of much of the Republic. First of all, Plato holds, there is in the soul an irrational or appetitive element of desire (ἐπιθυμία), the ally of pleasure and satisfaction, from which spring love, and hunger, and thirst, and the other appetities (439 D). And then there is an element of reason (λόγος), which has two functions; for by it men both learn to know, and (because they have learned to know) are ready to love. It is an element which will necessarily be of supreme importance in the State; it will be at once a guide of action and a bond of union for its members. Lastly, midway between the two comes an element of spirit (θυμός), an element almost analogous to what we should call the sense of honour, and similarly issuing (for those in whom it is most strongly present) in something of the nature of chivalry. The specific function of this element is that it inspires men for battle; but it is not unlike appetite, in that it is also the source of ambition and competition, while, on the other hand, it is also a natural auxiliary of the element of reason, inspiring men as it does to hot indignation against injustice and ready submission to justice. It is indeed as an auxiliary of reason that it presents itself chiefly to Plato: ‘in the battle of the soul it takes its stand by reason’s side’ (440 B).
In the light of this threefold division we may expect to find, and we do find, two features in Plato’s political construction. The State which he constructs will grow under his hands in three stages: the constructed State will be marked by the presence of three classes or functions. But the growth of the State will not be determined on historical lines: there will be no attempt, such as is made in the Laws, to show the natural steps by which the State has developed. On the contrary, Plato proceeds by a psychological method in the Republic. He takes each of the three elements of the human mind, beginning with the lowest and proceeding to the highest, and shows how each of these in its turn contributes its quota to the creation of the State. He gives a logical analysis of the different elements of mind, which at any time go to make up that creation of man’s mind which we call the State. As he takes each in turn, and in an order which proceeds from the lowest to the highest, there is an appearance of historical method in his construction of the State. But it is only an appearance. He does not mean that the State began as an economic association based upon the division of labour, although he begins with such an association. He does not mean that there was a progress from a ‘simple’ to a ‘luxurious’ State, though he proceeds from the one to the other himself. He is aware, all the time, that ‘the features he ascribes to each are taken from the Athens of his day’.1 The same warning which applies to Plato’s sketch of the growth of the State also applies to his sketch of its corruption. That sketch is no historical résumé of the constitutional changes of Greece – though it wears that appearance, because, starting from the ideal State which issues from ideal psychological conditions, it proceeds gradually downwards to the worst form of State, which results from the worst psychological conditions. It is an attempt to show that while the presence of the sum of right conditions in the human soul means a true State, each diminution of that sum means pro tanto a corruption of the State. It is an attempt again to illustrate from the large letters of the injustice of the State, the nature of injustice in the individual, in the same way as the justice of the State has already been made to illustrate that of the individual.
[1] The Economic Factor in the State
We have seen that in building the State which is to demonstrate the nature of the soul, Plato already implies, in advance, a view of the soul’s nature. Similarly, when he proceeds to build the State, and occupies himself first of all with the economic structure necessary to its life, he implies in advance the very doctrine of justice which his construction is intended to prove. That doctrine, which involves that each man should ‘do his own’ (
), and every man should fulfil a single specific function, already appears, in the shape of division of labour, in the first rudiments of the State. Beginning with appetite as the primary basis of the State, Plato shows (369 B–372 D) that it involves some form of association. The desires for food and warmth and shelter cannot be properly satisfied, except by means of common action. The State first finds its binding force in human need. Man cannot dispense with his fellows: each, while able to confer something upon the rest which they need, needs in turn something which they can confer. The result is an inevitable division of labour or specialization of function, which involves, as its other side, a combination for the reciprocal exchange of the several products. Such specialization Plato justifies on economic grounds; it means the easier production of a greater number of objects, and those of a better quality. It issues in an association of men united by an economic nexus – an association at first limited to farmer and builder, clothier and cobbler, but subsequently increased, by the addition of a class to make instruments for the first four, a class to tend the cattle they require, a third for purposes of foreign, and a fourth for those of domestic trade,1 until it reaches the measure of an adult State. The economic moment is not the least in the life of the State. Every State is, in one aspect of its nature, a great economic concern; and wherever a protective system reigns or has reigned, it has made this aspect prominent, by making the State a self-centred and self-sufficient unit in respect of its economic life.2 To Plato the State, viewed merely as an economic concern, contains features valuable not only in themselves, and from an economic point of view, but also as types and foreshadowings of polititical truths. It contains the feature of specialization; and if the cobbler sticks to his last, and thereby produces better work and more work, why should not the statesman stick to his statesmanship, and produce the same result? It contains again the feature of reciprocity; and if the organization of economics for the satisfaction of physical wants is based upon this plan, why should not the whole organization of human life in the State for the satisfaction of every want be based on the same scheme? May not reciprocity here, too, displace self-seeking, and mutual exchange of services between ruler and ruled supersede the individualism which seeks to do and to get everything for itself? Specialization is the author of unity everywhere: the doctrine of specific function will eliminate unlimited competition in every sphere. ‘The intention was, that … each individual should always be put to the use for which Nature intended him, one to one work, and then every man would do his own business, and be one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and not many’ (423 D).
[2] The Military Factor in the State
But whatever the importance of the economic motive – however valuable the lessons which economic organization has to teach, it is not the only motive or the sole organization. Plato, indeed, makes Socrates rhapsodize on the golden age which will ensue in the Arcadian State he has built, but at the same time he makes Glaucon scoff at it for ‘a city of swine’; and Socrates, while laughing at Glaucon’s wish for a ‘luxurious’ city, and still asseverating that this is the ‘healthy’ and true type, willingly consents to go further (372 E–375 E). One suspects some Socratic ‘irony’, some subtle ridicule of the idyllic Nature-state, which the Sophists had painted, and the Cynics delighted to paint.1 The logic of the Republic demands that Plato should consider two other and higher elements of the human mind, and the part which they play in constituting the State. Accordingly, he proceeds to give its place to the element of ‘spirit’. Men are not content with the supply of the merest ‘necessaries’: they need satisfaction of their desires for refinement. Pictures and poetry, music and dress, are all ‘needs’ of mankind: a large population is necessary to provide them: a larger territory is necessary to support the larger population. War now (373 D) enters as one of the functions of the State, which must acquire and defend a sufficient territory; and thus the element of spirit (which inspires men for battle) next appears, and expresses itself in the organization of the State by constituting a military force of guardians (374 D). In the logical synthesis of the State from the psychological factors which are its constituents, Plato, having considered the State as an economic community based on appetite, must now regard it as a military organization based on spirit.
The first, and the vital question, which arises with regard to the military organization of the State, is naturally the question of specialization. Shall a professional and trained army be created, or shall the body of the people act as a general militia in time of need? The answer is already given in what has been said of the division of labour in economics. It would be absurd to set one man on making shoes, and shoes only, that they may be well made, and to leave the art of war, a matter of far more vital necessity to the State, in untrained and unpractised hands. If efficiency is to be gained by specialization anywhere, it must certainly be gained by specialization in a matter so arduous and important as war.1 There must be soldiers whose business it is to make war, and nothing else but war; and they must be picked for their work in virtue of a special aptitude – of an abundance, that is to say, of the element of spirit – and trained for their work in a way that will develop that aptitude properly. Accordingly, from this point onwards1 the Republic becomes a treatise on the education of the happy warrior.
[3] The Philosophic Factor in the State
Postponing, however, for the present, Plato’s scheme for the education of the ideal soldier, we may conclude the construction of the State from its constituent elements in human nature, by discovering the part which reason plays in its composition. That part is two-fold. (1) We have already noticed that spirit, in one of its aspects, is the ally of reason, a hater of injustice and a lover of justice; nor are we surprised, therefore, to find that reason is active already, side by side with spirit, in the construction of the military organization of the State. The natures which are selected for training as soldiers must not be merely quick and spirited. The soldier is a guardian (ϕὐλαξ) of the State; and like a watchdog (here Plato uses one of the analogies which are frequent in his method of exposition) the human guardian must be mild and gentle to those who are of the house he guards, though fierce to every stranger. Now the watchdog is mild and gentle to all whom it knows. Those whom it knows it also loves: according to its knowledge, and by the use of the faculty of knowledge (which is reason), it distinguishes between friend and foe (376 A–B). The faculty of reason must therefore be present in the guardian of the State, that he may distinguish between the citizen whom he defends and the enemy whom he attacks. In the soldier, reason thus appears as a mere empiric knowledge, which is mixed with a dominant quality of spirit, and expresses itself in an instinctive affection for the object of knowledge because that object is known and familiar. (2) But reason expresses itself most (because it expresses itself in its purity, and not in union with a dominant element of spirit) in the government of a State. It is perfect, not in the guardian, but in the ‘perfect guardian’ or ruler. Here, in the perfect guardian, Plato introduces a third element. The class of guardians bifurcates into two – the military guardians, whose characteristic is spirit, and who are now termed ‘auxiliaries’ (ἐπίκουροι); and the philosophic guardians, whose characteristic is reason, and who are the guardians par excellence of the Platonic State (414 B).
But reason, even in its purity, and even in the philosophic guardian, is itself a twofold thing. By it we know, but by it we also love; and there is in it both an intellectual element of apprehension, arid an element as it were of affection and attraction. The very watch-dog loves as well as knows, and loves because he knows.1 Now the quality which Plato originally postulates for the ruler or ‘perfect guardian’ (
) – the element of mind which he originally believes to be expressed in the government of the State – is reason in its aspect of affection (412 D–E). The ruler must be wise; but what impresses Plato most in the earlier part of the Republic is that he must be loving (
). The men who will govern the State best are those who care for it most, and those who care for it most are those who believe2 that its welfare is their welfare, and its mishap their mishap. If this be the element of mind expressed in the government, the government will obviously be unselfish; and in place of the political selfishness which Thrasymachus had glorified, we shall see realized the conception that government is an art practised for the good of its subjects. In this aspect of its operation, reason is indeed the very bond which unites the State. As a source of affection and attraction it is the factor of the soul which expresses itself in the State by maintaining its unity. Appetite may have drawn men together by an economic nexus: spirit may have added a new military bond: it is reason that holds men together by teaching them to understand, and, through their understanding, to love one another. The ultimate organization of the State is a rational organization. Reason in its alliance with spirit has caused the soldier to know, and to like, and therefore to protect, the citizens whom he guards; but reason in its purity causes the ruler to comprehend, and out of his comprehension to love and serve, the State which he governs.
That the rulers, like the soldiers, should be a distinct and specialized class, naturally follows upon this view of the attitude of mind which government expresses. It is not in all that this reason issuing in love is to be found; and those in whom it is most to be found are carefully, and by an elaborate system of moral tests, to be selected from the ranks of the soldiers, and set to govern the State. But this specialization of a ruling class, which shall give itself to ruling, and to ruling alone, becomes still more justified if we regard reason in its intellectual aspect.1 The real ruler, as Plato ultimately tells us, must be a philosopher; and the philosophic nature is reserved for a few rare souls: ‘a whole people cannot be a people of philosophers’ (494 A). The ultimate test of the true ruler is therefore an intellectual test of his philosophic power. He must know the ‘idea’ or essence of Justice, and of Beauty, and of Temperance, in order that he may fashion into their likeness the characters of those whom he rules.2 Ultimately, he must know the Idea of which all these Ideas are but phrases, and from which alone comes every perfect work – the Idea of the Good. He must know what is the purpose of all doing and of all being – what is the end in the light of which all human action and all existence have a meaning – in order that he may do the work, which is appointed to him in the scheme of things, in such a way as to make it serve the fulfilling of this end. In the ruler, therefore, that final element of mind must express itself, which grapples with the mystery of existence, and arrives at a solution of its meaning. If in him this element is incarnate, then, and then only, has a State come into being, which is the creation (and also the image) of the fulness of man’s mind. For if the mind of man is capable of this exaltation of reason, if it can attain to a condition of perfection in which reason guides its operations by the light of a supreme purpose, the State also must be capable of this exaltation, and must equally attain its perfection when, and only when, it is guided by the insight of a philosophic reason. This flows inevitably from the premise on which the Republic is based, that the State is the product of man’s mind, and that each aspect of the State is the product of an element of mind. The synthesis of the State from each of its spiritual factors cannot therefore but culminate in the conception that it is not only an economic, nor only a military, but also a rational organization, and that, as such an organization, it must ultimately be guided by the highest reason which is possible for man. The ‘philosopher-king’ is not a mere addition on insertion: he is the logical result of the whole method on which the construction of the State has proceeded.1
From this new conception of the ruler, as a philosopher rather than a lover of the State, a new method of selection naturally flows (503 E). Instead of attempting by moral tests to discover those who care most for the State, we must now, by an intellectual test of philosophic power, discover those few who can guide it best in the light of the deepest wisdom. Another result also follows. If philosophy is to direct the State, a new training and a new method of education are necessary. There must be a system of education not only for the auxiliaries, who are to be happy warriors, but also for the ‘perfect guardians’, who are to be philosopher-kings. We may therefore expect, and we shall find, two successive schemes of education in the Republic. And just as the philosopher-king is no addition or insertion, but the logical outcome of Plato’s principles, so, too, the second or philosophic scheme of education is not an after-thought or postscript, but the logical apex of the argument.
THE CLASSES OF THE PLATONIC STATE
We may now advance the argument a stage further. So far we have seen the three successive logical stages in the genesis of the State – the economic, the military, and the rational or philosophic. We have now to notice that in the completed State there are three classes corresponding to these three stages. Two classes have already emerged, the governmental and the military class, each composed of men possessed of special gifts, who are specially trained to exercise these gifts and to discharge the one function for which they are fitted – and that alone. ‘Setting aside every other business, the guardians are to dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this end’ (395 ELC). To these two classes of guardians we have now to add a third class in the State, an economic or producing class, composed of men who have not the special gifts of the ruler or soldier, but who, equally with the ruler and the soldier, confine themselves to a single function, which must necessarily be that of satisfying the physical wants of the community. The Platonic State as a whole, therefore, is a community marked by a division of labour between three specialized classes,1 the rulers (or ‘perfect guardians)’, the soldiers (at first called ‘guardians’, and afterwards ‘auxiliaries’), and the producing classes (whom Plato calls the ‘farmers’). There is a Lehrstand, a Wehrstand, and a Nährstand: there are, as in the medieval conception of ‘the three estates’, oratores, bellatores, and laboratores. The three several elements of mind which constitute the State are therefore not only to be logically distinguished as factors in its logical genesis (as has hitherto been done); they are actually distinct as classes in its external organization. This implies that each of the several elements (appetite, spirit, and reason) is particularly and essentially prominent in particular individuals or bodies of individuals. There is one small body in which reason is prominent: another, and larger, which is dominated by spirit: a third, by far the largest, in which appetite is paramount.1 This is quite another contention from the primary contention that each element of mind is a factor in constituting the full life of the State; and it is a contention which is far more dubious. The State may be and indeed is a product of mind; but it does not follow that the State is or should be divided into classes which correspond to the different elements of mind. In each individual mind all those elements are present; but if in the State each man is limited to an activity which corresponds to one element only, is he not forced to live as a citizen with a single part of his mind? The ruler must live by reason: therefore, Plato argues, he must abandon appetite; and he is accordingly brought under a communistic regime which prevents the play of appetite, and thus involves the paralysis of an integral element in human nature. Again the farmer must live for the satisfaction of appetite; he must be regulated in that life by the external reason of the perfect guardian; and thus he suffers an atrophy of his rational self.2
In turning each psychical element into a separate social class, and in confining the right of government to one of these three, Plato is guided by his analysis of human nature. That analysis has two features. It makes a definite separation of the different elements of the mind: it assigns a large predominance in the life of the mind to the element of reason. In separating the elements of mind from one another Plato uses the principle of contradiction. Men are all aware of contradictions or conflicts within their minds; and since the same thing cannot be affected in contrary ways at the same time (436 B), it follows that the mind is not homogeneous, but the residence of various elements which may, and often do, contradict one another. Appetite, for instance, is a different element from reason: there is a struggle of the two, ‘which is like the struggle of factions in a State’ (440 B). But the mind, heterogeneous as it is, must needs be reduced to unity; and this is the function of reason. The rational principle, with the passionate or spirited principle as its ally, must rule the concupiscent, ‘which in each of us is the largest part of the soul, and by nature insatiable of gain’. Reason is ‘the little part which rules … being supposed to have a knowledge of what is for the interest alike of each of the three parts and of the whole’ (441 E–442 C). Reason, therefore, achieves a unity of the mind, in the sense of a system of right relations under which the several elements are not permitted to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of the others. We are here in close touch with Pythagorean principles; and it seems like a definite allusion to Pythagorean doctrine, when Plato speaks of the blending together, into a perfectly adjusted harmony, of the three elements of the mind, ‘which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale’ (443 D).1
It may be urged, in criticism of Plato, that the presence of contradictions or conflicts in the human mind does not impair, though it may disturb, the real unity of each human personality.2 Such unity is more than a system of right relations between different elements, and more than an hierarchical adjustment of those elements, by which one is made sovereign and the rest are placed in subordination to it. The human mind is not the home of contending elements which have to be reconciled by the victory and through the sovereignty of one of the rivals: it is from the first a unity, and it is pervaded throughout by reason. If, however, we adopt Plato’s analysis of the human mind, and apply that analysis to the State, we shall arrive at the conclusions drawn by Plato. To the tripartite soul will correspond a Three-Class polity; to the rule of reason will correspond a system of communism and the rule of philosopher-kings. Government will become a philosophic autocracy, to which the economic and military classes of the State will be subordinate, as appetite and spirit are subordinate to the rational part of the mind. It is true that the unity of such a State will not be a unity achieved by force, any more than the separation of its classes will be a separation artificially made or artificially maintained. Both are for Plato grounded on innate right, because they are both grounded on the innate constitution of human nature. The knowledge which all the citizens possess of their duties and limitations, and the common disposition of all their wills to admit their duties and limitations – both of these, in his view, will sustain the Three-Class system and the rule of Philosopher-Kings. Each class knows what it can do: each knows that it would be unjust if it tried to do other things, or to interfere with the doing of other things. Each class, again, in virtue of self-control, translates its knowledge into a disposition of the will; and by its self-control each class may be said to lend its will and give its consent to the system of classes and the method of government. Nevertheless it is true that the doctrine of the tripartite soul, and the theory of the specific function of each part, tend to produce a polity which can be accused both of excessive separatism and of what Aristotle calls ‘excessive unification’. It can be accused of the one because it rests on a system of classes which has some of the features of a system of castes, and more especially because it postulates a great line of division between the producing and the ruling classes. It can be accused of the other, partly because it involves a system of communism, which unifies the rulers with one another and the rest of the community, by pruning away their desires and depriving them of the property which is essential to a full human personality, and partly, again, because it depends on a system of government, which unifies the State in subjection to a single sovereignty rather than in the exercise of a single general will. The fault lies not in Plato’s conception of the relation of the State to the human mind, but in his application to the State of a separatist conception of mind and an autocratic conception of reason. If we start from a conception of the fundamental unity of the human personality, and seek to transfer that conception to the State, we shall attain a view of the State as a unity pervaded throughout by reason – as one in virtue of a reason which animates each and every member, and comes to light not in the minds of a chosen few, but in the will of the whole community. We shall conceive the State as a single personality, and we shall ascribe sovereignty, in the manner of Rousseau, to the general will of the whole personality. In a society based on a conception of this character, there will indeed be classes – but each class will be a factor in determining the common will; there will be unity – but a unity consistent with the full individual existence of each member.1
But we must not leave the separatism which we have criticized without noticing that it has another side. If Plato will not admit that every class has all the faculties of mind, and that every class should be able to attain the full development of its full faculties, he at any rate admits that it is possible for individual members of one class to possess the faculties peculiar to another, and he is anxious that, where this occurs, such men should readily rise to the class to which their faculties entitle them to belong. He expresses this principle in the form of a myth. All the members of the State are brethren one of another, he tells us, but in fashioning them God wrought gold into the composition of the rulers, silver into that of the soldiers, and iron and brass into that of the farmers and craftsmen. But He did not desire that the descendants of the original members of each class should belong to that same class throughout all generations. He gave the guardians a command that they should guard nothing more strenuously than the principle that as is each man’s composition, so shall his class also be. It may be that a ‘silver’ man is born of ‘golden’ parents; it may be that to ‘silver’ parents is born a ‘golden’ son. Whenever that comes to pass, the rulers must act accordingly; and degrading the ‘silver’ man to the rank of soldier, they must promote the ‘golden’ man to the position of ruler (415 A–C). By this transposition of ranks each man will find his appointed level: if there be the light of reason within him, he will have scope for its exercise. No possibility of human development, Plato would fain believe, is stifled by the division of classes which he proposes; on the contrary, an opportunity is given, such as without it there could not be, for the fullest use of every power.
Safeguarded by the transposition of ranks, the division of classes is free to achieve its purpose of introducing specialization, and making possible the excellence which specialized capacity alone can attain. The setting aside to their work of those who are called to be rulers and soldiers is also the banishing of incompetence from politics; and not the least of the defects which Plato traced in contemporary States disappears with the disappearance of sham statesmanship. Again, the separation of class from class, and especially the separation of the producing from the governing classes (liable as it is to the criticism, which Aristotle passes upon it, that it bisects the State into two halves, each with its different temper and its different institutions), may yet be said to make for political unselfishness. On one side stands the economic Society: on the other rises the State – a State carefully detached by a system of communism from economic Society, and likely neither to interfere with it nor to be influenced by it. The distinction between Society and the State, which the Greeks tended to ignore, may here be said to find a full expression.
But above all, in this separation and specialization lies the clue to that which the whole argument is intended to discover – the nature of justice. In order finally to discover justice, as justice exists in the State, Plato pursues the method of residues. Making what he conceived to be a complete classification of the virtues of the State – justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance or self-control (the four ‘cardinal virtues’ of the Greeks) – he first assigns to each of the latter three its proper place, and then claims the place that remains for the remaining virtue of justice. Now the virtues of the State, on the principle laid down before, are the virtues of its members when they are acting as members. Wisdom accordingly must be the virtue of the ruling class which directs the State by its reason: courage must be the virtue of the soldiers: and self-control, it might seem, must be that of the producing class. But self-control is more than the virtue of any one class. It is a virtue which is attained, when appetite on its side accepts, and reason on its side provides, due rule and regimen; and the self-control of the State will accordingly mean, on its passive side the recognition, by the producing and military classes, of the need of submitting to rule, and on its active side, the recognition by the government of the need of providing such rule. As a whole, therefore, self-control is a harmony between the different elements of the State, resulting from the presence of the same conviction in all.
What then is justice, and where is the place of its habitation? It is simply the specialization of which we have spoken before: it is simply the will to fulfil the duties of one’s station (
), and not to meddle with the duties of another station; and its habitation is therefore in the mind of every citizen who does his duty in his appointed place. It is the original principle, laid down at the foundation of the State, ‘that one man should practise one thing only, and that the thing to which his nature was best adapted’ (443 A). The ruler, for instance, must be wise, and if he shows wisdom in his work, and cleaves to wisdom as his true vocation, he is thereby just – or rather (for it is the virtue of the State of which we are speaking) the State is just, because its member, in his appointed place, has done his appointed duty.1 In this sense justice is the condition of every other virtue of the State; for unless a citizen concentrates on his own sphere of duty, he will not show the virtue which that sphere demands. Social justice thus may be defined as the principle of a society, consisting of different types of men (the producing type, the military type, the ruling type), who have combined under the impulse of their need for one another, and by their combination in one society, and their concentration on their separate functions, have made a whole which is perfect because it is the product and the image of the whole of the human mind. As the principle of such a society, it consists in the full discharge by each of these types of the specific function for which, by its capacities and by the place they have given it in the society, it is naturally meant. The justice of the State is the citizen’s sense of the duty of his station, issuing before the world in public action; and England was just at Trafalgar, because her fighting men who obeyed their Admiral’s signal fulfilled in the battle their appointed function and showed their specific excellence.
Such a conception of justice is the final and ultimate answer to the individualism in life and in theory which Plato combated. The conception postulates a view of the individual as not an isolated self, but part of an order, intended, not to pursue the pleasures of isolated self, but to fill an appointed place in that order. The individual is not a whole, and cannot be treated as such: the State is a whole, and it must enforce upon the individual the fact that it is, by treating him as a factor and a fraction of itself. The conception of the individual as part of an order, true as it is, is pushed to an extreme by Plato; and in treating of communism we shall see reason to believe that it led Plato to deny to the individual rights, which are the very conditions of his being a moral person and thereby of being capable of any virtue. But the conception of social justice (or righteousness) as the filling by each man of his appointed sphere, in obedience to that categorical imperative of social duty which Goethe, like Plato, proclaimed1 – this, whatever the defects of its qualities, is the cardinal conception of the Republic, and the fundamental basis of that view of public duty, to be discharged in some special station, and of public efficiency, to be attained by some special training, which the Republic was written to advocate.
Before we attempt any criticism of Plato’s conception of social justice, we have still to consider his definition of justice in the individual. If the justice of the State is the due performance of function by each class, he argues, then the justice of the individual (the discovery of which was the purpose of the whole argument, and the reason for the construction and consideration of the State) will be equally the due performance of function by each part of the individual mind. The parts of the individual mind represent the same principles as the classes of the State. Indeed, it is these different parts, predominating as they do in different ways in different individuals, that produce the difference of social classes (435 E). It follows that, as in the State, which is the analogue and the product of man’s mind, there are three elements, so in the mind of each man there are, parallel to them and the source of their existence, the three elements of reason, spirit, and appetite.2 As the justice of the State means that each of its three elements retains its place, so the justice of the individual means that reason, spirit, and appetite all keep their proper bounds.3 But since the justice of the State is that of the individuals composing it, it follows that each individual has two aspects, and shows justice in either. In one aspect he is a member of a community, and he shows justice by exhibiting the one virtue proper to the peculiar place which the one predominant element of his nature has assigned him – the virtue, for instance, of courage, if spirit is the element predominant in his temper. But in another aspect he is an individual mind, and as such he shows justice if he keeps each of the elements of his mind in its right place, and thereby exhibits the other virtues of wisdom and courage and self-control. If as a citizen, therefore, a man may live, with a single part of his mind, as an individual he lives with the whole, finding injustice the keystone of the virtues, which holds them all together in an ordered adjustment and harmony.1
The Platonic conception of justice, as applied to the State, may be subjected to criticism. The formula of discharge of function may be held not to touch the essence of what men generally mean by justice. It may be urged that it is too passive in its character; and that, while it bids men keep to their sphere, it does not provide a principle for dealing with the clash of wills, and the conflict between one sphere of right and another, which is what we seek in a conception of justice. We must remember, however, that justice has a companion in self-control, which is also a general virtue of society at large. If justice, which is faithfulness in discharge of function, is deficient without its corollary of a harmony, or fitting together, of the different functions, self-control, in the sense in which it is defined by Plato, supplies that corollary. It has the nature of harmony and symphony (430 E): it extends to the whole of society running through all the notes of the scale,2 and producing a harmony of the weaker, the stronger, and the middle class (432 A). Self-control, however, is a moral and not a legal principle; and the objection may be still urged that the justice of which Plato speaks is not really justice at all. It is an indwelling spirit; but it does not issue in a concrete jus, and still less in any law. Law is one thing, and morality is another: the one is concerned with the external rules which direct men’s actions in an ordered community; the other with the ideas which lie behind rules and the ideals which lie behind order. It may be urged that Plato has blurred the distinction, and confused the boundary which lies between moral duty and legal obligation.3
In reality, however, such an objection is beside the point. Platonic justice, as we have already seen,1 is not a legal matter, nor is it concerned with any external scheme of legal rights and duties. It belongs not to the sphere of Recht (legality), but to that of Sittlichkeit (social morality).2 It is not a matter of law, or again of individual ethics, nor is it a confusion between the two: it is a conception of social morality and a definition of the code of social ethics which no less than law, and perhaps even more than law, underlies the play of social relations. It deals with the ways in which a whole society may attain goodness and thereby happiness (421 B–C): it is not confined to the goodness or the happiness of individuals. Its formula is that the essence of social morality lies in the fulfilment of ‘my station and its duties’; and this is a formula which modern thinkers can still employ.3 Behind this formula, and behind the whole conception of social morality, there lies the conception of society as a moral whole or organism, living a moral life of which every individual is an organ and in which every individual has a function. The political theory of Plato is a theory of this moral organism; and his theory of justice is a theory of the ethical code by which it lives. He does not start from the conception of a legal society based on legal rights, and he does not conceive justice as a system for the maintenance and correlation of such rights. He starts from the conception of an ethical society based on the moral duty of discharge of specific function, and he conceives justice as the spirit by which men are animated in the fulfilment of that duty.
Nor was Plato, in conceiving justice in this sense, very far removed from the current ideas of Greece. The Greeks, it has been noticed,4 had no word corresponding to the Latin jus. Jus. implies not only Right, but also, and still more, Remedy: it is something concrete, ‘which is recognized, and can be enforced by a human authority’. It is the sum of the actual rules, whether created by usage or by judicial decision or by statute (lex), on which the courts proceed. While the Romans thus thought and spoke of a single concrete jus, and of lex as a part thereof, the Greeks thought and spoke of an abstract and absolute Right (τό δίκαιον), by the side of which they set, as the one expression of concrete law, the old and traditional Use (νόμος), whether written or unwritten, of the community. Early in Greek speculation the question naturally arose of the true nature of the Just or Right, with its corresponding quality of Justice or Righteousness, and of the relation between Justice and old traditional Use. It was natural that this speculation should, as it does in Plato, prove more than a legal speculation, and that the Just should be elevated by thought into the ideal good, and Justice into the ideal goodness, of human society. Such a result is the outcome of the fact that the Greek genius was not, like the Roman, specifically legal, or, as such, concerned with legal right backed by legal remedy and enforced by legal process. On the contrary, it was specifically metaphysical; and Plato, the greatest exponent of the genius of his people, was a genuine Greek when he sought to find the first principle or Idea of the Just, and even when, strong in his conviction of the truth of that Idea, he sought to revolutionize society in its light. He departed from the ways of his people only in carrying his zeal for the first principle of society to an extreme in which abstract Right proved fatal to any concrete Law, and ideal Justice, resident in the pure reason of the philosopher-king, was made to abolish all law and all legislation. But even for that the way was already prepared, when once the distinction between abstract Right and legal Use had been drawn.1
1 He wrote separate treatises, the Metaphysics, the Ethics, and the Politics. But political science and moral philosophy, at any rate, are in his eyes still one and The indivisible. It must be admitted, however, that the separate treatises on ethics and politics tend to diverge not only in name, but also in spirit. The realistic tone of Books IV–VI of the Politics shows little trace of an ethical point of view.
1 In brief, the Republic is a ‘philosophy of mind’ in all its manifestations; and the modern work with which it may most easily be compared is that section of Hegel’s sketch of philosophy entitled the ‘philosophy of mind’, in which he discusses the inner operations of mind as consciousness and as conscience, its external manifestations in law and in social morality (the sphere of the State), and its ‘absolute’ activity in art, religion, and philosophy.
2 Pöhlmann, Geschichte des antiken Kommunismus und Sozialismus.
3 πλο
τος καὶ πενία (Republic, 421).
1 But Plato says that it is the guardians alone who will have neither silver nor gold; from which one may gather that the other classes of the State use the precious metals (417 A).
1 These Sophists did indeed reconcile State and individual, by making the State a tyranny working for the satisfaction of one individual. They reconciled it, however, from the wrong end (if indeed they can be said to have reconciled it at ail), when they adjusted the State to one individual, instead of adjusting all individuals to the State. Yet it shows how closely the State and the individual were connected, even by the revolutionaries, that individualism, instead of seeking to destroy the State, should have attempted to recreate it after its own image. The Sophists were not anarchists, even in their wildest flights.
1 ‘Do you really think that our youth are corrupted by Sophists, or that private teachers … corrupt them in any degree worth speaking of? Are not the public who say these things the greatest of all Sophists?’ (492 A). ‘Sophists … in fact teach nothing but the opinion of the Many, that is to say, the opinions of their assemblies; and this is their wisdom’ (493 A).
2 Plato’s criticism of contemporary politics is to be found in the eighth and ninth books of the Republic. Nohle (Die Staatslehre Platos, p. 101) remarks with justice that Plato depicts actual States after he has sketched his ideal State; while nevertheless, in the actual development of his thought, the study of actual States came before the construction of the ideal and served as an incentive to its construction. Moreover, the defects of the actual showed him what to seek in an ideal; and in this sense his critique of the actual controls and determines his construction of the ideal. Indeed, it may almost be said that the elements in his ideal State which seem most idealistic are in a sense most realistic: they are the results of an ardent impatience with the elements of actual life which he had thoroughly studied, and of which he thoroughly disapproved. His communism, for instance, is largely the result of a lively sense of the evils actually inherent in a ruling class which had its own economic interests, and used its political position to advance those interests.
1 Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1279, a 13–15 (III. 6, § 10), ‘nowadays men seek to be always in office for the sake of the advantages they can gain from the public revenues and from office’.
1 This view of the ‘two States’ is one that recurs in Plato. ‘Such a State’, he says of oligarchy, ‘is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another’ (551 D). Similarly in the Laws he urges (712 E–713 A) that the ordinary State has no constitution: it is a mere territory divided into parts one of which is master and the other is slave. The Platonic view of the two States within each State naturally suggests Disraeli’s phrase of the ‘two Nations’, and the modern Socialist idea of the ‘class-war’.
2 Thucydides, VI. 39 (the argument is that of Athenagoras, the democratic leader at Syracuse).
3 Cf. the picture drawn by Thucydides of οτάσις at Corcyra: ‘And the cause of all these things was the pursuit of office for reasons of greed and ambition’ (1x1, 82).
1 Republic, 521 A. Ordinary rulers, Plato suggests (416 A), are like ‘watch-dogs, which from want of discipline, or hunger, or some evil habit or other, turn upon the sheep and worry them, and behave not like dogs but wolves’.
1 ‘Both the community of property and the community of families … tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not tear the city in pieces by differing about “mine” and “not ‘mine” … but… they all tend towards a common end’ (464 C–D).
2 It must be noted that no legal significance attaches to ‘justice’ in Plato’s use of the word. Justice (δικαιοσύνη), along with courage, self-control and wisdom, is one of the four virtues which constitute moral goodness (ἀρετή). Such goodness is the quality both of an individual soul and of a community of individuals; and justice, therefore, is also a quality of both. It is thus one of the constituent parts both of individual morality and of social morality; but it is with morality rather than law that it is connected in either form (cf. infra, p. 207).
While justice is, properly speaking, a part of goodness, it becomes in the Republic almost identical with goodness itself. The ‘goodness’ or excellence of the individual soul is practically identified with the ‘justice’ of the relations of the elements of the soul (reason, spirit and appetite): the soul which has τάξις καὶ κόσμος among those elements, and is thereby just, is also good. Similarly the goodness of a society is practically identified with the justice of the relations of its members: the State which has τάξις καὶ κόσμος among its members, through the faithful abiding of each in his station, and is thereby just, is also good. In the Laws it is another virtue – that of self-control – which is practically identified with goodness (cf. infra, p. 344); but here too, as in the Republic, one of the virtues is made tantamount to the whole of virtue. Virtue (we must remember) is a unity; and the parts of virtue, whether justice or self-control, involve the whole.
1 This is a reference to the doctrine of a δύναμις τ
ν ἐνατίων; cf. supra, p. 102.
1 This teaching of Plato – that competition in itself, pursued as an ultimate end, is the mark of ignorance and injustice – is partly the outcome of the old Greek sense of limit enforced by the Delphic oracle, and re-enforced by the Pythagoreans (supra, p. 56), but still more the result of the doctrine of justice to which he is feeling his way, and which makes justice consist in the wise discharge of specific function. Men engaged each in the discharge of such a function will not compete with one another, because their functions are not competitive, but complementary. If we translated Plato’s teaching into modern economic terms, we should say that economic competition is not in itself good, but only good as a means to the production of economic excellence – that is to say, of the maximum amount of wealth. This being so, the wise producer will not seek to compete with all producers, but only with those who are producing in a poor way; nor will he compete for the sake of competition, but rather for the sake of economic excellence.
1 The argument, it will be noticed, is partly verbal, and depends on the fact that the Greek words both for ‘goodness’ and for ‘living well’ (ἀρετή and ε ζν) have a double entendre (or at any rate a width of connotation), which the corresponding English words can hardly be said to possess. ‘Goodness’ implies not only moral excellence, but also, as it were, intellectual efficiency: ‘living well’ means not only living nobly, but also living happily. But the argument is also real as well as verbal. Plato means by goodness something which is an intellectual as well as a moral quality; and he means, again, that the exercise and energy of this quality is the highest form of happiness.
1 Nettleship, Lectures, p. 48. At the same time it should be noted that Plato already implies, what he afterwards seeks to prove, that justice is not a conventional code of conduct, but an inner excellence of the soul.
2 For Hobbes, too, believes that the sense of right is a thing not inherent in man, but created by a compact, and enforced by a power. ‘Before the name of just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power’ (C. xv.): ‘for in the differences of private men, to declare what is equity, what is justice, and what is moral virtue, and to make them binding, there is need of the ordinances of sovereign power’ (C. xxvx.). The fundamentally wrong thing in his position is (exactly what Plato urges against Glaucon’s position) the view of human nature which it implies – the individualistic view that man is a selfish unit, that ‘in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel, first competition, secondly diffidence, and thirdly glory’. On such a view, justice can be regarded only as an artificial thing, doing violence to the instincts of human nature in the interests of a self-preservation which the unchecked indulgence of instinct prevents. Accordingly Hobbes has to be met – as Plato meets Glaucon – by a denial of the view that man is by nature a selfish unit, and by an opposite theory of human nature.
1 The argument is used by Plato himself in the Laws (cf. infra, p. 424).
1 This view of the relation of natural and conventional is based upon Nettleship (Lectures, pp. 54–7).
1 Similarly Aristotle, in the first book of the Politics, proposes to consider a nascent State first, in order to explain the difference between the State and the Household. But, as we shall see, it is a logical, and not an historical growth of the State, which Plato really considers; and the same is true of Aristotle.
1 Republic 544 D; cf. also 435 E, and Sophocles, Oedikus Tyrannus, 56–7:
2 Plato builds a State to illustrate man; but he presupposes a knowledge of man in building it.
1 Nettleship, Lectures, p. 10. The same may be said of Hobbes’ apparently historical construction of the State in the Leviathan. That, too, is logical and not historical; and the feature presented by Hobbes are those of contemporary England, as they presented themselves to him.
1 In this connexion it is important to notice that Plato is kinder than Aristotle to the middleman who conducts the business of trade. When a currency has been introduced, he argues, and a medium of exchange has made possible a system of exchange through the middleman, instead of barter between the two producing parties, it would be a waste of time for the farmer to come to market and wait about in order to sell his goods; and this service (διακοία) is undertaken by the middleman, who thus supplies a need (χρεία). From this one may argue that the middleman, doing a service which supplies a need, in that it saves the time of the producer, deserves his reward; whereas Aristotle recognizes no service, and consequently refuses to see the justice of any reward. On the other hand, if Plato appreciates the nature and the service of exchange in the Republic, we have to notice (1) that in the Laws he forbids retail trade for the sake of gain, and assigns such trade as he considers permissible to aliens (infra, p. 377); and (2) that in the Republic itself he adopts a somewhat harsh attitude to production, leaving agriculture to a lower and almost servile class, and speaking of manual arts as ‘a reproach’ (590 C). But it is an error to speak of Plato’s aristocratic prejudice against trade and industry (as is done by Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, III. 111–12). He shows himself in the Laws prepared to advocate technical education (643 B–C): he finds room for a system of poor relief; and though he seeks to abolish usury, by suggesting that legal protection should be refused to transactions involving credit, he leaves room for a larger development of economic activity than Aristotle seems willing to admit in the first book of the Politics. After all, Plato’s master was himself a craftsman; and, like him, Plato believed that men might draw useful lessons for the conduct of life from the arts and crafts.
2 The tendency to stop short at a view of the State as a great economic concern may also be traced in some forms of socialism.
1 If this be so (but Campbell and Gomperz both think that it is not the case), Plato is opposing the cry for ‘reversion to nature’, which lay behind the theories that the State and justice were conventional. He would keep the State as it stands with all its ‘luxury’, and ‘purge’ it of its mistakes (399 E). At the same time, it must be admitted that there is much reversion in Plato himself – in his theory of art and of medicine, and especially perhaps in his communistic principles (cf. infra, p. 266); and in view of this the Arcadian State may be seriously meant. There are similar references to a golden age in the Politicus and the Laws (cf. infra, pp. 317, 357), and here again it is difficult to be sure whether Plato means to approve, or to criticize, the idea of a ‘State of nature’. It should be noted, however, that Plato afterwards speaks of his own ideal State, when fully constructed, as 
. It is natural, and it only is natural, because it alone is built on the eternal facts of human nature.
1 We have already seen that professional soldiers were among the associates of Socrates (supra, p. 104), and that, some five years before Plato wrote this passage of the Republic, the value of a professional soldiery had been shown by the victory of the peltasts of Iphicrates over a Spartan mora. These facts would reinforce the general principle of Plato – a principle already urged against Thrasyrnachus in the first book of the Republic (supra, p. 183) – that excellence demands as its condition the regular discharge of a specific function.
1 From II. 376 E to III. 412 A.
1 This will explain the bearing of the Socratic principle that virtue is know ledge. It is easy to object, that to know that a thing is right is not to do the thing, and that there is will besides knowledge. But, in the first place, knowledge here means more than the mere knowledge that A is right and B is wrong: it means an understanding of the world in the light of a principle. Secondly, such under standing is conceived as involving an attraction, and as resulting in a will in accordance with itself. The philosophic element which understands is thereby attracted to whatever it understands – truth, or beauty, or virtue. Instead of the ‘will to believe’ of which modern writers have spoken, there is a converse conception of belief as issuing in will: cf. supra, p. 105.
2 The belief is an ὀρθὴ δόξα, a right opinion, without a scientific basis. It may also be said, therefore, that what Plato originally demands of his rulers is a right opinion; while afterwards he demands scientific knowledge (ἐπιοτήμη).
1 It is not meant that reason exists separately in its aspect of love and its aspect of philosophic insight. On the contrary, the one cannot exist without the other. The love for the State, which has just been mentioned, depends on the presence of a certain insight: the insight into ultimate truth, which reason gives, postulates and involves an attraction towards truth. All that is meant is that in one passage the one aspect of reason appears more decidedly, in another the other.
2 Republic, 501 A–C. Plato here conceives the perfect guardians as painting a new picture on a cleaned canvas. In doing so, ‘they will first look at natural justice, and beauty, and temperance, and again at the human copy … and one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they have made the manners of men, as far as possible, conformable to the Divine’.
1 There is no need to assume any discrepancy between Plato’s view of the guardians in Books II and 111, and his account of the philosopher-king at the end of Book V and in Books VI and VII. Still less need we assume that the Republic falls into separate sections different in thought and distinct in date of composition. It is Plato’s art (an art most strikingly shown in Book V) to reveal his mind gradually, and to give his message as it were in successive stages. Already in Book IV (435 C–D) he hints that ‘the true method is another and a larger one’: and in Book VI (503 A), speaking of the position of the rulers, and the need of their training in philosophy, he adds, ‘This is the sort of thing which was being said, and then the argument turned aside, and veiled her face’. But it must be admitted that many scholars have considered that there are separate strata in the Republic, and have marked a distinction between the part dealing with philosopher-kings and their education and the rest of the dialogue. Pfleiderer, for instance (in Sokrates und Platon), makes a division into Rep. A (i.–v. 471 and viii.–ix.); Rep. B (v. 471–vii.); and Rep. A–B (x.), the transition. Nettleship considers that Books V–VII form a distinct section, possibly inserted, on the ground that they are different in tone from the other books, and that one can easily read on from IV to VIII. Burnet, as we have seen, suggests that Books VI–VII are the programme of the studies to be followed in the Academy, which Plato was about to found, and that, unlike the rest of the Republic, which is Socratic, they represent Plato’s own views. But he does not assign any different date to these books, or suggest that they were not part of Plato’s original plan.
It should be added that the assumption on which I have gone, that the Republic is a unity and not a compound of different sections, is not free from difficulties. There is, for instance, the difficulty presented by the Timaeus, in which the argument of the first four books and part of the fifth is recapitulated, but no reference is made to the end of the fifth book or to Books VI and VII (cf. infra, pp. 311–12). There is the difficulty, again, that while Books VI and VII are metaphysical, Books VIII and IX (apart from the discussion of pleasure in the latter book) contain no metaphysical elements and no references to the metaphysical argument of the two preceding books. Nevertheless I cannot but feel that the end of the fifth book and Books VI and VII are essential parts of the plan of the Republic. Plato, who had discussed wisdom in the earlier books in its lower aspect of right opinion or instinctive affection, was necessarily bound, and from the first intended, to discuss pure reason, and the part which it should play in the system of his State.
1 I.e it is what Aristotle criticizes it for not being, a κοινωνία constituted of elements different in kind, each making a different contribution to a common good, and profiting by the contributions of the rest.
1 Plato seems to be adopting and amplifying the Pythagorean doctrine of the Three Classes – 
2 The same criticism may indeed be passed on Aristotle’s conception of the economic classes as having properly no share in the moral (that is, the rational) life of the State.
1 The musical simile, and the reference to a blending together in a proper harmony, both suggest Pythagorean influence (cf. supra, p. 56). See Burnet, Greek Philosophy, pp. 176–8.
2 It is sometimes said that the Greeks had little sense of the personality of the individual; and one writer speaks of Plato as ‘like all the Greeks, knowing nothing of the eternal significance of the individual personality’. Plato, on the contrary, like all the Greeks, bases this State on the personality of the individual; and though he may be said to have under-estimated its necessary unity, he none the less recognizes that unity (cf. e.g. Rep. 589 B).
1 It may be said, in the words of my old master, Edward Caird, that Plato ‘is not organic enough’. All the virtues, other than wisdom, are modes of obedience: all the parts of the State, other than the philosopher-kings, are means to an end. Cf. infra, p. 274.
1 The true ruler will show wisdom, self-control (since that virtue belongs to him in common with his subjects), and, in and through both, justice. Further, he must have shown courage (in keeping to his conviction that the welfare of the State is his welfare) in order to become a ruler. Therefore the good ruler, as Aristotle afterwards argued, showing as he does all the four virtues, is the same as the absolutely good man.
1 Goethe’s Mache ein Organ aus Dir = Plato’s 
. Another saying of Goethe is also apposite: ‘a man must either be a whole or join a whole.’
2 In the text an explicit account of these three elements in the individual was first given, and it was then shown how they issued in the three elements of the State. But Plato begins with an implied psychology of the individual, constructs a State accordingly, and argues from the State to an explicit psychology of the individual. Though he professes to argue from the uncials of the State to the minuscules of the individual, in reality the minuscules are there from the first: cf. supra, pp. 186–7.
3 Justice in a word is a 
of the parts of the soul (cf. supra, p. 158).
1 It must be remembered that ‘the justice of the State’ and the ‘justice of the individual’ are both exhibited by individuals. The difference is that the individual exhibits the former as a part of society; he exhibits the latter within his own mind.
2 The musical simile (cf. 443 D) suggests, as was noted above, Pythagorean influence.
3 Cf. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, III. 75.
1 Supra, p. 177, note 2. At the same time the definition in 433 E (where justice is defined as ‘having and doing what is one’s own’) seems to imply (in its use of the word ‘having’) that legal notion of justice which Aristotle discusses under the head of ‘particular justice’ (cf. supra, p. 47, n. 2).
2 Sittlichkeit is ‘neither the subjective morality of our inward conscience, nor the external legality of mere law: it blends and transcends both. It is a spirit and habit of life expressed in the social opinion and enforced by the social conscience of a free people. By it our relations to one another are controlled; and since our relations flow from our position or station in the community – or rather, since the sum of the relations in which we stand constitute our position or station – we may say that it controls our position or station’ (Political Thought from Herbert Spencer to Today, pp. 61–2).
3 It is implied in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, and employed by Bradley in Ethical Studies (see the chapter on ‘My Station and its Duties’) and by Bosanquet in the Philosophical Theory of the State (pp. 205 sqq.).
4 Wilamowitz, Staat und Gesellschaft ah Griechen, p. 59.
1 Plato implies, throughout the Republic, that ideal Justice is opposed to the traditional usage of the Greek States. Here he is like the Radial Sophists; but while they identified ideal Justice with the ‘natural’ right of the stronger, he identified it with the supremacy of true or philosophic knowledge.