CHAPTER X

The Republic and its Theory of Communism

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COMMUNITY OF PROPERTY

Plato invents not only a new system of education, in virtue of which the State is reformed, and its government recast, in the name of justice and for the sake of spiritual betterment: he also invents a new social order, under which the governing class surrenders both family and private property, and embraces a system of communism. This, too, as we shall see, is done in the name of justice; and here again spiritual betterment is the ultimate aim. Because Plato was Plato, the reform of education, and thereby of government, was the centre and basis of his thought; and the new social order was only an outwork or bastion. But because his critics and commentators have been repelled or attracted by the novelty of that order, and because, in more modern times, it has been natural to emphasize the affinities between Plato’s communism and the tenets of socialism, attention has principally fastened on what Plato himself would have regarded as a subsidiary part of his scheme. Aristotle gave the cue, when, in the second book of the Politics, he directed his criticism entirely against the new social order, and when, in the course of that criticism, he urged that the way of reform lay rather in education than in sweeping material changes, thus accusing Plato, by implication, of having inverted the proper order of progress. If, however, we turn to Plato’s own exposition, and seek to apprehend the balance of his own convictions, we cannot for an instant doubt that communism is only a material and economic corollary of the spiritual reformation which, first and foremost, he sought to achieve. A really good education, he holds, furnishes the best safeguard of the State’s unity (416 B); ‘if our citizens are well educated … they will easily see their way through … other matters, such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women, and the procreation of children.’ In spite of Aristotle’s criticism, it cannot be doubted that it was primarily by spiritual means that Plato sought to regenerate man and society.1 The material institutions of a communistic system are consequential: they are simply meant to clear the ground, and to remove the hindrances in the way of the operation of those spiritual means. This is implied in the fundamental conceptions of the Republic. The State is a product of man’s mind: to reform the State, we must reform man’s mind. Justice is nothing external: it is a habit of mind; and true justice can be realized only when the mind acquires its true habit. On the other hand, the possibility of a permanent reform of men’s minds depends, to some extent, on the character of the social conditions in which they have to work: and the reign of justice, if it primarily depends on the presence of a habit of mind set towards the discharge of specific function, depends also, in some degree, on the absence of material conditions which are inimical to such concentration. It is no disloyalty to the spirit, after all, to recognize that material conditions exist, and can affect its life, for better or worse, according as they are favourable or unfavourable.¹

Plato believed that conditions were most favourable for the life of the spirit under a system of communism. In itself, the idea of communism – at any rate in respect of property – was by no means foreign to the Greek world. There is some reason for thinking that in the early days of the race, before the Greeks turned to agriculture, the land was held in common, and belonged, if not to the State, at any rate to the groups of tribe and clan. When, in the days of agriculture, the land came to be divided in private holdings, such division would be the work of the State. Each man would receive his lot (κλρος) and it seems like a reminiscence of such an allotment that in later days, when many have lost their lots, and a few have engrossed large holdings, there arises a demand for ‘redivision of the land’ (). In historical times, even in an individualistic and modern community such as Athens, the State still exercised a supervision over private property, and it still retained property of its own in forests and quarries and mines.2 In communities less advanced traces of communism long survived. In Sparta there was, indeed, a system of private property; but the produce of the lot of a Spartan citizen, which was tilled on his behalf by serfs, went to furnish the common tables (σνσσίτια) at which the citizens messed together.¹ Community of use was thus joined with private possession; and this also showed itself in other Spartan customs, such as the right of one citizen to take food from the house of another in the country, or to use another’s dogs and horses, and even slaves, as if they were his own.² In Crete, a Doric community like Sparta, the approach to communism went further: each of the communities of the island had public estates tilled by public serfs; and their revenue was appropriated to the furnishing of provisions for the dining-clubs (ἀνδρεα), and to the general expenses of government. It is in these Spartan and Cretan practices that we may trace the closest affinities to the system proposed by Plato in the Republic.³

Nor was communism unknown to the Greeks as a matter of theory, even before it was advocated by Plato. We need not ascribe the origin of a theory of communism to the Pythagoreans, into whose tenets a later generation read much that was Platonic; but within its own ranks, at any rate, the Pythagorean circle had professed the motto that ‘friends’ goods were common goods’, and Plato quotes that motto in the Republic. It is in Athens, and during the later fifth century, that communistic theories definitely appear. There was never, it is true, a socialistic party, or any serious socialistic propaganda, at Athens, partly because the genius of the Athenian community, in the age of Pericles, was definitely individualistic, and partly, it has been suggested, because of ‘the rooted dislike of the Greeks, and, chief among Greeks, of the Athenians, to discipline and organication’.4 But radical speculation, here as in other respects, ran far ahead of ordinary social opinion. The right of property in slaves was attacked; and it was an easy step to attack the right of property in general. One of the bases for such an attack may have been the growing tendency to idealize the ways and institutions of ‘nature peoples’, who were free from the ‘conventions’ of civilized life. This tendency, as we shall see, was one of the bases of the idea of community of wives; and it may also have served as a basis for the idea of community of property. The two ideas were closely connected: the premiss of both was the abolition of the family, and, with the family, its institutions – in the one case monogamy; in the other private property. This connexion may be traced, and the idea of community of property definitely appears, in the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes, which was produced some time before the year 390, and probably in the year 393, and to which there is good reason for believing that Plato alludes in the fifth book of the Republic.¹ Imagining women in control of affairs at Athens, and a scheme of community of wives in operation, Aristophanes suggests, as part of the scheme, a system of common property –

The silver, and land, and whatever beside

Each man shall possess, shall be common and free – 2

and he proceeds to indulge in a satire, after his manner, on the radical theories of his age, and especially on the ‘naturalism’ which would turn men into the likeness of savages or even of animals.

Plato’s own advocacy of communism of property is, however, far from being naturalistic. In dealing with community of wives he uses natural analogies; but the arguments he uses in advocating community of property are entirely ethical. We have seen that Plato begins the Republic with the idea of combating and destroying a false conception of the self as an isolated unit concerned with its own satisfaction. It is his aim to substitute a conception of the self as part of an order, and as finding its satisfaction in filling its place in that order.¹ This conception, we saw, is expressed under the name of Justice, and it means that each man should do one special work truly and thoroughly, and that no man should selfishly and aggressively trespass on the province of his neighbour. Now communism is to Plato the necessary result of this conception of justice. Two of the three classes of his ideal State – the rulers and the soldiers – if they are to do their work wisely, and to pursue it unselfishly, must live under a regime of communism. The parts or elements of the soul which they represent in the life of the State are reason and spirit. If they are to devote themselves to discharging the special duty of these elements, they must put aside that element of appetite, which not they, but the ‘farmers’ of the third class, represent; and they must therefore abnegate the economic side of life which is the outward expression of appetite.² A communistic life, in the sense of a life divested of the economic motive, is thus necessarily connected with, and necessarily issues from, the proper position in the State of the two higher elements of mind. Especially is it necessary as a condition of the rule of the philosophic nature, in which the element of reason is dominant. Without communism reason would either be dormant (while appetite was active in its place, and busied with acquisition), or, if it acted, it would be troubled in its action by appetite, which would tend to make it act for selfish ends. Not only is communism a necessary condition of the rule of reason, but reason issues in communism. Reason means unselfishness: it means that the man whom it animates abnegates mere self-satisfaction as his aim, and throws himself into the welfare of a larger whole. Through reason the philosophic ruler sees that he is an ‘organ’ of the State, and that he must put away the element of appetite, since what is required of him as an organ of the State is pure reason.

Such is the psychological basis of Platonic communism. But the basis which Plato himself emphasizes, even more than the psychological, is the practical and political. He believes communism of property to be necessary, for the simple reason that the union of political and economic power in the same hands is proved by universal experience to be fatal to political purity and political efficiency. The Guild Socialist of today teaches that, for the realization of democracy, economic power must precede and control political. Plato teaches that for the realization of aristocracy, in his sense of the term, economic power must be absolutely divorced from political. When he comes to analyse the successive corruptions of the ideal State, he traces them all to a single source – the union of the two powers; and he traces the growth of corruption to the growth of that union. Whenever such union is effected, two results follow: the holder of political power, intent on his economic interests, forgets the need of wisdom – forgets, too, the need of unselfishness, turning his political power to an economic advantage; and his subjects, despising his ignorance and resenting his selfishness, begin to murmur and to move until the State is split into two and ceases to be a community (417 A–B). It is from this practical consideration that Plato starts; and in this sense his communism, idealistic as it seems, is the most practical feature of his ideal State. But while it is practical, it is also philosophical; and while it is based on experience, it is also based on that theory of specific function which pervades the whole of the Republic. Men who have a function so exceptional as that of government must be exceptionally equipped: men who have a unique duty must submit to unique regulations. It is from this point of view that the parallel which has often been drawn between the communism of Plato’s guardians and the communism of the medieval monastery is obviously justified. Guardians and monks are alike vowed to a high calling: guardian and monk must alike be free from worldly interests and distractions. Indeed the doctrine of the medieval Church that secular and clerical function should be separate – the doctrine of Hildebrand – is fundamentally the same as Plato’s doctrine that political and economic power should be divorced.1

Connected as it is with elements which are peculiar to parts and classes of the State, and resting as it does on an aversion to the union of economic and political power, communism cannot be a matter of the whole State. It does not touch the third or economic class. A system which means the abnegation of appetite can scarcely affect the class which represents the element of appetite. A system, meant to deprive the governing classes of economic interests, can hardly affect those who do not belong to those classes. The third class retains private property; but it retains it under the strict supervision of the government. The government regulates trade and industry (less by law, than by its innate wisdom): true to the main principle of the Republic, it assigns to each member of the third class his special work, in order that, each man practising his own craft, and no man interfering with that of another, there may be no dissensions; and it prevents producers from becoming either too rich or too poor, since both riches and poverty corrupt and destroy the State. But this is a policy of State-control, and not of communism: it is a policy, which admits an individualistic management of economics, but regulates it by considerations of the welfare of the State.1

Plato’s system of socialism, therefore, is one which has nothing at all to do with the economic structure of society – which leaves an individualistic system of production still standing, and does not touch a single producer. It must indeed appear a strange socialism to any modern socialist; for it is a socialism in which, limited as are the divisors, the dividend is still less. If there are few who share in the system, there is also little in which they share. The guardians to whom the system applies are distinguished from the rest of the State by being partners in poverty. Property they have none. Neither individually nor collectively do they own a single acre: the land and its products are in the hands of the third estate of farmers. They have no houses: they live ‘encamped’ in common barracks, which are always open and public (415 E). This is a Spartan note, and the same note recurs when Plato proceeds to deprive his guardians, as Sparta deprived her citizens, of gold and silver. ‘The diviner metals are within them’ (416 E); ‘and they, alone of all the citizens, may not touch or handle silver or gold’ (417 A). Without land, without houses, without gold or silver, the guardians are to live on a salary paid in kind by the farming classes according to a regular assessment, a salary paid year by year, and consisting of such necessaries as will suffice for the year. These necessaries are not divided among the guardians for private consumption: they are to be consumed, on the Spartan plan, at common tables. Platonic socialism, it is obvious, is a way of asceticism; and here again it parts company with modern socialism. The modern socialist, whatever the ultimate importance he may attach to community of education and the spiritual emancipation of the working classes, starts primarily from the goods of this world, and, assuming their desirability, he advocates a juster division of those goods for the sake of a more general diffusion of the happiness which they can give. His scheme is positive; and if, like Plato, he appeals to the conception of ‘justice’, ‘justice’ does not mean to him, as it means to Plato, the duty of discharging an appointed function, but the right of receiving an adequate reward for the function discharged. Plato’s scheme is, in comparison, negative; and his conception of the goods of this world is that they are hindrances. More than once the question occurs in the Republic whether the guardians, who are placed under this system, are not being condemned to forfeiture of happiness (419–21; 466);1 and Plato, though he seeks to answer the question in the affirmative, is yet clear that the principle of happiness resides in the State as a whole; that it is the general welfare of the State that counts; and that, for the sake of that welfare, the guardians must be compelled or induced to do their work in the best way, even if, in order to do that work in that way, they must lose the things which most men most desire (421 B–C). In a word, it is good for a society that the best faculties of mind which it possesses should be developed, and that it should be guided and governed by those faculties; and if, for the sake of that social good, some men had better renounce any happiness (in the sense in which the world counts it), they must face the renunciation.

Platonic communism is ascetic; and just for that reason it is also aristocratic. It is the way of surrender; and it is a surrender imposed on the best, and only on the best. It exists for the sake of the whole society, but not for the whole society. It exists only for the governing classes. In that sense it is a political, and not an economic communism which Plato preaches. Its aim may be said to be the substitution of a trained and professional government, supported by a system of regular taxation, for an unprofessional and unpaid government supporting itself by corruption. One may even say that here is the Periclean system of pay (μισθός) for political work,1 safeguarded from abuse by being combined with the Spartan system of common tables, and reconciled with an attempt at professional specialization which Periclean Athens would have repudiated. While Plato thus pursues a political aim, which issues in something of an economic programme, modern socialists² are primarily concerned with an economic programme, on which their political aims are consequential. Their primary and economic object is the socialization of the means of production; their consequential and political aim is the control of such socialized property by a democratically organized State. They desire to rectify what they conceive to be the inequality and the injustice of the existing scheme of distribution, which is based on private capital, by nationalizing capital and transferring the control of distribution from the private capitalist to the State. They recognize that unless the State to which such transference is made is a democratic State, socialization and nationalization will be empty words. The whole community, therefore, must own the means of production: the whole community must control, through such ownership, the methods of distribution; and this is only possible in a democratic State, where the workers, who will be controlled by capital, will themselves control that capital, and where, in a new sense, Rousseau’s principle will be realized, that ‘each, giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody’. Platonic communism differs from modern socialism on all these points. There is no question in the Republic of the socialization of all the means of production. Plato is concerned only with the product; and even of that he would socialize only part – the part to be paid annually to the guardians by the members of the third class, who, so far as we may speak of capitalists, are the capitalists of his State. This is because his scheme of communism is secondary, and not, like that of the socialist, prior to his scheme of government, and because his scheme of government is not democracy, but an intellectual aristocracy. That aristocracy is compatible with a regime of private property among the working classes, provided some part of the produce of their capital is set apart for its maintenance; what it cannot tolerate, on pain of losing its efficiency, is the existence of private property, in any shape or form, among its own members.

Yet though we may thus seek to distinguish between the aims of the Republic and the aims of modern socialism, we must not forget that there is identity as well as difference. To realize that identity, we must turn our attention to another aspect of Plato’s communism. It is not only meant to prepare a broad highway for specialization of function; it is also meant to ensure the unity of the State. It is true that to secure the former of these aims is also, in a great degree, to secure the latter. If the upper classes are set apart to perform their special function, and freed from all hindrances to its performance, there will be no more of that competition for power and office, which destroys political unity and plunges States in sedition and civil war. But Plato believes that his scheme of communism will have a direct and positive influence in producing political unity. Under that scheme the guardians will have put away every selfish interest or tendency; and they will devote themselves with a single eye to the general interest (464 C–D). They will be naturally loved by those whom they rule, because they are saviours and helpers, not masters; and they will naturally love in turn the subjects to whom they owe their sustenance, because these are not slaves to be despised, but maintainers and foster-fathers to be cherished (463 A–B). Rulers and subjects will thus be knit together by a mutual regard based not only on difference of function, but also on mutual need and mutual gratitude. Different as his means may be, the ends of the modern socialist are fundamentally of the same character. To him, too, the goal is unity and solidarity: to him, too, the enemy to be destroyed is selfish competition. He would banish the unchecked competition of individual with individual for economic power, exactly as Plato sought to banish the unchecked competition of one selfish unit with another for political power: he would eliminate the doctrine of the economic man, exactly as Plato sought to eliminate the doctrine of the ‘superman’. Like Plato, he pursues an ideal of justice; and if his justice, at first sight, seems to mean a larger share of this world’s goods, ultimately it means, as it meant to Plato, an order of society in which each man does his appointed work for the sustentation of the whole, and all are knit together by mutual need and regard. He thus attempts to realize the conception of a social whole, of which all are members, and of a social interest, in securing which each man secures his own; and here his feet are on the ground which Plato trod before. In a word, the ideal of both is that of a society organized on the basis, not of differences in birth or in wealth, but of common social service.

And yet, as it stands, the communism of Plato remains what has been called a ‘half communism’.1 It is not an institution of the social whole. It affects less than half of the persons, and much less than half of the goods, of the society to which it belongs. Two difficulties suggest themselves, the one practical, the other theoretical. In the first place, how can a system of communism peculiar to one part of society be fused in practice with a system of private property peculiar to the rest? Plato, after denouncing the system of the ‘two States’ within the State, seems to recur to the same practice which he has denounced;² and after protesting against sedition, he creates a State whose structure invites division. If private property is the cause of dissension, why should it still be tolerated among the members of the third class? It will breed dissension in that class; and the guardians, deprived as they are of material means, may be unable to control the dissensions of a class which has the power derived from the possession of property. Nor is it easy to see how a spiritual hierarchy, destitute of property and devoid of the motives which accompany its possession, can understand or control the motives and actions of ordinary men. This brings us to the theoretical difficulty of Plato’s scheme. Is a system of half communism really the logical deduction from his own premisses, and would not a system of general communism, common to all the classes of the State, have satisfied those premisses better? The answer obviously depends on the exact nature of his premisses. He assumes that, because there are three elements in the human mind, there are three classes in the State corresponding to those three elements; and he further assumes that, because each of the elements of the mind should be limited to its appointed work, each of the three classes of the State should be limited to the operation of the element of mind to which it corresponds. In this way he arrives at a system of communism for the ruling and fighting classes, on the ground that it is necessary for the operation of the elements of reason and spirit which they represent, and a system of private property for the producing class, on the ground that it is consequential on the operation of the element of appetite represented by that class. If we accept these premisses, and if we thus postulate a three-class system in which each class represents a different element of mind, we can only arrive at the system of half communism at which Plato arrives. We shall only attain a system of general communism if we start from a different set of premisses. We may urge that if all of us, as individuals, have three elements of mind, all of us, as constituent members of society, have also three elements – though some of us may have more of one than we have of another; and we may further urge that if all of us have these three elements, all of us should be allowed to put them in operation, and to enjoy the conditions necessary for their operation. This would involve the result, on the one hand, that appetite should be operative among the guardians, who would therefore share in economic activity and shed the peculiar communism which bars them from such activity; and, on the other hand, that reason should be operative among the members of the producing class, who would therefore share in rational development, and also, if communism is a necessary condition of such development, in a system of general communism. If we argue in this way; if we assume that reason is general, and should operate generally; if we assume further that communism is necessary to the general operation of reason – because it is a necessary condition of that community of education without which there can be no such general operation – then we may deduce from our premisses the full communism which Plato fails to deduce from his. But we have attained this result only by altering the premisses of the argument. We have not interpreted Plato: we have rewritten him.

It is thus hardly necessary to explain why Plato failed to arrive at a system of general communism.1 The suggestion has been made that his failure was due to his immersion in practical considerations. He saw, it has been urged, an immediate practical hope in a scheme which placed the aristocratic class of the Greek city-state under a system of communism, and which set that class, thus safeguarded, and trained for its work by philosophy, to rescue politics from the degradation into which they had fallen. His hope was in the rich young rulers: he appealed ‘to the philosophic nobility of the Greek people’, as Luther originally appealed an den christlichen Adel Deutscher Nation. The nobles were already free from economic cares: why not extend that freedom further by a system of communism in which they should share? They had already been attracted by Socrates to the pursuit of knowledge: why should they not be attracted to the full study of mathematics and dialectic? It is true enough that Plato was no mere idealist, in the loose and inaccurate sense of that word: it is true enough that all that he advocated in the Republic was meant to be put into action, and into immediate action, in the quickest and most practicable way. But there is no need for any recourse to such considerations in order to explain why Plato stopped short of general communism. The simple fact is that such a system does not square with, and cannot be deduced from, his general principles. In spite of his emphasis on unity, to which he sacrifices, as we shall see, the difference of sex, he lays no less emphasis on difference and specialization, and for their sake he retains and accentuates the difference of class. He is convinced of the uniqueness of rational knowledge: he is convinced of the difference between the men who are capable of such knowledge and the rest of mankind; and holding communism to be the condition of their perfection, he associates communism with them – and with them alone.

COMMUNITY OF WIVES

Plato’s scheme not only embraces community of property; it also contemplates community of wives. Both seemed to Plato to follow logically upon the aim which he proposed to himself. He wished the rulers of his ideal State to be troubled neither by distractions from their work, nor by temptations to self-interest. He had deprived them of property, because the care of it was a distraction, and the desire for it was a temptation. But his aim was only half achieved with the abolition of property. The family postulates property for its maintenance: it is a distraction from the genuine work of a man’s life;1 it is a temptation to throw oneself into self-seeking, which seems almost something noble, when it is disguised under the garb of a father’s anxiety for the future of his children. The abolition of family life among the guardians is thus the corollary, and the inevitable corollary, of their renunciation of private property.²

The advocacy of community of wives occupies a much larger proportion of the argument of the Republic than the advocacy of community of property. The space devoted to the latter is slight. Plato does not regard community of goods as a paradox, and he does not trouble to defend it against possible criticisms. He feels, however, that what he has to say of the family is a paradox, and indeed, as we shall see, a double paradox; and he defends that paradox vigorously from criticisms such as had been levelled by Aristophanes in the Ecclesiazusae, a few years before, against similar ideas. For Plato’s scheme, which entails the participation of women in the education and the occupations of men, and the consequent abolition of the family in favour of a system of temporary and State-regulated marriage, was not without its precedents and its forerunners. In spite of Aristotle’s remark, that ‘no one else has introduced such novelties as community of women’,³ we may trace such ideas before the time of Plato. There was a natural basis for their germination in the practice of nature-peoples. Herodotus already records how ‘the Agathyrsians have their women in common, that they may be brothers to one another, and being all kinsmen, show no envy or hatred to one another’, and, again, how ‘the women of the Sauromatians go hunting on horseback with men … and go fighting, and wear the same dress as men’.¹ In Sparta women shared to some extent in the training of men: there was little family life; and wives might be lent by their husbands to produce children for the service of the State. At Athens, where the position of women was very different, there had been advocates even in the fifth century of a change in the relations between the sexes. Euripides had attacked ‘the subjugation of women’ in the Medea, and in a fragment of the Protesilaus he appears as an advocate of community of wives.² The Ecclesiasusae shows that such a scheme was current enough to be made an object of satire by Aristophanes, who was always quick to detect and attack the radical ideas of advanced circles at Athens. Finally, Socrates himself, if we may trust the account of Xenophon, had held that there was no difference in kind between the natural endowment of women and that of men, though women were inferior in strength and in judgement;³ and like Plato after him (and indeed like the Greeks in general) he had regarded marriage not as a consortium vitae, but as a means for the production of children and the breeding of a good stock.⁴

We have indeed to remember that the general Greek view of the relations of the sexes was in many ways different from modern views. The public life of the Greek streets and places of assembly was a masculine life. Men met men in the market-place and assembly and gymnasia: ‘the Greek city was for most purposes a men’s club’. The women sat in their women’s quarter at home and spun and bore children. They were married early, about the age of fifteen; and when they married they passed from the seclusion of the women’s quarter in one house to the seclusion of that in another. They saw few men besides their husbands: the social gatherings of the Greeks were as masculine as the rest of their lives. Marriage was regarded as a means, and a wife as an instrument, for the procreation of lawful issue for the service of the State. Family life thus meant less to the Greek than it does to us:1 he lived in the open, as a ‘political being’, while women, except at Sparta, were condemned to something of an Oriental seclusion, and taught to think that they should be neither seen nor heard. All these are conceptions which Plato partly inherits and partly combats. He inherits the conception of marriage as a union of the sexes for the purpose of begetting children: he sees in marriage nothing of a sacrament, nothing of a spiritual communion of husband and wife, nothing of a creation of an inner and sacred society of the family. On the other hand he combats general Greek practice of condemning women to seclusion and solitude, and he desires that they should be brought into the open life of the State, and into a full participation in all its rights and duties.

Starting from the latter point of view, we may say that Plato had set his face against the private household, with its secluded women, with its hoarded property, and all its narrow life, as something inimical to the unity of the State and the free development of all its members. We have already seen that, contrary to Athenian practice, he sought to remove education from the control of the family, and to give it into the hands of the State. We have now to see how, in order to perfect the unity of the State, by making the State itself, as far as the guardians are concerned, the one and only family, and in order to strengthen the State by setting free the best of its men and its women – but especially of its women – from the household drudgery that diverts them from its service, he seeks to remove the family itself from the life of his guardians. To Plato the home, which is so precious to us, was only a stumbling-block. ‘Every Englishman’s house is his castle,’ we say. ‘Pull down the walls,’ Plato would reply: ‘they shelter at best a narrow family affection: they harbour at the worst selfish instincts and stunted capacities. Pull down the walls, and let the free air of a common life blow over the place where they have been.’ Thus the home is condemned as a centre of exclusiveness, where selfish instincts flourish; and Plato bids us see ‘each man dragging any acquisition which he has made into a separate house of his own, where he has a separate wife and children and private pleasures and pains’ (464 C–D). It is condemned again as a place of wasted talents and dwarfed powers, where the mind of the wife is wasted on the service of tables (460 D), and ‘little meannesses’ abound, ‘such, for example, as the flattery of the rich by the poor, and all the pains and pangs which men experience in bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy necessaries for their household’ (465 B–C). In a word, Plato sees in the family on the one hand a root of selfishness, which may grow into family feuds and civic sedition, and on the other hand a drag on development, which prevents men and women from being what they might be and discharging the function which they might discharge, and therefore (since justice consists in discharge of function) prevents them from being ‘just’ themselves or making ‘just’ the State in which they live. The day of its abolition will be the day of the inauguration of unity (the greatest of all good things) for the State, of liberty for the individual, and of justice for both. In a sense, however, it is a mistake to speak of the abolition of the family as Plato’s goal. It is really the reformation and transformation of the family that he desires. If, in one sense, he may be said to seek to banish the family from the State, in another and deeper sense he may be said to wish to import the family into the State. Returning as it were to the old days of the tribal State, in which citizenship meant kinship, he would make the State – or rather the rulers of the State1 – a family, and the family a State; and by fusing the two together he would abolish neither of the two, but rather the antithesis of the antagonism by which they tended to be divided.

There are two sections, or ‘waves’, in Plato’s argument, the one concerned with the emancipation of women, the other with the reform of marriage. It is in the name of the emancipation of women that he first (451 C–456 B) approaches the problem of family life. The seclusion of women in the household, he felt, meant not only that the development of women was stunted, but also that the State lost the service of half of its members. While men had pursued an ideal of versatility, and needed to be limited and specialized, women had been allowed no single function (except that of child-bearing and child-rearing), and they ought to be granted the right of discharging all for which they were naturally fit. In judging of their natural aptitudes Plato is first of all guided by an analogy drawn from the animal world. In an earlier passage he had compared the guardians to watch-dogs; and he now (451 C) suggests that, after all, dogs of either sex can do the work of watching, with the one difference that the female is somewhat weaker than the male. The capacity of either is the same in kind as that of the other: the training given to both is consequently identical; and thus, if we consent to be guided by this analogy, we shall acknowledge that men and women have the same capacity and need the same training. The difficulty of analogies for human life drawn from the animal world is, however, that the two are not in pari materia; and if we seek to fashion the moral world of man according to the non-moral world of animals, we may fall into the vein of Strepsiades (supra, p. 83), or like Callicles in the Gorgius (and like some of the modern perverters of Darwin’s theory of natural selection) we may seek to identify right with physical might. But Plato does not merely argue from the analogy of brute creation: he seeks to prove his point by an analysis of human nature. He denies that there is any difference in kind between man and woman: if woman differs from man in sexual function, that is all, and she is in all other functions of life a weaker man, possessed of the same capacities but not of the same strength. It is absurd, he argues, to make a distinction in one function the ground for a distinction in all. There is no difference in the nature of women which affects their participation in political life (455 A–B). All women, indeed, have an inferior capacity to that of men, in politics as elsewhere: many women, like many men, have no capacity at all for the political functions of the guardian; but there are some women who, in their inferior degree, have a capacity for discharging the same function of guardianship which some men possess, and these must be trained and must serve as guardians in common with the men who are similarly qualified. Othenvise the principle of justice will be defeated, and there will be elements in the State which are not discharging the proper function for which they are qualified by their nature. Plato, we may perceive, is a teacher not so much of woman’s rights as of woman’s duties; and if he aims at emancipating women from the bondage of the household, it is only in order to subject them again to the service of the community at large. It is for raison d’état that he desires the emancipation of women; if women are trained to perform the lighter labours of guardianship, the service of the State will gain new instruments and will thus be discharged more efficiently. Yet such service is after all true freedom: in it woman stands by man’s side as his yoke-fellow in the fulness of his life, and by it she attains the fulness of her own.

But how is this scheme, which devotes woman to the service of the State, to be reconciled with the physical necessity of continuing the species? How can marriage, and the bearing and rearing of children, among the class of the guardians, be dovetailed into a plan which subtracts the woman from the life of the family? Let us suppose for a moment that monogamy were still to be practised. The men-guardians, living in common and open barracks, have no place to which they can bring a wife: the women-guardians, living the same life and in the same way, can make no home for a husband. Under such conditions monogamy could only mean that the husband saw his wife occasionally1 (perhaps in his barracks, perhaps in hers), and that neither could attend to their children, absorbed as both were by the State. But monogamy under such conditions, where the husband loses the society of his wife, and both lose the care of their children, loses its raison d’être. Plato therefore turns to a system of communism, under which the wives and children of the guardians are to be common (457 C–466 D). He had two reasons for preferring that system. There was first of all a physical reason. The analogy of the animal world suggests, that if you desire to have a good stud of horses, you must put a good sire to as many good dams, and a good dam to as many good sires, as you possibly can. To produce a good stock of citizens, the State must act on the same principle: it must supersede monogamy at will by communism under supervision. The men and women-guardians, living together in common barracks, and discharging their duties in common, will naturally have intercourse with one another; but that intercourse must be regulated, and regulated with a view to the greatest benefit of the State. Marriage must accord with the canon of utility; and if it does so, it will be consecrated by such accordance (458 E). In any matter of the continuation of a species, the greatest utility is gained when the fittest stock is bred from the fittest and ripest parents. This is true of horses, of hunting-dogs, of game-birds: it is no less true of men. The best among the men and women-guardians must therefore be united, at the proper age and at stated seasons, in temporary marriages; and the offspring of such marriages, and of such marriages only, must be reared by the State. Here there is no promiscuity: there is the very opposite of promiscuity. Plato dreams of solemn and State-controlled nuptials, directed to eugenic ends; and far from abolishing, he seeks to consecrate marriage, by making it serve the consecrating final cause, from which alone comes every good and consecrated state – the greatest good of the community.

This is the first and physical reason for the reform of marriage suggested by Plato; and this is the first and eugenic part of his scheme of reform. But he has also moral reasons for the reform which he suggests; and these moral reasons are connected with the second part of his scheme. At each season of solemn nuptials, he proceeds to suggest, a number of marriages, sufficient to maintain the fixed and unalterable number of the guardians, will be celebrated; and when the children of these unions are afterwards born, they will be taken at once from their mothers to public crèches, and the parentage of such children will be hidden for all future time. The mother will have nothing to do with the rearing of her child: the mother will never know her own child; but all the parents married at a given season will be taught to think that all the children born in due time after that season are their common children, and all the children so born will be taught to think that they are brothers and sisters of one another. Such a system will once more satisfy the canon of utility, and it will satisfy it in a still deeper sense than the arrangements for the breeding of the best stock. There is no greater good for the State than the bond of unity (462 B).1 What is most useful for the State, and makes for the greatest well-being of the State, is that its members should feel themselves one body, and should approach as nearly as possible to the unity of an individual (462 C–D), owning the same things, loving the same persons, and using the words ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ of the same objects. Plato’s State is already one in the relation of its guardians to their subjects, which is a harmony of protectors and nurturers: it is already one in the relation of its guardians to one another, which is based on identity of training and community of goods: it will be finally one, as far as the guardians are concerned, if they are one family, in which all are related (or rather think themselves related) through a system which substitutes the idea of common for that of private parentage. Moreover, such a system of common parentage will also produce unity in the further sense of harmony and consistency in all the arrangements and institutions of the State. It will be the proper complement, in the first place, of the system of common property. You cannot combine common property with private families; for the private family is the incentive to the acquisition of private property, and as long as it remains the instinct of acquisition will be active. Again, it will accord with that abolition of laws and litigation which Plato desired to make one of the essential features of his State. It will mean a living spirit of family ethics in place of a dead system of legal rules; and men will freely do their duty by their neighbours from personal sentiments of kinship and affection instead of under legal compulsion (464 D–E). Sedition will never haunt a State whose rulers are a single family; and happiness will dwell in a community whose members are at once rid of the material cares and worries of the household, and knit to one another by the happy bonds of affection and instinctive sympathy.1 The new city which Plato’s imaginarion has compacted will be the ‘home’ of its rulers, who know no other: it will be their ‘fatherland’ not only in word but in deed, and the ardour of fraternal affection will reinforce the feeling of a common citizenship.

The eugenic element in Plato’s scheme for the reform of marriage is less important in his eyes than the elements which make for the unity of the State; but it is an element which possesses considerable interest. The eugenic doctrine of the heritability of desirable qualities is one which already appears in the elegiac verse of Theognis:² ‘we look for rams and asses and horses of good stock, and men believe that good will come from good.’ In a later age Socrates is depicted by Xenophon as occupied by the problem of heredity, and seeking to explain why good parents do not always produce good children. Good stock, he argues, is not the whole of the matter: the parents must also be both in their prime.1 In the Republic Plato faces the problem in a scientific spirit, using the analogy of animals, with especial reference to breeding studs of horses (459 E–460 E), in much the same way as a modern biologist. Believing, like Socrates, that offspring should be bred from the best stock when it is in its prime, he fixes the period of reproduction for men between the age of twenty-five and fifty-five, and for women between the age of twenty and forty; and he lays it down that if intercourse takes place outside those periods, the offspring should not see the light, or, if it does, should be put to death. Unlike the modern eugenist, who seldom advocates legislation, and generally disbelieves in the arrangement of marriages at Westminster, Plato trusts entirely to the action of the State, and is prepared to regulate marriage equally with art and poetry. One of the principles of his regulation may remind us of Malthus. He is averse to any increase of the population, not, as was Malthus, for economic reasons, or in order to stop population from outrunning subsistence, but for political reasons, and in order to maintain the political stability of his State. Like modern biologists, he believes that ‘it is not the maximum number, but the optimum number … that it should be the endeavour of social organization to secure’.² With this object he seeks to regulate the number of marriages; with this object he advocates a system of checks. He deprecates, for instance, the prolongation by medical skill of the life of chronic invalids: he advocates the procuring of abortion when intercourse has taken place outside the prescribed limits of age; and in certain cases he advocates infanticide.³ On the whole, however, it may be said that Plato, interested though he is in the problems of birth, is much more concerned with the problems of education. Writers on eugenics distinguish between nature and nurture, and they emphasize the primary importance of the former. Plato believes, first and foremost, in nurture, and his emphasis is laid on the profound effects of the education of youth in a right environment. His scheme for the reform of marriage, equally with his scheme for communism of property, is secondary to his scheme of education.⁴

If we take Plato’s scheme for the reform of marriage as a whole we can see that it has many facets and many purposes. It is a scheme of eugenics: it is a scheme for the emancipation of women: it is a scheme for the nationalization of the family. It is meant to secure a better stock; greater freedom for women – and for men – to develop their highest capacities; a more complete and living solidarity of the State, or, at any rate, of the rulers of the State. It is easy to agree with the aims which Plato proposes to himself, but it is somewhat difficult to accept the means; and here, as elsewhere, one may agree with Plato’s principles, and yet reject their application. Many may sympathize with his scheme for the emancipation of women; and yet the fundamental argument which underlies that scheme raises doubts. After all, the difference between men and women is not only that the one begets and the other bears children; or at any rate, if it is the basic difference, it produces a number of other differences which cut deep. The fact of her sex is not one isolated thing in a woman’s nature, in which, and in which alone, she differs from man: it colours her whole being. She is by nature the centre of the life of the family; and one can only abrogate that fact at the cost of the death of the family – a price which Plato is prepared to pay. She has by nature a specific function of her own, which she will always refuse to delegate to a crèche; and the long period of growth and the need of nurture of her children (which finds no parallel in the children of ‘the other animals’) will always make the discharge of this function the work of a lifetime.1 The unmarried woman may enter into the open field of the world’s activities: the married woman has her life’s work ready to her hand; and it is surely the true policy of the State not to abolish maternity, but to recognize it as a function and a contribution to the community, wherein and whereby the mother, taking her station in the common life, and doing the thing which pertains to her station (τὸ αὑτς), attains to Justice.1

Much the same may be said of Plato’s scheme of temporary and State-controlled marriages. The relation of husband and wife, like the relation of mother and child, is really the matter of a lifetime. It is impossible that men and women should come together merely for sexual intercourse, and instantly depart. They may meet primarily for that purpose, but ultimately, as Aristotle taught, they meet for a life’s ‘friendship’: they are united by a permanent interest in a common welfare; and in the friendship, or permanent spiritual union, of true marriage lies one of the greatest influences towards a good life. Not only, however, does Plato make an unreal abstraction for the sexual motive, when he contemplates the regulation of that motive by the State for the sake of producing a better stock; he also makes of the individual a mere means, and that in respect of a side of life on which the individual most naturally claims to be an end to himself. He denies a fundamental right to personality, in a field where the sense of personality is most vivid, and where the whole man, body and soul, reason and feeling, ‘all thoughts, all passions, all delights, whatever feeds this mortal flame’, cry for their satisfaction.² This, however, is a matter of less moment; and the fundamental criticism of Plato must turn on his refusal to do justice to the real nature of the marriage tie, which finds a much more sympathetic treatment in the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, or to admit the moral value and necessity of the family. He abolishes an established institution for the sake of a problematic good; and in the name of unity he destroys a school of morals, in which duty is learned the more easily because it is tinged with affection and coloured by personal feeling. But it is characteristic of Plato, as we shall see, that in his zeal for the State he frowns on associations; and it is perhaps a general criticism of his political theory that it does not sufficiently reconcile unity with difference.

THE GENERAL THEORY OF COMMUNISM IN THE REPUBLIC

Under the whole scheme of communism, whether in respect of property or in respect of marriage, there lies the assumption, that much can be done to abolish spiritual evils by the abolition of those material conditions in connexion with which they are found. Spiritual ‘dieting’, it must always be remembered, is the first and primary cure in Plato’s therapeutics; but a ruthless surgery of material things is also one of his means. Because material conditions are concomitant with spiritual evils, they seem to him largely their cause; and since to abolish the cause is to abolish the effect, he sets himself to a thorough reform of the material conditions of life. By compelling men to live under absolutely different conditions in the material and external organization of their lives, he hopes to produce a totally different spirit and an utterly different attitude of mind. The gist of Aristotle’s criticism of this conception is simple: spiritual medicines are what is needed for spiritual diseases. Educate a man to the truth, and by the truth that is in him he will connect the very same material conditions, which were before connected with evil, with everything that is good. Material conditions are concomitants, and not causes; occasions, but not active forces. It is idle to tinker with occasions. It is more than idle: it is corrupting and enfeebling. To free men from drudgery is not necessarily to make them live the free life of the spirit; and one may doubt whether the drudgery in which the lives of nearly all of us are cast is not as much of a moral training as it is of a material necessity, and whether its disappearance would not involve the ‘life of swine’ rather than that of ‘Olympic victors’, as Plato prefers to think.

There is something medieval in Plato – something of an ascetic dread of the world and its temptations. He does not indeed fly from the world to the cloister: he loves the ‘city of Cecrops’ too much to leave it altogether for any city laid up in the heavens; and he would rather shatter and remould its scheme of things nearer to his heart’s desire. Yet there is in him a temper of impatience with our human world, as there is in Aristotle something of the spirit which would strive to interpret things as they are at their best, and cheerfully accept what life can offer, believing

There is some soul of goodness in things evil
Would men observingly distil it out.

Thus Aristotle can vindicate private property, in spite of its temptations, as a basis of personality and an instrument of moral action; and so again he can justify the family, whatever its limitations, as a school of conduct and a preparation for the State. It is easy to accuse Plato of seeking to effect a spiritual result by material means, and to urge that in attempting to remove the occasions of vice he removes the occasions of virtue. Yet Plato’s side of the matter is one side, and Plato’s view contains one half of the truth. It were a grave error, after all, to think mind independent of its material environment, or to hold the unqualified view that ‘in social reform character is the condition of conditions’. Shakespeare can speak of the soul of goodness in things evil, but he also speaks of the nature which is

subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

It is often only a ‘conservative opiate’ to think that things need no change, and that it is the attitude of our minds to things which is at fault. The external things of life exist in the consciousness, and they have no existence for man except in so far as they are in his consciousness. If they are in his consciousness, they are part of the self, and self-determination means determination by a self of which they are part. Self-consciousness cannot exist apart from its content; and if the content includes external things which are evil, the determining self will determine itself accordingly. We have to remember, if we are to do justice to Plato, the real truth contained in his theory that the mind assimilates itself to its surroundings, becoming lovely when it lives among things which are lovely, and ugly when it lives among things which are ugly. While we may speak of the mind as distilling goodness out of evil things, we must not forget the opposite truth, which Plato so keenly felt, that evil things instil their own evil into the mind. It may be that he exaggerated the effect of environment; we must beware of minimizing its influence. Social conditions affect character; and there are still forms of private property, and features of family life, which warp or stunt the mind. Our criticism of Plato, if we venture criticism, should be less that he believed in the evil effect of evil environment, than that he believed some things to be evil which are not in their nature evil. The elements in the Republic which offend us spring, after all, from the sensitiveness of a generous soul, too much oppressed by evils – the canker of property; the blight of family selfishness – which were indeed real evils, but were not, all the same, the essence of the institutions they disfigured.1

It is obvious that Plato’s attitude involved a certain element of reaction. Institutions, he believes, are a product of mind; yet he rejects many of the institutions of civilized life. This may well seem inconsistent; and the question naturally occurs, why the products of mind should be rejected by a thinker, who believes that they are the products of mind, and can only reject them on the strength of the conceptions of his own intelligence. It is a question which a wise reformer must always ask himself; nor can it but dismay him to reflect that he is opposing the conceptions of his mind to institutions, which have been created, maintained, and approved by the minds of many generations. But he may meet one question with another. Were these institutions the products of right mind, of mind acting in view of a true end and by appropriate means? Error may become inveterate as well as truth; and it has often been seen that the suggestions of some powerful intelligence, when backed by the influence of a strong will and an attractive personality, may enter into the life of a whole people without real examination or discussion. The historian sees that they have entered and established themselves: he readily believes in their sanctity; and he accuses those who aim at their destruction of the want of a proper historical sense, and of forgetting that ‘the roots of the present lie deep in the past’. None the less the philosopher has the right to inquire why they came, and to ask by what title they exist and what element of mind they express; and if he is dissatisfied with the answer which he receives, he has every right to suggest what should have come instead, what has a real title to exist, and what element of mind ought to be expressed. But history deserves some respect, and Plato pays it little. He rejects many of its developments as mistaken, and he substitutes in their place his own ideas of what ought to be. Aristotle’s criticism is shrewd and dry. ‘We must not forget that we ought to attend to the length of past time and the witness of bygone years, wherein it would not have escaped men’s notice, if these things had been right and proper.’1 But, to tell the truth, Plato’s ideas of ‘what ought to be’ are not always so much the undiscovered novelties of latter days, as the remembered antiquities of an early past. We have spoken of an element of reaction: we might almost have spoken of an element of atavism. The ‘luxurious’ State is in Plato’s eyes suffering from a ‘fever’: it needs a letting of blood and a purification. It must be brought back to simplicity, by which Plato means that the superfluous elements, which are not conformable to the spirit of justice must be excised in order that the whole may attain to such conformity. Back to simplicity it is accordingly brought, but the simplicity which is gained proves in the issue to be another simplicity – that of the primitive; and Plato thus seems to find the path of progress in the way of retrogression. It is a case of a true principle twisting round, as it were, in its author’s hands, when it comes to be applied; and one begins to wonder if it was not more in earnest than in irony that Socrates found in the primitive ‘city of Swine’ the true and healthy type. Again and again this tendency appears. Music is confined to the simple and direct expression of simple moods by means of simple instruments: the element of reflection and of complexity vanishes, and the pibroch1 supersedes the sonata. In Plato’s theory of medicine the primitive element is clear; and when one reads of the duty of the physician to leave those who are chronically sick to perish, one is reminded of the savage who helps the aged to die by exposing them to starvation.² In the system of communism suggested by Plato, it is impossible not to detect primitive elements once more. It has already been suggested that the study of anthropology was not unknown at Athens in the fifth century; and we have seen reason to believe that radical thinkers had sometimes professed to find suggestions for a reconstruction of society in those ‘nature-peoples’ who represented to a modern age the picture of what Greece itself had been of old. Similarly, it would seem that Plato was tempted to reconstitute Greece by rejuvenating its infancy. At the bottom of the communism of the Republic there is perhaps not only something of the ‘common tables’ of Sparta, not only something of the Spartan customs of marriage,³ but also some knowledge of the supposed community of wives among early peoples, and some inkling of the community of property which appears to characterize the village community. Even in Plato’s conception of the unity of his ideal State there is latent an element of reaction: it is a tribe, or stem-state, knit together by the bond of blood. It seems easy to accuse Plato of an anachronism, or rather of an inversion of history, and to argue that he begins by assigning the unity of the State to the sense of economic interest, which is its final and conscious bond, and ends by making that unity depend on the sentimental tie of kinship, which is its first rude and unconscious form. And while such an argument would be in so far mistaken, as Plato begins logically, and not historically, with the economic motive, the accusation would at any rate have this truth, that the return to the tribe does suggest a failure of historical perspective.

The scheme of communism proposed by Plato raises a number of ultimate questions. Is it consistent with human freedom and individuality, or does it destroy such individuality? Is the system of philosophic absolutism, on which it rests, compatible with a system of individual rights? Does not Plato sacrifice liberty to fraternity by what Aristotle calls his excessive unification of the State, and equality to efficiency by the institution of his philosopher-kings? It is certainly Plato’s aim to destroy mere individualism, to abolish individual ‘rights’ as construed in the proposition ‘might is right’, and to deny liberty in the sense of ‘doing as one likes’. But on the other hand, it is as certainly his aim not only to guarantee but to develop individuality, in the true sense of the word, and with it the rights and the freedom it requires. The individual is in reality, as we have seen, part of a scheme and member of a whole. Such a conception of the individual is implied in a teleological conception of the world. Because the whole world is a co-ordinated whole, a single scheme and not a mass of units, the individual cannot stand by himself, but only in his place in the whole, and as playing his part in some scheme within that whole. Upon this conception, freedom will mean liberty to play that part freely: the rights of the individual will be those conditions which are necessary to playing that part and must be guaranteed to the individual if he is to play it properly. Freedom in that sense, and conditions of this kind, Plato certainly tries to secure. The whole system of communism is meant to set the individual free from everything which prevents him from taking his right place in the scheme of the State: it is designed to secure those conditions – in other words, to guarantee those ‘rights’ – which are necessary to the positive discharge of his function in that scheme. But, it may be rejoined, this teleological conception cuts the individual short, and limits him to being and acting merely in the single aspect of a part. On the contrary, we may answer, far from cutting short, it broadens and expands. The self is as wide as its interests; and the individual is narrowest when he stands by himself, with no interests outside himself, and widest when he exists and acts as a part, identifying himself with the interests of the whole body of which he is a part. The wider the whole of which the individual can act as a part, the greater the sum of interests that he has, the greater is his individuality. The motto of life may be said to be ‘Live in as wide a fellowship as you may, and have fellowship in as many interests as you can’.1

Liberty then need not be sacrificed to gain fraternity: on the contrary, through fraternity man comes by the fullest and therefore freest use of his powers. No rights are destroyed when the individual is treated as part of a community: rights belong to the individual as a member of a community, and are the conditions of his action as a member, secured to him by the community. The teleological conception is ‘the foundation for all true theory of rights’,² because it involves this conception of the individual as a member of the community, acting for its end, and guaranteed the conditions of such action. That no sacrifice of the individual, or of liberty, or of rights, was involved by his philosophy Plato felt sure; and he argued the point under the rubric of happiness. He urged that his guardians were happy, or enjoyed the sense of free and full play of their individuality which the Greek termed εὐδαιμονία, by acting in their appointed place in the State.³ ‘In a proper State’, he tells us, ‘the individual will himself expand, and he will secure the common interest along with his own’ (497 A). Where, then, is the flaw of Plato’s communism, so far as the liberty of the individual is concerned? Granted that Plato has a true conception of the meaning of individuality, and a true conception of rights (as the conditions of the free activity of the individual considered as a member of society), is there not some error in his reasoning? He starts from right principles: may there not be, here as elsewhere, defects in their application? There would appear to be two. In the first place, while it is true that the self should grow and spread forth its branches, it is also true that it must have a root. A wide extension of interests may be desirable; but such an extension is of little avail, unless it has its basis in a strong personality and the conscious sense of an individual self (ϕιλαυτία). Unless we premise such a sense of self, that which identifies itself with a wide range of interests is nothing; and the result is nothing. It is the error of Plato that he forgot the basis, in contemplating the superstructure – that in aiming at the extension of the self, he forgot that it must have a previous intensity.1 Too often it is true that it is an ineffective, unindividual type of mind which identifies itself with a wide range of interests; and a strong sense of personality, though combined with a narrow range, will go further and do more for the world than any watery altruism (). The diffusion of the one type has to be reconciled with the concentration of the other; and we must first know ourselves as separate individuals, in order to transcend such knowledge, and to know ourselves as part of a wider order and as serving a wider purpose. It is exactly this power of knowing ourselves as separate individuals which Plato really destroys, when he abolishes property and the family; for they are necessary bases of any conscious sense of an individual self.

It is thus one flaw of Plato’s communism, that by abolishing the basis of any sense of self, it takes away the possibility of the true sense of self which he inculcates. It does deny to the individual a right – a necessary condition, that is to say, of his thinking and acting as a member of society and expressing a social will; for it denies him that which is a necessary condition of his thinking and acting at all and of expressing any will. The other flaw which may be traced in Plato’s reasoning is his demand that the individual shall identify himself with no lower scheme or order than that of the State. Such a postulate is too high for man. Every individual does and must identify himself with a lower scheme and a narrower order – that of the family. It is true that the State is a fellowship (κοινωνία), ‘and each one of us part of it’; but it is also true that it is a fellowship of fellowships (κοινωνία κονιωνίων), and each one of us part of these – which is the great lesson that Aristotle teaches. It is true again that the State is a product of mind – that it is mind concrete in an external organization; but it is not true that the unity of the State is the same as the unity of a single mind, or that mind must be concrete in a single organization, the ‘Republic one and indivisible’.

The meaning and the bearing of the line of criticism here indicated may be realized more clearly if we place ourselves at a point of view suggested by Plato himself, and regard the State as an organism – that is to say, as a whole of which the parts are organs for the attainment of a single end.1 Of such a whole, the human body, whose members are all organs for the purpose of life, had generally been taken as a type. The application of the category of organism to the State is necessary and valuable. It is necessary, because it gives a true idea of the kind of unity which exists in the State: it is valuable, because it is an antidote to false ideas of the unity of the State as legal in its essence and contractual in its form. Modern political thought has borrowed from biology an organic conception of the State, which it has opposed to the legal conception of a contract entertained by thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, exactly as Plato drew from his teleology a similar conception, and opposed it to the ‘conventional’ view of the Sophists. The emphasis which is now laid, as it was also laid by Plato, upon the organic character of the State is just and salutary. A contractual conception degrades the State into a business partnership (societas), whose members are linked by a purely voluntary tie of self-interest. They have put as it were their money into a concern which they have called the State, because they thought that it would pay; and if they find that it fails to pay – as the Sophists argued that it failed to pay the ‘strong’ man – they can and will withdraw from the concern.¹ The organic view, on the contrary, substitutes a vital for a voluntary tie. It teaches that the unity of the State is not one made by hands, and by hands to be broken, but an inevitable outcome of human nature and human needs. It teaches that the State can no more be left by its members, than the body by its limbs, and that its dissolution is as much the death of its members, as it is of itself. While in this way it attaches the individual to the State, as the outcome of his nature and the essence of his being, in the same process it also links individual to individual and citizen to citizen. Members of one whole, the citizens are members one of another: as every limb seems to ache when one limb is pained, so the poverty and degradation of one class must impoverish the life of the rest;² and the education and assistance of the weaker members is thus inculcated upon the stronger as the very condition of their own welfare. The conception of a common weal and a vital union supersedes that of self-interest and a casual nexus.

The conception of a common weal is very present to Plato: the quality which he postulates in his guardians is a vivid sense of its existence. Unity is very vital in his eyes: ‘there is no greater good than whatsoever binds the State together into one’ (462 B). But he may be accused of having pushed the organic conception too far, and of having attempted ‘to unify the State to excess’ (λίαν ἑνον). A true organic theory of the State must recognize that, while the category of organism is one which partly covers the State, and, indeed, covers it better than any other category, it does not cover it entirely.3 In the first place, the State, if it is an organism, is one whose parts possess will, and with that will the demand for its expression, and with that demand a claim to private property, as a necessary subject upon and through which expression can take place. In the second place, the State is an organism whose parts are also members of other organisms. They are members for instance of the family, and the family is an organism whose end may be subsidiary but cannot be sacrificed to that of the State. Any organism which satisfies a vital necessity of human nature, like the family, must be indestructible, however detrimental to the organic unity of the State it may at first sight appear. But the zeal of the State had come upon Plato, and had come as a fire to consume whatever was not of the State.1 A fire will not stop at exceptions; and these exceptions to the organic unity of the State he could not brook. Nor is this attitude of mind peculiar to Plato or to theory: it has, at different periods of the world’s history, played a great part in the actual life of mankind. The conception of the State as the sole organism, to whose majesty all other organisms must be sacrificed, is characteristic of the sixteenth century, and of much of the French Revolution. It may seem eccentric to speak of the Reformation as Platonic; but in one of its aspects the Reformation was part of a general movement for State centralization, which made for the destruction or utter subjection of all organizations other than that of the State. It is a movement which is expressed in Luther, as well as in Machiavelli, who are both its apostles.² In part that movement attacked the organization of the Church, seeking to revenge itself upon the Middle Ages, which had made the State ancilla, by constituting the State caput: in part it swept away old medieval associations of shire and hundred, as in England, and superseded them by the nominees of the State. Again in the French Revolution the same influence of a movement towards centralization is seen. The Revolution of 1789 annihilated the incapable despotism of the ancien regime only to instal the crushing tyranny of the Republic; and the Church, which the monarchy had always attempted to bring into subjection under the name of ‘Gallican liberties’, was by ‘the Republic one and indivisible’ swept into destruction. The argument employed in favour of disendowment is significant: the Church was a corporation, which in virtue of its revenues was dangerous to the unity of the State.1

Here we touch a vital problem – that of the relation of the State to associations. Of late years that problem has been much in men’s minds, and under the influence of Gierke much has been said of the real personality, the spontaneous origin and growth, and the ‘inherent’ rights of groups.² It may be germane to the argument, and to the understanding of Plato, to indicate the place which associations actually held in the law and practice of the Greek world. There were associations within the normal Greek city, such as phratries and tribes, whose members were united by a common cult and owned land and other property in common.

‘Each of these communities is a living being, which lasts as long as the feeling of community animates its members. The State itself is only the widest and most embracing of such communities: it would destroy its own raison d’être if it did not maintain and protect the others which stand beside and under it. The individual citizen feels himself a member of many circles, some narrower, some broader…. The living element which resides in each community precipitates itself for the Greeks in a god, or, more exactly, it is felt, because it is alive, to be divine, and thus to be personal, and it is finally called a person.’³

Thus the Greeks, if they did not attain any clear idea of a corporation as a juristic person, nevertheless regarded a group as being, in and through its god, a person, in much the same way as a medieval monastery realized its identity in and through its saint. And so the old phratries and tribes of Athens, though they lost their character of kin-groups, none the less persisted, because they were persons, or because their god was a person, and they could not be destroyed without murder. When, in the days of Cleisthenes, the demes arose, even they, though they were local and artificial units, rapidly acquired a cult, a treasury and property of their own; so that it was a living society, and not a mere administrative division, which kept the register of citizens, and chose a list of candidates for the Senate, and performed the many functions which the demes had to discharge in the life of Attica. To phratries, tribes, and demes must be added the religious associations which clustered round a new god or form of worship: Dionysus had his θίασοι, and the Orphic rites their circles. Finally, there were the manufacturing or trading groups, which, without becoming exclusive guilds, might form associations, with a common hero or god, and thus attain something of the nature of a conscious community.1 These are all facts which we should hardly guess from the philosophy of Plato; but they are facts that find their recognition in the theory of Aristotle, who can speak of tribesmen and demesmen as forming associations which are essential parts of the State, and of households and villages as its constituent members.²

Just as, strong in his sense of the close-knit unity of the State, Plato refuses to tolerate any other association, so he refuses to accept any individual member who is not a serviceable organ of its life. Social service is the one clue: there is no room for useless members in the body politic. Every element must be enlisted in the service of the State: the element that cannot be enlisted, and is unfit to serve, as an ‘unjust’ element, and it must disappear. This sense of the burning claim of the State on every citizen explains many features of the Republic. It explains Plato’s attitude to the invalid (supra, p. 260). He cannot serve, and it is better that he should die. The note of efficiency in social service is here too strong for our modern thought, and this application of the organic conception of the State may seem to us perverse. We are inclined to argue that, because the State is organically one, it should carry its weaker members with it, helping, from the fulness of its common life, their defects and imperfections, and trusting that the life of the whole will be fuller of riches and tenderness because such members, who after all can make their peculiar contribution, find recognition and assistance. Plato, on the contrary, is ready to argue that, because the State is a working organism, every member must work efficiently, and each must carry his share of the burden – or depart. The conception of specific function makes him rigorous: he will not have the quality of justice strained by any false mercy. More than once he speaks of ‘drones’ as the curse of actual States; and he is resolved that in his commonwealth there shall be no room for drones. This is the basis of his advocacy of the emancipation of women; for such emancipation is the one way of turning a sex condemned to the life of drones into a body of working bees. It is, again, one of the grounds of his treatment of art: art must be an obvious mode of social service, and therefore it must serve an obvious social purpose. Finally, it is one of the reasons for his theory of communism: for communism is a way of eliminating all the impediments which prevent the fullest and most efficient ardour of service in the highest and most highly responsible organs of the community.1

Plato is something of a political mystic, in revolt against the fact of difference. Like the mystic, he would so completely fuse the lover of perfection with its object – the guardian with the State – that identity is lost in the effort to gain identification. There is a deep wisdom in Aristotle’s remark: ‘the unity of the State, which he commends above all things, would be like what is mentioned by Aristophanes in the Symposium, when he speaks of lovers, in the excess of their affection, desiring to grow together and to become one instead of two, in which event one or both must necessarily perih’.² Unity, after all, is not the raison d’être of a group: it is rather the quality which a group must possess in order to attain its end. That end is the richness and fulness of the life of the group (which Aristotle calls αὐτάρκεια) – a richness to be gained through the different contributions of the different parts, which must therefore retain their difference; a fulness to be achieved through the energy of each member in its due place. Without esprit de corps, or the sense of a unity, that energy will not be forthcoming; but without this fulness and richness of life as its goal, esprit de corps will only be pipeclay and regimental buttons. The best community is that which reminds every member that it is his duty to enlist himself in its service, but remembers, at the same time, that it is its own duty to elicit every energy and awaken every potentiality in every one of its members. For the fundamental reality is the individual spirit; and it is better, even when one is thinking of the social good, to think in terms of eliciting every innate power of that spirit than in terms of enlisting recruits for social service.

Plato, however, is by no means entirely a political mystic. It is hardly fair to say that he commends unity above all things. His ultimate ideal is justice; and justice means the discharge of specific function. Justice involves a number of corollaries. It involves the freedom of every part to discharge its function freely; and Plato thus speaks of the guardians as necessarily having for their duty the making of freedom, and bound to ensue only the things which bear on this end (395 B–C). It involves again the happiness which comes from a conscious sense of energy directed to right ends; and so he speaks of his city as founded for the purpose of securing the happiness of all its members (420 B). Finally it involves unity, in the sense of a scheme within which, and for the sake of whose realization, each part discharges its several function; and so he speaks of the chief aim of the legislator, and the greatest good of the State, as the bond of unity (462 B–C). But it is obvious that unity which exists for the sake of justice can exist only in the form of differentiation. It must be a unity of different parts with different functions; and the whole structure of the Platonic State, with its three separate classes and their three separate functions, is accommodated to this fact. Plato, after all, recognizes the need of unity in difference; and we must remember that when he insists on absolute and undifferentiated unity, it is the unity of a part, and not of the whole, that he has in mind. His concern is with the guardians; and his anxiety is to keep them properly differentiated as a governing organ, as much as to insist on their identity one with another and their identification with the State. On the other hand, the guardians in the issue seem to become the State. The third class practically disappears: the auxiliaries are merged with the perfect guardians in a common communism; and the note of unity without difference is dominant. If we lay stress on this fact, then, with Aristotle, we can accuse Plato of political mysticism. If we lay stress on the earlier part and original scheme of the Republic, we shall hold the accusation to be captious and unfounded. It is a matter of balance; and each student of Plato must strike the balance for himself.

1 See, however, the note on p. 209. 239

¹ Cf. 416 C: ‘Over and above the education we have described, any wise man would say that the houses and other property of the guardians should be so arranged as not only not to interfere with their excellence as guardians, but also not to tempt them to do wrong to the other citizens.’ This passage not only shows that communism is a corollary to education (): it also indicates, in its accumulation of negatives, the negative character of Plato’s communism (cf. infra, p. 246).

² Wilamowitz, Staat und Gesellschaft, p. 61.

¹ At Athens the magistrates only had common meals; but the ordinary citizen drew pay from the State for his attendance at the law-courts and in the Assembly.

² Aristotle, Pol., II. 5, 5 7 (1263, a 35–7).

³ Plato himself, in the eighth book (547–8), in speaking of timocracy, treats these practices as nearest to – in the sense that they are the first corruption of – the system of his ideal State.

⁴ Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 287–8.

¹ The relation of the Ecclesiazusae to the Republic is a vexed question. One theory, which has a considerable measure of support, is that aristoshanes, writing after the Republic (or at any rate a first draft of the Republic) had appeared, was satirizing Plato (cf. Rogers’ introduction to his edition of the play, pp. xxi–xxviii). According to another view, which seems to me far more probable, the Ecclesiazusae was written before the Republic, which appeared about 387, and Plato is seeking, in the fifth book of the Republic, to meet the current satire on communism, including that of Aristophanes. The whole question is exhaustively examined by Adam in his edition of the Republic, Vol. I, pp. 345–55. In any case, Aristophanes’ satire is directed against something which Plato did not advocate – a scheme of communism in which all share, and in which all things, including land, are held in common.

² Ecclesiazusae, 597–8 (Rogers’ translation).

¹ Citizens are not ‘peasants at a fair, but common banqueters’ at a festival to which each has contributed (421 B). The phrase, in the connexion in which it is used, reminds one of a fine passage in Browning’s Rabbi ben Ezra.

² ‘He whose desires are drawn towards knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul … for the motives which make another man desirous of having and spending have no place in his character’ (485 D–E).

¹ It would be interesting and instructive to draw a parallel between Hilde-brandine and Platonic reform. Hildebrand found a church in which, through the Teutonic conception and practice of the Eigenkirche, the clergy were so tied to and controlled by economic interests, that they could not properly discharge their function. He found a church, again, in which clerical marriage tended to make the clergy founders of families rather than pastors of souls. His campaign against simony and clerical marriage had thus motives analogous to those which inspired Plato’s campaign against the immersion of statesmen in economic interests and family cares.

¹ The position of the third class in Plato’s State is a difficulty, and Aristotle raises the question of its organization. In truth, the class of producers seems to disappear: Plato is preoccupied with the ruler. It is noteworthy that it has no special virtue assigned to it: the ruler has wisdom, the soldier courage, but the producer can only share self-control and justice with both. The third estate would share in the benefit of some of Plato’s reforms, e.g. the reform of traditional representations of God, and the improvement of music. Both of these would touch the lower classes, which must be supposed to have known myths and music, and would benefit by the purification of both. But it has been remarked that the third class is practically a serf class; and in some ways it corresponds to the serfs whom Aristotle proposes to use for tilling the land of his ideal State. Nohle, however, seeks to justify Plato’s treatment of the third class (cf. his Staatslehre Platos, pp. 138–47).

¹ Plato never quite proves the original thesis of the Republic, that the just man is the happier. It is assumed throughout; and the terrible description of the tyrant, the type of injustice, towards the end of the Republic, is the culmination of the assumption. But it is never demonstrated (cf. infra, pp. 301 sqq.); or, if it is demonstrated, Plato achieves the result only by a representation of justice in the individual (as a relation of the parts of the soul which issues in harmony and therefore in health and therefore in happiness) which hardly accords with the social quality inherent in the term.

¹ Plato himself says in the Timaeus, where he recapitulates the Republic, ‘the guardians were to be like hired troops, receiving pay for keeping guard’ (18 B); cf. also the Republic, 464 C.

² Modern socialism is Protean. The form which I have had in mind, in the comparison here attempted, is that which is known as collectivism. I have not considered modern communism, or sought to compare it with Platonic com munism, because collectivism seems to me (as communism does not) to be a definite ideal definitely comparable with that of Plato. Communism in its modern form presupposes a community of goods on which each can draw – not, as the collectivist suggests, according to his services, but according to his needs. It means the abolition of private property: collectivism means the abolition of private capital (or ‘property for power’), but it leaves – provided that it is distributed fairly on the basis of social service – a large area of private property (in the shape of ‘property for use’).

¹ Natorp, Plato’s Staat und die Idee der Sozialpädagogik.

² This is one of Aristotle’s criticisms (Politics, II. 5, 8 20, 1264, a 24–6). The main lines of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s system of community of property are clearly expressed in the course of this chapter of the Politics.

¹ Cf. Natorp, op. cit. I cannot agree with Natorp’s interpretation of the passage in the Laws (739) as referring to a general communism of all in all things, under which the land is held in common; and still less with his view that the passage proves that Plato, after all, believed in general communism as the perfect ideal. The passage seems to me to refer to the scheme of the Republic. The language may be loose; but it is hardly possible that Plato should mention incidentally, in one passage of a later work, a system entirely different from that of the Republic, and mention it, too, as a higher ideal (cf. infra, p. 370, n. 1).

¹ Cf. Zola’s saying: ‘On donne sa virilitè à son oeuvre’.

² Plato recognizes that property and the family are interdependent facts. The most thorough-going modem socialists equally recognize that socialism, which means a revolution in property, must also involve a reformation of the family.

³ Politics, II. 7, § I (1266, a 34).

¹ Herodotus, IV. 104, 116; cf. also IV. 180, to which Aristotle refers, Politics, II. 3, § 9 (1262, a 19).

² edea, 230 sqq.; Fragm. 655.

³ Xen. Sympos., 2, § 9.

⁴ Ibid., Mem., II. 2, § 4.

¹ This is not the same as to say that l’esprit de la famille was not present in Greece. On the contrary, if family feeling was not intensive, it was at any rate exclusive; and it is exactly this exclusiveness which Plato attacks. He does not regard the family as too weak to serve any purpose, but as too strong to be coordinated with the unit of the State, and too exacting in its demands to permit the free development of its members (cf. Burnet, Aristotle on Education, 106, n. 2, 132–3).

¹ The producing classes retain home and family, as they retain private property. The same reasons which confine community of property to the guardians confine also community of wives, which is a corollary and consequence of community of property, to the same class.

¹ The young husband at Sparta only visited his wife by stealth.

¹ Strictly speaking, the greatest good of the Platonic State is justice. Justice, however, implies a single whole or system, in which each member acts as a part; and the greater the unity of this whole, the easier it is for each member to feel himself a part, and, acting as a part, to ensue justice. Being thus essential to justice, unity may be regarded as the greatest good of State.

¹ One may argue that Plato takes too optimistic a view of the relations of relatives. ‘Blood may be thicker than water, but the skin of kinship is proverbially thin.’ But granting that Plato’s view is true, and assuming that solidarity so perfect characterizes a family, surely the family has a raison d’être – it attains a ‘good’. Plato is therefore contradicting himself at this point. At any rate he is guilty, as Aristotle remarks, of the logical fallacy of supposing that what is true of a small circle of relations will also be true of a large circle of men if they are related. There are two factors, (1) the size of the circle, and (2) its relationship; and Plato forgets the influence of the first of these in producing solidarity. He abolishes the family circle, and yet seeks to keep the motives and obligations based upon it, which have no meaning apart from it.

² Verses 1183 sqq.

¹ Xen. Mem., IV. 4, § 23.

² Bateson, Biological Fact and the Structure of Society, p. 21.

³ On this last point see Adam’s edition of the Republic, I. 357–60.

⁴ Plato’s three-class system is practically adopted as biologically true by Bateson (op. cit., p. 33), on the ground of the heritability of success; and his proposal of a transposition of ranks, where ‘mutational novelties’ arise, is also biologically defensible. It may be added that while in the Republic Plato advocates the marriage of like to like, in the Politicus and in the Laws he advocates the marriage of like to unlike. In the Politicus he argues (310 D) that marriage of people of like qualities results in degeneration: in the Laws he advocates the marriage of opposites (, 773 B), in order that the whole State may be well mixed. This change in his theory of marriage accords with the change in his general theory of politics. In the Republic he had stood for the ideal constitution and ideal marriage: in the two later works he stands for the mixed constitution, as we shall see, and for mixed marriages. It is interesting to notice that in the Laws Plato advocates two eugenic measures – a tax on bachelors after the age of thirty-five (774 A), and an exchange, as it were, of health certificates between bridge and bridegroom (771 E–772 A); (cf. infra, p. 382).

¹ Cf. Aristotle, Pol., II. 5, § 24, 1266, b 4.

¹ It is perhaps unnecessary to remark that all this has no bearing on the question of woman’s suffrage (which is quite another matter), but is simply concerned with Plato’s scheme for the complete absorption of women in political life and activity.

² Plato has no room for sentiment. He meets it with stern utilitarianism, curious in the author of the Symposium: ‘what is ?’

¹ Plato, as he may be said not to be organic enough (supra, p. 202, n. 1), may also be said not to be ideal enough. He is so much alive to, and so much oppressed by, actual evils, that he is blind to the better side and the whole meaning of an institution such as the family. While Aristotle, less sensitive and more detached, can enunciate a philosophy of the family, or again of property and of the drama, Plato – too much, as it were, in a passion to provide a philosophy – can only furnish a critique of these things.

¹ Politics, II. 5, § 16 (1264, a 2); cf. also VII. 10, § 8 (1329, b 33), ‘we should make adequate use of what has been discovered, and seek to find what is missing’.

¹ Webster following Jamieson defines the pibroch as ‘a Highland air, suited to the particular passion which the musician would either express or assuage’.

² Plato’s principle in this suggestion is, that there is no ‘right to life’ in the individual as such; there is only a right to life in the individual as a citizen able to serve the State. Cf. Green, Principles of Political Obligation, p. 157, § 154, for Plato’s view, and for its necessary correction.

³ Sparta herself, indeed, in some respects, retained traces of an earlier past which other Greek States had outgrown.

¹ ‘Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and the lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane’ (William Morris, A Dream of John Ball). ‘To be no part of any body is to be nothing: and so I am, and shall so judge myself, unless I could be so incorporated into a part of the world, as by business to contribute some sustentation to the whole’ (Donne, in a letter quoted in Walton’s Life). Cf. supra, p. 205, n. 1.

² Green, Principles of Political Obligation, p. 57, 5 39.

³ Whether the guardians of the ideal State are really ‘happy’ is another question (cf. supra, p. 246, n. 1; infra, pp. 301 sqq.).

¹ As Nettleship puts it, Plato is so much concerned with the virtues of esprit de corps, that he forgets ‘that corporations have no conscience’.

¹ ‘When we speak of an organism, we mean (1) a living structure composed of parts different in kind; (2) that those parts, by reason of their difference, are complementary to one another and mutually dependent; (3) that the health of the whole consequently depends on the healthy discharge by each part of its own proper function…. The State is not an organism; but it is like an organism. It is not an organism, because it is not a physical structure. It is a mental structure – a union of different minds in a common purpose. But this mental structure is like an organism, because … the attainment of the common purpose depends on the discharge of reciprocal functions by the different parts’ (Political Thought in England from Spencer to Today, p. 107).

¹ Compare Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution: ‘The State ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper or coffee, calico or tobacco, or some such other low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.’

² The organic conception, as it presents itself in Plato and Aristotle, has, however, the defect of postulating members who are means to the life of the rest, and do not share in that life. And yet Plato argues from his organic conception of the State to the conclusion, that as in an organism part must be proportioned to suit part, and all to suit the whole – as no part must grow unduly, lest every part should suffer – so in a State, class must be proportioned to class, and all classes be adjusted to the welfare of the whole (Rep. 420 D). But the other side of the conception is more prominent; cf. p. 236.

³ An organic theory based entirely on biology does not cover or recognize the moral aspect of the State as a society consciously self-directed towards a conception of the Good. Plato’s organic theory, based as it was on teleology, does involve such a recognition: and the category of organism, as used by him, covers an aspect of the State, which as used by Herbert Spencer it fails to cover.

¹ In this respect Plato was true to the spirit of Sparta, where ‘associations intermediate between the State and the individual were either lacking, or had become mere expedients of mechanical subdivision’. It was otherwise in Athens; and Aristotle, as we shall see, was true to Athens.

² Treitschke, Politik, I. 89.

¹ The policy of the French government to the Church, and the passing of the law of associations, in recent years, illustrate the same point. France has a Platonic tradition of objection to associations (unless they are registered and licensed by the State); while England tends rather to follow the Aristotelian doctrine, and to admit the free existence of many associations and communities within the State.

² Cf. Political Theories of the Middle Ages, translated by Maitland (= Das Deutsche Genossemchaftsrecht, III. c. 2, § II) and Johannes Althusius. Figgis, Churches.

³ Wilamowitz, Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen, p. 48.

¹ Wilamowitz, Stunt und Gesellschaft der Griechen, pp. 48, 51, 114. See also above (pp. 49–50) on Solon’s law of associations.

² Ethics, VIII., 9, §§ 5–6 (1160, a 18–28); Politics, I. 2, § 8 (1252, b 28) and I. 3, § 1 (1253, b 2–31.

¹ It is an instance of Plato’s anxiety to enlist every faculty in active service that, in the Laws (794 D–795 C), he insists that boys and girls should be taught ambidexterity, in order that they may use their bows and slings and javelins most effectively in defence of the State.

² Aristotle, Pol., 4, § 6 (1262, b 9–13). Plato’s zeal for unity appears most obviously in Rep. 462 A–E.