Chapter 1

PLATO AND HIS PREDECESSORS

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0. I believe that the philosophically most fundamental motivation of Plato’s Republic is to reply to a staple proposition of fifth-century Greek thought, a proposition propounded by many of Plato’s Sophistic predecessors, and that is the proposition that there is a distinction between nature and convention, phusis and nomos, and that nomos, convention, human law, cannot be derived from nature, and, according to some, though not all, of those who believe all that, even contradicts nature. I think Plato was an extreme social conservative who found the line of thought that contrasted nature and convention threatening, and that it is profitable to read the Republic as a reply to that threat.

It is true that the threat is not put expressly like that in the Republic. But the subversive distinction between nature and convention is alive in the challenge that Glaucon lays down to Socrates. Plato’s manifest aim, among other things, is to respond to Glaucon, and thereby to refute a contractarian account of justice which debases it by tracing it to individual self-interest. Here’s what Glaucon says:

Well, I promised I’d talk first about the nature and origin of morality, so here goes. The idea is that although it’s a fact of nature that doing wrong is good and having wrong done to one is bad, nevertheless the disadvantages of having it done to one outweigh the benefits of doing it. Consequently, once people have experienced both committing wrong and being at the receiving end of it, they see that the disadvantages are unavoidable and the benefits are unattainable; so they decide that the most profitable course is for them to enter into a contract with one another, guaranteeing that no wrong will be committed or received. They then set about making laws and decrees, and from then on they use the terms “legal” and “right” to describe anything which is enjoined by their code. So that’s the origin and nature of morality, on this [that is, the Sophist] view: it is a compromise between the ideal of doing wrong without having to pay for it, and the worst situation, which is having wrong done to one while lacking the means of exacting compensation. Since morality is a compromise, it is endorsed because, while it may not be good, it does gain value by preventing people from doing wrong. The point is that any real man with the ability to do wrong [and get away with it] would never enter into a contract to avoid both wronging and being wronged: he wouldn’t be so crazy. Anyway, Socrates, that is what this view has to say about the nature and origin of morality and so on.1

Glaucon is saying that morality is not natural to us, like affection or anger, and he is putting a particular individualist spin on that.² But in replying to Glaucon Plato goes beyond the contractarian argument to dispute the Sophistic terms in which it is framed.³ “Glaucon’s account resonates with the fifth-century distinction (associated particularly with the sophistic movement) between nature and convention, and the preference for the competitive values of natural law rather than the co-operative values of conventional law.”⁴

Accordingly, and in order to expound the doctrine of the Republic from the explained angle of vision, that is, within the perspective of the nature/convention contrast, I shall first discuss the contribution of Sophists.

1. In the history of European civilization, the fifth-century traveling teachers known as the Sophists were the first to treat social and political affairs as an independent object of study. Now the phrase “independent object” invites the question “independent of” what? And the answer is that they studied society and politics, indeed, humankind itself, as something independent of, or separate from, the world of nonhuman nature: that is the deepest meaning of their famous distinction between nature and convention, between what comes naturally and what comes by human and social contrivance. We may conjecture that, before the Sophists, or at any rate before the Athenian fifth century, there is not a developed conception such as we take for granted of the human being as operating differently from beings of nonhuman nature, nor of the individual human being as a being endowed both with freedom of choice, and notably with the capacity and the right to govern his or her own life; nor of a human community as having an unambiguous right to make and remake laws which reflect its optional ideals and interests. I do not mean that, before the Sophists, no one has any inkling of these truths, some of which may indeed be truisms, but that, as I put it, there is no integrated developed conception answering to them. (It would be as absurd to suppose that, pre-Sophistically, nomos and phusis were entirely confounded as it would be to suppose that there was no assimilation that their emphatic distinguishing rejected. Only bores say with special emphasis what everybody knows to be true. When the Sophists contrasted nature and convention, many were shocked as no one could be if anyone happened to say with special emphasis: there’s a difference between the dry and the wet.)

The nomos/phusis distinction generates a possibility of radical criticism and radical transformation: the space society occupies, when society is conceived in separation from the natural world, is a space of possibility and choice (at least relative to natural constraint). Much conservative thought is an attempt to shrink that space, and it is not surprising that there exists a perennial conservative rhetoric in which certain existing institutions are said to be natural, which means that they have arisen with some necessity, like a flower from its seed, or that they are natural in that they can be suppressed only at great cost, at the cost, and here again we can use the flower analogy, of distortion, of destruction of natural growth. The Sophist distinction between nature and convention, phusis and nomos, between what comes of itself and what comes by deliberate contrivance contradicts that particular conservative outlook.

Now, as I said, the Sophist emphasis on the nature/convention distinction proves that in pre-Sophistic thought it was not made, or not with the appropriate and required emphasis: nobody makes a great to-do about a distinction that is entirely familiar. Taking that as a clue, I hypothesize that we encounter in pre-Sophistic thought a conception of humanity in which it is engulfed, or sunk, in nature.5 In this conception humanity is not conceived to be as separate from the rest of nature as humanity later came to be conceived to be. And on that hypothesis, it follows that we find in pre-Sophistic thought a conceptual predisposition to if not the full doctrinal structure of a conservative social philosophy. (A fully articulated conservative doctrinal structure is, in any case, impossible, until its doctrinal opposite is also possible. You cannot deny that there is a distinction between nature and convention until that distinction is on the table. We can certainly say that the conservative post-Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, rejected the distinction that the Sophists made: but the Sophists’ predecessors simply failed to make it—it was not yet there to be rejected.)

In the lectures that follow, I shall do five things. First, I shall set forth a partly conjectured pre-Sophistic thought pattern, in which humanity is, to a degree, engulfed in nature. Next, I shall describe the Sophistic revolution, or, better, the fifth-century revolution in conception that found a particularly sharp expression in the teaching of some Sophists. (It is not so important for my purposes to credit the Sophists in particular with originality in this respect, by comparison, say, with the Athenian playwrights, of whom I know very little. What matters is that the Sophists were militant public or semipublic deniers of a traditional thinking that Plato sought to retrieve.) Third, I shall present the political thought of the political reactionary Plato as an attempt to recoup and refashion the subordination of humanity to nature which characterized the pre-Sophistic tradition. Fourth, I shall also say some things about Plato’s Republic in particular which amplify my principal theme, and then, fifth, some further things that have almost nothing to do with it.

2. I now pursue my hypothesis about pre-Sophistic thought. I cite three indications that it failed thoroughly to distinguish humanity from nature, and, with respect to each indication, the contrast with the Sophists is plain. In summary description, the three are: (1) that in explanatory theory humanity is regarded as continuous with nature, as are the Gods and nature, and the Gods, of course, are more or less naive projections of human beings; that human beings are not viewed as free and responsible; or as determining their own history; (2) that they are thought of as dividing naturally into (a) Greeks and barbarians, (b) free persons and slaves, and (c) natural aristocrats and natural hoi polloi; and (3) that there was much reflection at a high intellectual level about cosmology and physics, and, one could say, physical chemistry, but not systematic reflection, just occasional asides, about human society. I must now elaborate and connect these points.

3. (i) As far as fundamental explanations of them are concerned, humanity and nature are in a relatively undifferentiated continuum. Indeed, divinity, humanity, and nature are all three assimilated to one another—natural occurrences are explained in the language of justice, a language that later comes to be restricted to the human realm; human beings are understood on the model of other parts of nature; and nature is understood as manifesting divine forces where the divine is itself understood in human terms.

We think of nature as mindless and of ourselves as possessed of consciousness and acting out of deliberation. We think of natural things as lacking in spontaneity and operating according to law, and we think of ourselves as, by contrast, spontaneously adopting designs, being guided by laws (as atoms are not), and even as devising the laws by which we are guided. To be sure, there are materialists among us who are skeptical about the robustness of the distinction that I just drew. They will say that the special powers of humankind are ultimately grounded in or reducible to nothing but a complex arrangement of nature, that part of nature which comprises the human cerebrum and nervous system. But, when they are not addressing ultimate questions, which is to say, most of the time, the materialists think the way everybody else does, using contrasts which we all take for granted, whether or not in a philosophical hour we labor to stress the contrast or to reduce its force or even to explain it away.

Since it is obvious for us to make the foregoing distinction between the structures of human and natural agency, we readily distinguish, as I indeed did a moment ago, between the laws that human beings make and the laws to which nature conforms, so much so that one might claim that the word “law” is now ambiguous across those two contexts.6 But that distinction between social and natural law was not at all obvious to the early Greeks, one indication of which is the manifest fact that when the Sophists contrasted nomos and phusis what they said was treated as novel and subversive.⁷

The nomos/phusis distinction is absent or slurred in early Greek thought since, for the early Greeks, the human estate is understood in terms of nature and the realm of nature is explained by principles that we have learned to restrict to the human realm. When Anaximander of Miletus (610–ca. 547 BC) says, “Things come into existence and perish as it is ordained; for they pay the just penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice, in accordance with the order of time,”⁸ and when Heraclitus (of Ephesus ca. 540–ca. 480) echoes, “The sun will not overstep its limits, because if it does the Erinyes [the Furies, handmaidens of justice] will find him out,”⁹ they are not, so I think, (consciously) pressing the idea of man-made law into merely metaphorical service as explanatory of natural processes.¹⁰ Rather, it is the same principle of justice which regulates the movements of nature and of humankind. “For all human laws are sustained by one law, which is divine”¹¹ which also controls nature. Of course, laws were made by human beings and customs were perpetuated because of thousands of daily decisions in the times of Anaximander and Heraclitus, just as they are now, but that is not conceived in the theoretical representation as a matter of creation and decision in the sense of those terms in which they denote transcendence of the impositions of nature. They conceived the order in social life, the regularity, as more like the order in the movement of the stars or the tides, with the former being a special case of the latter, since society is a part of nature. Let me quote from Dodds’s essay, The Ancient Concept of Progress, on the Sophistic movement:

When a Greek of the archaic period spoke of “law”, and even when he spoke of “the laws” in the plural, he usually meant not the contents of the statute-book but the entire body of traditional usage which governed the whole of his civic conduct, political, social, and religious. He thought of it, not as something which was liable to be altered next year, but as an accepted inheritance which formed the permanent background of his life. The laws represented the collective wisdom of the past; perhaps they had been codified by some great man, a Lycurgus or a Solon, but they were felt to rest ultimately on an authority higher than that of any individual statesman. Heraclitus made the feeling explicit when he declared that “all human laws are sustained by one law, which is divine.”12

Here the arrangements that people had made and which they themselves sustained are presented as rooted in nature, and to nature is attributed the principle of justice that is not yet explicitly affirmed as a human cultural artifact.¹³

Now all this was of course the easier to do because of a reciprocal conceptual assimilation: while the human world was, as emphasized, engulfed in nature, the world of nature was interpreted as though it consisted of the doings of human beings. The originating agencies of natural occurrences are Gods, but the character of the Gods is nothing but a reflection of human character. So humanity is permeated by nature, and nature through being divinely run is permeated by humanity. In Anaximander and Heraclitus the principles regulating social existence are read into and made constitutive of nature, and their manifestation in human life is then understood as a reflection of nature itself. This process is what the nineteenth-century thinkers Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx called a process of alienation. Something human is projected into something nonhuman, and its manifestation in humanity is then regarded as secondary to its manifestation in what is not human.

Nor is the assimilation of the natural to the divine and therefore to the human a feature only of mythological picture-thinking, for the “naturalists in general,” that is, the pre-Socratic philosophers, “seem to claim that everything is divine and that the divine order is nothing more than the natural order”:14 they follow Thales, for whom “all things are full of Gods,”¹⁵ so that for Heraclitus, in Hussey’s words, “theology and physics are one.”¹⁶ As Hussey also emphasizes,¹⁷ in Milesian cosmological speculation the view of the Gods as multiple and disorderly is transcended, and that no doubt means that they are less waywardly human than they are in myth. But that does not eliminate the triune continuum, although it does make it less colorful.

The second respect, consequent on the first, in which humanity was in its conception of itself engulfed in nature was that human beings were not in their own cultural self-representation viewed as responsible choosers of their actions.

Over the beating of my heart and the peristaltic movement of my gut I have little or no control: these are natural processes. And if all my functioning is seen as comparably natural, if there is no range of functioning which is set aside as transcending nature, then there is no concept of freedom and there is not that concept of responsibility which goes with the concept of freedom of choice. And so, and in this and the next two paragraphs I follow Adkins’s book on Merit and Responsibility (which, so I must warn you, is highly controversial, most scholars not accepting it), it is unsurprising that the early Greeks, engulfed as they were, lacked the elementary moral ideas of choice and guilt, which began to be articulated in the fifth century and which remain with us today, although we are to a degree losing our grip on them precisely to the extent that Darwin and Freud and Pavlov and Crick, Watson, and Wilkins, and their successors purvey theories which tend to restore the continuity of humanity and nature through which the Sophists broke.

The behavior of a character in Homer (ca. 750 BC) divides like anybody’s behavior does, into actions which are in and actions which are out of character. The implicit explanatory doctrine for actions in character is that they are due to the character they are in, where that is thought of as a feature of the person on a par with, for example, her height, thought of in a way that is at the opposite extreme from existential notions that we form our character through our choices. Inflammable material tends to burst into flame and a courageous person tends to behave courageously. When, however, a person departs strikingly from his usual way, when he acts out of character, then that is not thought of as showing his freedom, for it rather tends to be thought that he must have been seized by a God. Neither when acting in character nor when acting out of it are people thought of as governing their own behavior.18

They consequently cannot be called to account for it in the way that we are. They can be held responsible, but only in the way that you hold a dog responsible, without implication that it could have chosen otherwise. People can be praised and admired or condemned and contemned but in the spirit in which natural things are assessed, as you admire a fine horse or throw out a rotten apple with disgust. The vocabulary of evaluation of character, words like agathos and arete (good, virtue), is applied to animals as it is to people. Dogs can be brave, loyal, charming, elegant, faithful, perhaps ashamed, but not conscientious, guilt-ridden, in moral conflict, saintly, maybe not sensitive, and it is the first range of terms that is applied to people, not the second. What people feel is not guilt but shame which, unlike guilt, does not presuppose morally wrong choice: you can be ashamed of what your father did but not so easily feel guilty about it. You can feel ashamed of but not guilty about a disfigurement. You can be ashamed of what you inescapably are, and people are calumniated for that or even for having the shame of being vehicles of bad Gods-imposed processes.¹⁹

Now Adkins no doubt exaggerates the position, but we should note that Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name, urges that people should be punished only for those evil features which they can be expected to try to remove, not for those indelibly imposed on them by nature. An elementary reflection, but Vlastos²⁰ shares Adkins’s view in Merit and Responsibility that it was original with Protagoras.²¹

3 (ii). The Sophist rejection of the construal of the social as natural was politically explosive in its denial of a natural basis to three distinctions: between Greeks and barbarians, between freemen and slaves, and between the aristocracy, or wellborn, and the mass.

Heraclitus denied that barbarians possessed a developed reasoning faculty.22 Someone as late as Epicurus (341–271) could still say that only Greeks were able to philosophize: the tradition persists and does not divide from the protest against it in a neatly chronological way.

Now this distinction between Greek and barbarian tends to converge with one between natural master and natural slave: the naturally inferior barbarian is fitted by nature to labor menially for the naturally superior Greek.

These are prejudices that came to be adopted. “Came to be,” because, unlike the other patterns of thought I have been expounding, they are not visible in Homer. Homer saw the possibilities of human behavior thoroughly constricted by natural gifts, but he did not distribute those gifts in special proportions as between Greeks and barbarians, nor did he connect slavery with naturally inferior character, only with physical inferiority (a more obviously natural dimension).

A history of war and conquest in Greece produced a relationship of mastery and servitude between conqueror and conquered, and poets and pundits were eager to justify the socially durable arrangement in terms of natural endowment. Thus Theognis could write, in the sixth century: “A slave’s head is never upright, but always bent and he has a slanting neck. A rose or a hyacinth never comes from a sea-onion: no more does a free child from a slave woman.”²³ Like Theognis (ca. 550–500), Pindar (528–438) and other late sixth- and early fifth-century poets insisted on the barbarian/Greek and slave/freemen distinctions, and also found a basis in nature for the division between²⁴ the aristocracy and hoi polloi, the many.

The aristocratic social orders of the seventh and sixth centuries claimed a natural superiority. That natural superiority proposition it sustained in certain near-equivalences of meaning in common language that I shall presently mention²⁵ as well as in the explicit teachings of poets like Theognis and Pindar.

A term like “good” (agathos) served to denote both goodness taken generally as belonging to anything that is superior in value and good birth and good breeding in particular, rather like the outmoded English term “quality,” which once meant the quality, people of quality, as well as enjoying its wider meaning in which it denotes value as such. The aristocracy are best born, best by origin and therefore by nature, so they are the best. (Cf. “good family”: we haven’t quite given up saying things like “she comes from a good family,” and that doesn’t mean that they’re morally good. It means they’re rich but un-merely-recently rich. Cf. “nice people,” “Schöne Leute haben schöne Sachen.”26)

Once such linguistic joints have developed, it is very difficult to fracture them. It can be more difficult to say that ordinary people are good, have value, than it is to mock the desirability of being “good” altogether. That is, it can be easier for anti-aristocrats to debase the term “good” than to claim goodness for the demos.

This is so because aristocracy thrives on the idea of (natural) distinction, and a resonance of such distinction gets built into the terms of positive appraisal. (When, by the way, Robert Burns says, “the rank is but the guinea stamp, a man’s a man for a’ that,”²⁷ he is saying that distinction of rank is purely conventional, a guinea stamp, marked on nothing naturally more valuable. He is making a radical nature/convention point. The poem is great, and its datedness shows there was a thought-structure that has now gone.) And since the term is redolent of distinction, it is difficult to claim that everyone satisfies it. So it takes time for epithets like “Monsieur” and “Sir” and “gentleman” and “esquire” to be universally usable. When “gentleman” means that not everyone is a gentleman, it cannot mean what it comes to mean when everyone is.

Because these terms denote both something distinguishingly honorific and value in general, it can be difficult, as I said, to disparage the social property that they properly denote in their aristocratic application without appearing to be a moral or value nihilist. So democratic ideology faces a difficult linguistic task: it appears possible neither to generalize the honorific terms, since that violates the redolence of distinction in them, nor to disparage those to whom they apply. (The words “bad” and “wicked,” which mean “good” and “understood,” are no doubt used at Eton, but they were more likely to have been invented in some American ghetto.) You can’t call all men gentlemen and you can’t say gentlemen aren’t really gentle.

Poets like Pindar and Theognis affirm tenets in the pre-Sophistic thought pattern. A major and interesting claim they made is that virtue could not be taught, that one was either born with it or fated never to have it. The question “Can virtue be taught?” came to have a complex epistemological significance in Socrates and Plato. But in the tradition and in the Sophist reaction against it, it was simply an early version of the issue dividing democrats and antidemocrats in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: can environment improve character? It is in the interest of those born in more congenial environments to deny that environment can do that. And this interest is sponsored by Theognis, who repeatedly urges that training will have but negligible effect on character. And by Pindar too, who claims for inborn goodness a superiority over that acquired by training, thereby drawing the snob’s line between the truly wellborn, the effortlessly superior, on the one hand, and the parvenu on the other.28

Thus aristocrats are divided from the people by distinctions of nature, and it is revolutionary and progressive of the Sophists to maintain that virtue can be taught, and not only to maintain the principle, but also to offer to teach it to anyone who sought to regulate his life effectively. Of course, only the wealthy could pay, but maybe that’s how things have to go in the beginning of an anti-aristocratic democratic revolution. The first innings are for the radical rich, whether they be disaffected sons of the aristocracy or of more parvenu origin. The sans-culottes come later. The two mistakes to avoid are to see nothing revolutionary in the anti-aristocratic bourgeois moment and to see everything revolutionary there.

3 (iii). Earlier I cited passages in Anaximander and Heraclitus in which they use something like the concept of justice to explain the realm of nature. They, and the other so-called pre-Socratics, dealt energetically and extensively with cosmological questions, developing a kind of proto-physics, but there was no proto-sociology alongside it.²⁹ The Sophists, and in this respect they were followed by Socrates, professed skepticism about and/or disdain toward natural-scientific studies, and directed attention to the study of humanity. This change of focus constitutes a recognition of the distinctive character of human society and thereby asserts an emancipation from the comparative engulfment in nature, in which people lack articulate awareness of their capacity to arrange their social affairs themselves, an engulfment which gave aristocratic ideology comfort and support. Before I address the Sophists’ contribution, let me briefly summarize what I have said about pre-Sophistic thought.

To sum up: I have spoken of an early, that is, pre-fifth-century, Greek conception in which humanity in its self-representation is engulfed in nature, and I described three indexes of that engulfment: (1) Divinity, humanity, and nature are all three assimilated to one another—natural occurrences are explained by a principle of justice that we would restrict to the human realm; human beings are understood on the model of other parts of nature and nature is understood as manifesting divine forces where the divine is itself understood in human terms; (2) They are imagined as divided into natural subspecies, Greek and barbarian, free and slave, aristocracy and hoi polloi; and (3) There is a lot of proto-physics and proto-chemistry but not much proto-sociology.

Let us now turn to the Sophists, who participated in an entire change of conception.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SOPHISM

4. The Sophists enjoyed prominence in the fifth century BC, principally in Athens, to which most of them flocked and where they set themselves up as teachers. They came to Athens, because Athens was an intellectual center: “with her maritime empire and commerce she was now the wealthiest Greek city and a natural centre of communications. The democracy [moreover], under Pericles, prided itself on its tolerance and its openness to new ideas,”30 and, because the Assembly played a large role in public life, the Sophists could find in Athens an audience for their teachings, in the young men who sought to dominate the Assembly through the exercise of rhetoric and the display of political knowledge. And I say that the Sophists came to Athens because, apart from, among prominent ones, Antiphon, they were not themselves born in Athens. They hailed from many different parts of Hellas (the Greek-speaking world), and this is a significant fact about them, because it helps to explain why they so readily embraced the view that all human beings were by nature the same and why they resisted the tradition which maintained natural distinctions.³¹ They were themselves cosmopolitans and they lived, moreover, in a century which had seen a “widening of the Greek horizon … The inquisitive Greek traveller in foreign lands could not fail to observe that different peoples have different … laws and customs: the classic example is the symposium in Herodotus on the right way to dispose of a deceased parent, cannibalism [which was practiced by some inhabitants of India] versus cremation [which was practiced by Greeks].”³²

Now the fifth century began with the war against the Persians, and ended with the Peloponnesian war, the war between Athens and Sparta, each aided by allies. It was therefore a century of great strain and turmoil, which are conditions that make a revolution in humanity’s attitude to itself easier to perpetrate. We may conjecture that unreflective conceptions of the naturalness of ancient customs, of the superiority of Greek to barbarian and of aristocrat to commoner, lost their hold in a society rent by civil war, foreign attack, and plague within the city.

A final point is that a growing complexity of social and economic structure in the fifth century necessitated the formation of a great deal of new law, and that undermined the authority of the received nomos.33 The new laws lacked traditional sanction and they were constantly altered, so it became patently clear that law was a human contrivance.

THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SOPHISM

5. The historical importance of the Sophists cannot be reckoned on the narrow basis of what their contribution was to the civic life of Athens, a contribution which was often venal in inspiration: they were private tutors trying to make money. But their historical importance is that they expressly rejected the tradition that I have described. They severed the cord that tied humanity to nature and thereby asserted humanity’s freedom. The celebrated distinction between nature and convention,³⁴ which they might not have invented but which was deep in their outlook, declared that human beings were not destined to be unreflective slaves of inherited custom and law: these were human creations, not products of natural processes. People therefore had authority over them, not they over people. And if it is no longer satisfactory for people to obey rules conceived as externally imposed necessities, if they have to recognize the laws as their laws, then they must convince themselves of the validity of what they bind themselves to. They must guide their social relations rationally, not through unthinkingly accepted custom, or what purports to be oracular inspiration. In this manner, then, we can count the Sophists as the founders of social and political theory as a self-consciously practiced subject. At least they asked the questions.

To repeat what has been said at the start of these lectures, it is not as though their predecessors denied the distinction they made between phusis and nomos: there is a difference between denying it and not making it. And there is also a difference between making it in practice (of course the predecessors did that) and recognizing it in theory (which they did not).

USES TO WHICH THE NATURE/CONVENTION DISTINCTION CAN BE PUT

6. Merely to distinguish between that which exists by nature and that which comes from human contrivance is not yet to say what consequences ensue from the distinction. Different Sophists drew very different, even, in an important sense, opposite, conclusions from it.35

In a widespread traditional representation, the Sophists are thinkers who said that instead of restricting himself by obeying the laws of his city, a man should satisfy his natural appetites through self-seeking. But this characterization is defective in two ways. First, since it does not mention the humanity/nature continuum through which the Sophists broke, it fails to identify what was intelligent in the egoism that it attributes to them, to wit, its premise, which is to say the nature/convention distinction. But, second, it is simply false that the Sophists were, as such, egoists, that they all drew egoistic or nihilistic consequences from that premise, that is, from the contrast between phusis and nomos.³⁶

Thus, for example, Protagoras (ca. 485–ca. 415)37 concluded that, the laws being a human creation, they should be embraced as such, tended to, and, where desirable and possible, improved upon. His famous statement that “Man is the measure of all things,” the sole surviving fragment of his essay “On Truth,” had an epistemological significance explored in Plato’s dialogue the Theaetetus, but we can conjecture that for social theory its message was that institutions are the responsibility of those whose institutions they are and that they should criticize their traditions and modernize the laws so that human life might be improved.³⁸

In the view of Protagoras, “the laws of any state are valid for that state for so long as that state affirms them”:³⁹ his was a tolerant relativism.⁴⁰ The view of Hippias was different. He regarded some laws as binding and others not: he recognized the validity of only those laws whose universality showed them to be of divine origin.41 Some nations practice incest, so it is not a natural prohibition. All nations enjoin respect for parents, so it has natural/divine standing.

If for Protagoras law is valid, as long as it is accepted, and regardless of variations across Polities, while for Hippias some law is valid and some not, for others, like Antiphon (ca. 480–411) and Thrasymachus, whom we meet in Plato’s Republic, all submission to law derogates from intelligent self-seeking, which they conceived to be the only natural thing. Not believing that anything in nature bound people to cooperate self-denyingly with others, they thought people were fools unless they strove to satisfy self-interest, and that they should follow nature rather than convention. Antiphon wrote: “The requirements of the laws are most of them at war with nature; they have made rules for our eyes, to tell them what to see; for our ears, to tell them what to hear; for our tongues, what to say; for our hands, what to do; for our feet, where to go; for our minds, what they shall desire.”⁴² For Antiphon, nomos is a set of “fetters binding nature.”⁴³

7. Now the slogan “Follow Nature, Not Convention,” the slogan of the antisocial Sophists, might seem to contradict my central thesis that they rescued humanity from nature. In fact, it illustrates it, for what the rescue thesis, spelled out a bit more, says is that they rescued human culture from the illusion that society is part of nature. For, in the Sophist view, Greeks were not following nature but following custom, the established social order with its naturally sanctified class and power distinctions, and misrepresenting all that to themselves as nature. They were not following nature conceived as opposed to custom, for they did not conceive of that opposition. To say “Follow Nature, Not Convention” is to presuppose that social rules are not natural by their very nature. And the nature which people were being counseled to follow was, of course, human nature, not external nature (as such).

My principal point about the Sophists is that they discovered that human law transcends nature, even if, like Protagoras, they favored loyalty to the laws. And their development of the contrast between nature and convention was, as I have said elsewhere,44 the foundation of all social criticism. Criticism compares reality with a standard that it fails to meet. Only with the distinction of nature from convention can the satisfaction of human nature and human interests be employed as a standard, as a criterion for evaluating social institutions. There was no criterion before, because the social was treated as natural, which is fetishism, in the Marxist sense of the word.45 The Sophists made the criterion possible. Some used it antisocially, and others did not.

SOPHISTIC UNIVERSALISM

8. At least some Sophists had corrosive things to say about the traditionally pseudonatural distinctions between Greek and barbarian, freeman and slave, and aristocrat and commoner. They asserted a form of natural equality of humankind. Antiphon claimed for barbarians a humanity equal to that of Greeks in the following partly quaint assertion:

The laws of our neighbours [from context that must be “cocitizens”] we know and revere: the laws of those who live afar we neither know nor revere. Thus in this we have been made foreigners with regard to one another. [But] For by nature we are all in all respects similarly endowed to be foreign or Greek. [That is, upbringing could have made anybody either.] One may consider those natural facts which are necessary in all men and provided for all in virtue of the same faculties—and in these very matters none of us is separated off as a foreigner or as a Greek. For we all breathe into the air by way of our mouths and noses, we laugh when we are happy in our minds and we cry when we are in pain, we receive sounds by our hearing and we see with our eyes by light, we work with our hands and we walk on our feet.⁴⁶

The Sophist Lycophron also denied the validity of distinctions of birth, and Alcidamas, a Sophist pupil of the Sophist Gorgias, possesses the honor of having attributed to him the first known explicit condemnation of slavery, his statement being: “God has left all men free; Nature has made none a slave.”⁴⁷ To be sure, Alcidamas is speaking of cities, not individuals, but the terms of the denial give it broad reach. I do not think he could have added: except in the case of individual slaves.

The Sophists also rejected the natural superiority of aristocracy in their contention, which was shared by Athenians of the day, that virtue could be taught, for they thereby rejected the natural union of virtue and aristocracy claimed by Theognis and Pindar. And they also offered to teach anyone skill in social affairs, and, in particular, the art of rhetoric.

Now it might seem a trivial matter, the art of rhetoric, but in the context of aristocratic beliefs it had a special importance. For, in the old tradition, the many did not have the right to speak. When Thersites48 opens his mouth in Homer’s Iliad and complains of the hardships of the Trojan War, Odysseus descends on him and pummels him, and everyone is scandalized that a commoner should make bold to express his opinion. Pindar says, “[T]he vulgar will say anything.⁴⁹ They clatter vainly like crows.”⁵⁰ In the Gorgias Socrates, opponent of the democracy, puts forward as one of his criticisms of Pericles the fact that he encouraged the ordinary people to engage in discussions, and in the Persae of Aeschylus, it is said that now that the Persians have been repelled, “uncurbed the common tongue shall prate of freedom.”⁵¹ The privileged disfavored elementary self-expression on the part of the masses.⁵²

The Sophist offer to teach rhetoric to anyone constituted an opposition to this tendency. Of course the Sophists in fact taught only the rich, who could pay them. But, as I said before, their historical significance transcended their particular political involvements: the theory they evolved to justify their practice made claims about the right of all people to speak out on matters affecting them. This was not the last time that a rising class or generation in challenging the established order made claims on behalf of humanity as such. Practice and precept in the French Revolution bear an analogous relationship. In each case, we must distinguish the immediate parochial contributions of thinkers from their place in the larger context of humanity’s reflection on itself. And we should not go along with any one-sided methodological insistence that tells us to choose between those two ways, microhistorical and macrohistorical, of looking at the great episodes in the history of political theory.53

SOCRATES⁵⁴

9. I now turn to Socrates, who responded to the Sophists. There is an interesting contrast between them and him. I said that the Sophists’ immediate interests tended to be mundane or even venal, but that they have a long-range significance for political philosophy and democratic theory which far transcends the significance of their thought and speech for their immediate interests. With Socrates, by contrast, the transcendent comes first, as far as his own immediate interests were concerned. He was primarily concerned in a politically unprejudiced way with deep philosophical questions, yet the current of his thought ran in an aristocratic direction, and that tendency was made explicit and developed further by his follower, Plato. The Sophists’ parochial affiliations led them to devise theories of general range and radical import. With the Sophists, one can say, practice led theory. With Socrates, theory is original and dominant, but the way Socrates theorized and the theories he advanced connected him, at least in the democratic mind, to the aristocratic party.

As to the way Socrates theorized, the first thing to say is that he did not, like the Sophists, offer lectures in exchange for drachmas. And he did not claim that his teaching would endow young men with the wherewithal for political success. Instead, he sought to engage people (mostly men) in dialogue, to question the notions they took for granted, to ask them what they meant when they spoke of virtue and justice and courage. Now the associates Socrates attracted were, of course, those who had both the leisure and the inclination to talk to him. So far as I know, he did not venture into the Attic countryside to debate with the poor Athenian farmer, still less with any of the seven thousand slave miners in the Laurion silver mines. The only people who had the leisure necessary to enable them to discourse with Socrates were the established landed aristocracy, who actually resided in the city, and the rising sons of the middle class. But the middle class was concerned, as always, to get on, to increase their influence in the polis. The aristocrats were already perched at the top, so they could more comfortably devote time and energy to dispassionate argument.

It thus transpired that Socrates developed connections which were to lead to his execution by the democrats in 399 BC. From 431 to 404 Athens had been at war with Sparta and her allies. During that period the Athenian aristocrats betrayed the cause of their own city on several occasions. One case hard to be sure about was that of Alcibiades, a student and affectionate devotee of Socrates, who at least objectively speaking harmed the city by encouraging it to institute a naval campaign against Syracuse, then an ally of Sparta. This ended in disaster for the Athenian fleet, and it was thought, probably rightly, that he was well aware of what the upshot would be of the expedition that he had proposed. Also, he fled to Sparta instead of presenting himself at Athens when the Assembly had summoned him to account for his earlier behavior (not in the matter of the Syracusan expedition but in the matter of mutilation of the herms).

When Socrates was later accused of corrupting the youth, it was people like Alcibiades that the jury might have had in mind, for Alcibiades had once been a favorite of the people, and they saw Socrates as having molded him into a traitor. In this they were wrong. But they were not wrong in thinking that Socrates had some kind of connection with the thirty aristocratic Tyrants who ruled Athens terroristically for eight months in 404 BC, having been installed by Lysander, the victorious Spartan general. Charmides and Critias, relatives of Plato, were prominent among them, and Socrates fraternized with them. I am assured by scholarly Socrates-lovers that it is certain that he did not actually approve of the thirty Tyrants’ more violent measures; but when the democrats, having recaptured the city, sought to punish the aristocrats, there were reasons why the old philosopher was unpopular which had nothing to do with the annoyance of his always asking philosophical questions. The idea that he was executed because he was an intellectual gadfly, or nudnik, is a philosophers’ myth. (“When you say. …”) And the reason why he was accused of impiety is that a postwar amnesty forbade charging him with wartime misdeeds.

10. Socrates was stimulated by the Sophists’ controversial ideas. He took them seriously, but criticized them sharply, notably for using terms like virtue and justice without proper attention to what they meant by them. He also thought, and considered this a related fact, that political life in Athens suffered from a failure to grasp essential principles. The concern, he thought, was too much with the particular requirements of particular situations. Socrates by contrast enjoined his interlocutors to look to the fundamental ideas endowing political activity with whatever value it could claim to have, and to analyze them through the give-and-take of debate.

I said earlier that the Sophists turned intellectual focus away from natural science or cosmology, study of how the world is, to the study of the practices and conventions of human beings. They speculated about the springs of human action and taught the art of influencing people. Socrates, too, abjured cosmological speculation, but he took a large step beyond the Sophists in a humanistic direction. It is not enough to observe the behavior of people around you, or even to observe their behavior and your own: there is a stance different from that third-person stance, namely, the first-person stance, and it must always have the last word, in the sense of the title of Tom Nagel’s brilliant book, which is a wonderful defense of the autonomy of philosophy.55

Let me give an illustration of the Nagel point: see the second paragraph of the flyleaf of his book.

In The Last Word, Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential philosophers writing in English, presents a sustained defense of reason against the attacks of subjectivism, delivering systematic rebuttals of relativistic claims with respect to language, logic, science and ethics. He shows that the last word in disputes about objective validity of any form of thought must lie in some unqualified thoughts about how things are—thoughts that we cannot regard from outside as mere psychological dispositions. His work sets a new standard in the debate on this crucially important question and should generate intense interest both within and outside the philosophical community.

First, consider Quine’s plea for a naturalization of epistemology. He said, contemplating the historic disagreements regarding criteria of knowledge and rational belief: “Why not settle for psychology?” But how do we get a psychology save by practicing science under canons of right reasoning on whose rightness science is impotent to comment? It is our criteria that endow science with its warrant. Science could thus never impugn our status as normative, warrant-giving, creatures. It is thus important to know ourselves, as producers of criteria of validity. “Know thyself” was Socrates’s watchword, and, for him, the pursuit of this knowledge was closely connected with the analysis of key ideas such as those of virtue and justice. (He did not mean “know thyself” in a psychological sense: Socrates never talks about what Socrates is really like, deep down.) For to analyze such ideas is to ask ourselves what we mean by them, and we cannot reach an understanding of what we mean without a revelation of self. Philosophy is an essentially first-person activity—though not necessarily first-person singular.56

To furnish an understanding of justice, it does not suffice to cite an example, or a string of examples, of just dealing or just institutions. No such list can show what we mean by calling the dealings and institutions just. An understanding of the concept requires a characterization of it in general terms; we are looking for what our criteria are for its application. This was a methodological claim for Socrates, but, I speculate, perhaps it could be thought to have had a political color. Perhaps it could have been thought to embody a disparagement of the actual institutions of democratic Athens. It could also have been thought to involve an assertion of intellectual superiority consonant with an antidemocratic attitude, as we shall see in Section 12 below.

PLATO

11. Plato was Socrates’s student. Himself an aristocrat (that is, a man of wealth from a family perceived as possessed of a noble lineage and raised in a milieu where there was much cultured leisure), he was shocked as a young man of twenty-eight, when the democracy murdered his teacher. His lifework was a homage to and continuation of the Socratic achievement. In his early dialogues he exhibits Socrates in debate with Sophists and others, and probably with large elements of reportage in the dialogue. In his middle and later dialogues, Plato uses the figure of Socrates as an expositor of his own views. The Republic is generally accounted to be a middle dialogue.

Plato differed from Socrates in that he wrote down his teachings, for there is obviously a huge difference between engaging in a dialogue and writing one down on papyrus. More importantly for our purposes, Plato differed from Socrates in the breadth of his intellectual interest. While retaining the fifth-century enthusiasm for social and political questions, he also returned to the older cosmological issues, and he wove a unified theory of divinity, humanity, and nature, and reestablished in a more sophisticated form the continuum of the three that had been a feature of the pre-Sophistic tradition. The category of purpose was read back into nature itself. The observable world is as it is, insofar as it possesses reality and is not mere illusion, because and to the extent that it participates in the goal-imposing order of the suprasensible Forms, which themselves culminate in the idea of the Good.57 The material world strives toward exemplification of the world of Forms, and shows its deficiency in its failure to do so fully. So the ultimate explanatory category is, once again, as in Anaximander and Heraclitus, an evaluative category, in Plato’s case, the Idea of the Good. Value inheres in external reality itself, is indeed the supreme reality. And a right ordering of society depends on perception of that supernatural order of value. Of course value is not natural in the sense of made of natural stuff, but it is natural in the sense of independent of humanity, and it asserts its right governance over humanity. Plato was in a certain fashion restoring the pre-Sophistic subordination and engulfment.

12. The idea of an order of value which is independent of social and human construction, of what people will, is a potentially antidemocratic idea, and it becomes actually antidemocratic when the principle is added that social construction is illegitimate when it does not imitate that independent order of value. The democratic idea is that you legislate what the people will, not something of independent value whether or not there exists an independent order of value.⁵⁸ So you can, like Ronald Dworkin, affirm an independent order of value and still be a democrat, but nevertheless try to resist any antidemocratic inferences from acknowledgment of its existence. An easy way to be a democrat is to deny an independent order of value. A harder way is to acknowledge it but, like Dworkin, and me too, and, more or less, Rawls, deny its sovereignty over the polity. Plato affirmed it and affirmed its sovereignty over the polity. (This is a case of the familiar competing “obviousnesses” structure of philosophical debate. It seems obvious that government should be at least influenced by what’s good and that it should not go against the will of the people. Liberals and perfectionists respond differentially to the incompatible obviousnesses.)

So note that the cobbler/shoes, captain/ship analogies are profoundly antidemocratic, but also motivated by an important idea—the objectivity of value, of right and wrong.

13. The denial, by most Sophists (for a possible exception see the discussion of Hippias in Section 6), that there is an independent order of value and that the laws have natural sanction often went with what after the seventeenth century has been called the contract theory of morality, of the state, and such a theory is advanced with lucidity and economy by Glaucon in book 2 of Plato’s Republic.

Indeed, the contract theory is, more than anything else, the theory which the Republic opposes, at the level of political philosophy. (For you could say that the Republic opposes the social contract theory in political philosophy and ethical egoism in moral philosophy, which is connected with the contract theory, as Glaucon expounds that: ethical egoism is the view that each person is morally entitled to seek his own good only.)

In the relevant contract theory social arrangements and laws reflect a human agreement to accept certain restraints in order to acquire certain benefits, on the part of such persons. They would rather have the benefits without the restraints, but they know that no such deal is available. As Glaucon says, and as I quoted him at the beginning of the first lecture:

So that’s the origin and nature of morality, on this [that is, the Sophist] view: it is a compromise between the ideal of doing wrong without having to pay for it, and the worst situation, which is having wrong done to one while lacking the means of exacting compensation. Since morality is a compromise, it is endorsed because, while it may not be good, it does gain value by preventing people from doing wrong. The point is that any real man with the ability to do wrong [and get away with it] would never enter into a contract to avoid both wronging and being wronged: he wouldn’t be so crazy. (358e–359b)59

Gauthier agrees.

Now, this view offers what can seem only a precarious justification of authority, and of morality, because, much as it justifies authority and morality as long as the promised benefits are forthcoming, it also justifies resistance to authority by individuals and groups who judge that authority is not serving their interests (hence Locke on right of rebellion). It is therefore a theory which conservatives oppose, which is not to say that that is their only reason for opposing it. For they also have this better reason: they deny, Plato denied, and so did Aristotle, and so, profoundly developing this insight, did Hegel, that the social contract theory reveals the point of society. Society has a prior purpose, one that is necessarily prior to that of satisfying human demands, for it has the purpose of forming human beings in the first place, of shaping and educating human beings. A person nurtured within a community receives from it not only material benefits but her very character, and the absurdity of the contract theory, in the conservative critique, lies in its treatment of individuals as possessed of determinate character and a set of demands independently of the institutions that shape them. (In calling that a better reason for rejecting the contract theory than the reason which consists in fear of its consequences, I am not thereby endorsing anything in the conservative critique.)

14. Instead of asking, at the outset of our evaluation of a polity, whether it, that polity, is satisfactory with respect to the interests of the human beings living in it, we must ask, this is the first thing to ask, whether the polity produces satisfactory human beings, human beings with the right sorts of interests. And now I can say how the familiar social structure of Plato’s Republic displays rejection of the nomos/phusis distinction and reversion to a new domination by nature. For in order to ensure that the right sorts of human beings are produced, it is necessary for society to be ruled by people of innately superior nature who are trained to an insight into what is highest in nonhuman nature, to wit, the universal Forms radiating out of the Idea of the Good.

The state is to be ruled by those who are blessed from birth with natures of a higher grade than others have, where the criterion for evaluating a person’s nature is how capable of wisdom and therefore of justice it is, and where justice is, in the first and generative instance, a matter of a psychological harmony of which people are not equally capable, rather than of just dealing or just conduct or just laws. Indeed laws are only required where people’s natures are defective, which is a weirdly unsociological idea, because of coordination problems.

The top-quality specimens are educated to a perception of the Good, and they impose the wisdom that results from their encounter with the idea of the Good on a society which possesses two other grades of humanity. The hierarchy of roles assigned to people of different nature is justified through propagation of a myth which says that some are of a golden, others of a silver, and still others of a bronze, nature. The golden ones supervise the breeding of everyone else, and it is conceived on the model of breeding; the “one thing that’s important” (423e) is their “education and upbringing … a good educational system, if maintained, engenders people of good character; and then people of good character, if they in their turn receive the benefits of an education of this kind, become even better than their predecessors in every respect, but especially—as is the case with other creatures too—in that they produce better children (424a–b).”60 Here and elsewhere the animal analogy is used,⁶¹ in consonance with the return to nature which I say the Platonic political philosophy betokens.

15. The Republic is usually said to have three classes: the guardians, the auxiliaries, and the producers. But that is misleading. To be sure, there clearly are those three grades, but there are also slaves, who are mentioned in passing, like part of the furniture of the landscape. But if we set aside the slaves, who are a nuisance,62 it is really a two-class society in which some members of the upper class are selected at the age of twenty for special training that will eventually make them rulers from the age of fifty. (The Republic is only a three-class society if you think there is a hierarchical class division between those Etonians who go to Sandhurst and become military officers and those who go to Oxbridge and end up as civil service mandarins and cabinet ministers.) To be sure, there are three types of humanity, but the silver and gold are collected together in terms of social structure and only differentiated with respect to a subset of one age-group. Otherwise they live in community under an abolition of the family and private property. Those in the silver mass serve the golden leaders as a militia used to repel foreign enemies and to keep order within the city. The nonclass distinction between these auxiliaries and the guardian-rulers is confirmed by the isomorphism between the structure of the state and the structure of the soul: in that isomorphism, or parallel, the guardians correspond to reason, the auxiliaries to spirit or passion, and the producers to bodily appetite. But the spirited element, which corresponds to the auxiliaries, is by its nature an ally and support of reason, whenever reason and appetite are in conflict with one another (440e):⁶³ so the auxiliaries stack up with the guardians, in class terms. (After all, they’re all related.)

The (politically) subordinate class is engaged in productive work, and, so far as I can see, Plato does not seek to make their life very different from what it was in his contemporary Athens, except that they are deprived of political rights and that extremes of wealth and poverty are forbidden. And although he claims that he is constructing a state in which all souls may achieve virtue, his rather benign neglect of the condition of the many, about which I shall say a lot more in Sections 19 to 21, reflects a belief that the scope for development in their case is highly restricted.

So the state has an educative role: its prime function is the benign shaping of human beings, and that serves as a refutation of the contractarian philosophy, which sees the state as the result of a compact among magically preformed beings. But this state activity of nurture is not something from which all can benefit as much as some can. There is a division not only in Plato but also in Aristotle between those who undergo spiritual and moral growth and those whose energies are absorbed in providing material necessities not only for themselves but for the higher types. Economic activity is the substructure of culture, of the pursuit of virtue and philosophy. The purpose of production is consumption, and the chief value of manual labor is the instrumental one that it supports the leisure in which culture is possible. With that assessment of the relationship between labor and culture democrats, and even many Marxists, might agree. But Plato and Aristotle, arming themselves with a biological story, draw the antidemocratic and illiberal conclusion that some are by nature suited to devoting themselves to self-cultivation and being free of the burden of labor, while those onto whose backs that burden is to be shifted are unsuited to a life of leisure and culture. This class division among people can follow from the distinction between activities only when people are regarded as so different by nature that activities of radically different grades of value are suitable for them. Otherwise we could share the task of baking the bread and cultivating the garden, and we could then share the bread and roses together.

16. So whereas Plato agrees with the Sophists that political arrangements as they exist do not follow natural principles, he believes, in contradistinction to at any rate most of the Sophists, that there exist natural principles to which the polity ought to be made to conform. But these natural principles will not be found by observing the movements of natural things in the physical world. This world of experience is a defective copy of a higher realm of nature, a realm of universal ideas, and it is into this that the guardians are to achieve insight, discovering justice in the ultimate nature of things. They can then strive to make this world as natural as possible in that higher sense of nature, nature as something not derived from an independently understood human interest and human will and to which human interest may be shown to conform, and to which human will must therefore be made to conform. In this manner Plato’s aristocratic identification induced him to retrieve and refashion elements in the old tradition and thereby arrest the development of democratic ideas.

Strong confirmation of this interpretation of Plato as a reactionary comes from a passage in the Laws, part of which I shall quote. The passage shows that Plato was a reactionary in a rigorous sense of the term, in a sense of the term in which, so the text to be exhibited shows, he could have agreed that he was one. For he could have agreed that he wanted to turn the clock back. He more or less says so himself, in the Laws.

In the Laws, the Athenian stranger laments the breakdown, under Sophist and other onslaught, of the pre-Sophistic thought-world, and Cleinias tells him what the remedy is, a remedy which will reward close scrutiny. Here is the Athenian stranger’s lament about the loss of the old values that we took for granted in the good old days:

In the first place, my dear friend, these people would say that the Gods exist not by nature, but by art, and by the laws of states, which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them; and that the honourable is one thing by nature and another thing by law, and that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority [only] for the moment and at the time at which they are made. — These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might, and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions, these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others, and not in legal subjection to them.

Cleinias and the Athenian stranger then proceed to agree that it would be regrettable to have to use brute force to resuscitate the old ideology, and Cleinias suggests that

if … persuasion be at all possible, then a legislator who has anything in him ought never to weary of persuading men; he ought to leave nothing unsaid in support of the ancient opinion that there are Gods, and of all those other truths which you were just now mentioning; he ought to support the law and also art, and acknowledge that both alike exist by nature, and no less than nature, if they are the creations of mind in accordance with right reason.64

Now what interests me in Cleinias’s response is his statement that law exists by nature if it is a creation of mind in accordance with right reason, the right reason, we can add, which is written into the objective order of things. A partly “persuasive redefinition” (in Stevenson’s technical sense)⁶⁵ of “nature” is occurring here, in response to the following threatening iconoclastic argument, which was promoted by the more destructive Sophists:

Laws have authority only if they derive from nature
But: Laws do not derive from nature
So: Laws have no authority.

To resist this argument, you can deny its first premise, and, indeed, as we have seen, Protagoras, in effect did so. He affirmed the second premise but rejected the first, and was therefore not committed to the conclusion. He rejected the first by saying that Laws are indeed not derived from nature, Nomos isn’t Phusis, but they nevertheless have authority, human authority: man is the measure of all things. But the Laws passage suggests that Plato did not want to quarrel with the first premise and therefore could resist the conclusion only by denying the second premise, and, in order to do that, he had to redefine “nature,” so that, to repeat, it would suffice for the laws to count as existing by nature if they were creations of mind in accordance with right reason. That is one way in which the “order of value” of which I spoke in Section 12 might be thought to count as natural.

AUTHORITARIANISM, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE PRODUCING CLASS

17. A favorite exam question on Plato is: was he a totalitarian? It is the contention of Karl Popper that he was, but a class analysis of his ideal city satisfies me that he was not. I shall try to persuade you of that conclusion, and, as prelude to that task, it is appropriate to make the point that it is a sine qua non of the justice of Plato’s just state that not too many golden individuals be born. Plato has to suppose that the mass of the people who are born in his society are of the bronze nature: otherwise there will not be enough people who are suited to nonintellectual work, and it is a prime aspect of Platonic justice that people’s callings be suited to their natural grades. Such suiting would be inconsistent with the material requirements of society if inferior natures were scarce. Thus a state can only be just if most people in it are by nature inferior, and, therefore, comparatively unjust, for it is only the souls of the guardians that attain completely to justice.

Now this would not sound as paradoxical to Plato’s contemporaries as it does to us, because we all believe, or at least affirm, certain egalitarian presuppositions. Contemporary meat-eaters might say that it would be a bad thing if no more animals, that is, animals inferior to human animals, were born, but what contemporary political reactionary would say that it would be a bad thing if people inferior by nature were no longer born, if all human beings born from now on were of sterling quality? “It would be very nice, if everybody were clever, but fortunately, I mean, unfortunately, most people are stupid.” (They might think that it’s fortunate because they might realize how hard it would be to get decent help if the rabble didn’t keep getting reproduced, but they won’t say it.) I suggest that Plato’s contemporary audience could think of inferior people somewhat analogously to the way meat-eaters think of nonhuman animals: useful that they should keep on being produced.

Another apparent and surprising precondition of the Republic’s ideal city is that it looks as though Plato’s just state can exist only if there exists in it an unjustly intemperate desire for luxury. To see why that seems so, observe that the genesis of the ideal state is as follows. In response to the case for injustice presented by Glaucon and Adeimantus, the case for injustice as a feature of persons, Socrates proposes to look at what justice means in a society (368e) because there justice will be on a larger scale and therefore “easier to discern.”66 He then proceeds to describe an austere society in which people are so temperate in their desires that they are satisfied by and with a life without luxury. It is only when Glaucon protests that life in what Socrates calls the healthy society is too frugal that Socrates allows for luxury. But then, once luxury is introduced, the society will need more territory, hence will be in military competition with other societies, and will also be vulnerable to attack from without. So it will need a class of guardians, whose first function, the very reason why they are introduced, is defense of the city.

So we now have two respects in which the supremely just state cannot exist unless there is a certain amount of injustice around. The first respect was (1) that plenty of bronze individuals must keep on being born. The second is this: since the supremely just state requires guardians, and guardians come in only because of intemperate desire which leads to the danger of war, (2) justice requires the intemperate desire for luxury, which is unjust, as is shown by the fact that it is not a desire that the guardians themselves will have.⁶⁷ If all states were, like the one Plato goes on to describe, just, then there could be no war, and, therefore, no role for the guardians (as a whole class) that each such state requires in order to be just!

Socrates himself says:

“All right … I see. We’re not just investigating the origins of a community, apparently, but of an indulgent community. Well, that may not be wrong: if we extend our enquiry like that, we might perhaps see how morality and immorality take root in communities. Now, I think that the true community—the one in a healthy condition, as it were—is the one we’ve described; but if you want us to inspect an inflamed community as well, so be it.”⁶⁸

Robin Waterfield remarks, “[S]ince morality is going to be found, by the end of Chapter 6, to be the control of desire and passion by reason, Plato needs to imagine a community where desires tend towards excess and therefore need controlling.”69 Well, maybe Plato needs to proceed in that way, but does that make his proceedings consistent?

18. I haven’t worked out everything that I think about that, but I do not believe that Plato really thought that only states with injustice in them could become just. We may take his story of the genesis of the ideal state as a narrative device. The real point of introducing the guardians, as opposed to the pretext for doing so, is not for defense, but so that the city will be graced by philosophy. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the main purpose of Plato’s ideal city is to make the philosophical life possible, and that means the aristocratic life, but the truly aristocratic life, the life that is truly best. Plato’s dearest interest is not in how an ideal ruling class, or aristocracy, can make a state ideal but in how an ideal state can make an ideal aristocracy possible. We must bear that in mind when we try to answer the question whether Plato’s state is a totalitarian one. (See 496c–497a, on how bad things are for philosophers outside the Republic, in actual states.)⁷⁰

19. Now when Plato speaks in a general way about the state he is constructing, he says that in his state each human being will develop to as high a pitch of virtue as is possible for him. But in fact I do not think he cares very much about the condition with respect to virtue or lack of it in the members of his lower class. I think his true view is that, as far as they are concerned, virtue is a hopeless cause. For otherwise, so it seems to me, he would want to intervene more than he proposes to do in their lives. In fact the only social reform proposal he makes is that extremes of wealth and poverty be eliminated, which is not very extensive by comparison with the communism he imposes on auxiliaries and guardians. The other change is the political one that members of the lower class are not to deliberate on public issues. But whereas this might be justified by the sorts of characters they have, it can scarcely be represented as a means whereby they develop and exercise virtue. It is just a means of not letting their comparative virtuelessness harm the state.

For Plato, a just person devotes himself or herself wholeheartedly to his particular function. So at one point he endorses the “idea that a person who has been equipped by nature to be a shoemaker or a joiner or whatever should make shoes or do joinery or whatever” (443c).71 And at 370c he explains that “productivity is increased, the quality of the products is improved, and the process is simplified when an individual sets aside his other pursuits, does the one thing for which he is naturally suited.”⁷² And he also says that “ours is the only kind of community where we’ll find a shoemaker who is a shoemaker and not a ship’s captain as well, and a farmer who is a farmer and not a judge as well, and a soldier who is a soldier and not a businessman as well, and so on” (397e).⁷³ And also:

[W]e prohibited a shoemaker from simultaneously undertaking farming or weaving or building, but had him concentrating exclusively on shoemaking, to ensure quality achievements in shoemaking; and we similarly allotted every single person just one job—the one for which he was naturally suited, and which he was to work at all his life, setting aside his other pursuits, so as not to miss the opportunities which are critical for quality achievement.⁷⁴

Yet despite all those declarations, and in partial contradiction of them, what Plato really cares about, in his application of the division of labor idea to the lower orders, is that they be prevented from entering on the territory of auxiliaries or guardians. He does not mind much what in particular a producer does as long as he keeps to his own sphere; his status, not his last, is what the cobbler must stick to. The illustrations in 397 (just quoted) are consistent with that,⁷⁵ and 434a–b cannot be read in any other way:

“See if you agree with me on this as well: if a joiner tried to do a shoemaker’s job, or a shoemaker a carpenter’s, or if they swapped tools or status, or even if the same person tried to do both jobs, with all the tools and so on of both jobs switched around, do you think that much harm would come to the community?”

“Not really,” he said.

“On the other hand, when someone whom nature has equipped to be an artisan or to work for money in some capacity or other gets so puffed up by his wealth or popularity or strength or some such factor that he tries to enter the military class, or when a member of the militia tries to enter the class of policy-makers and guardians when he’s not qualified to do so, and they swap tools and status, or when a single person tries to do all these jobs simultaneously, then I’m sure you’ll agree that these interchanges and intrusions are disastrous for the community.”76

So much for the principle that the born shoemaker or carpenter must stick to his trade (443c):⁷⁷ the real point is not that the cobbler becomes a supreme cobbler through dedication to his task, but that the lower orders should not “butt in” when it comes to ruling. The important specialization is into classes. So, to repeat: what goes on within the lower class is not of great interest to Plato.

20. I shall say more about the essential virtuelessness of the lower class in a moment. But first I want to draw some consequences, with respect to whether the Republic is totalitarian, of what has been said so far. The main point is that Plato’s state is not totalitarian precisely because of the dim view Plato takes of the quality of the mass of its citizens. Because they are pretty hopeless, the state will not intrude enough into their lives to qualify as totalitarian, as far as they are concerned. Vis-à-vis the masses, Plato’s state is untotalitarian, not because he respects them and therefore grants them liberty but because he disrespects them and therefore sees no point in extensive intervention in their lives. The purpose of Plato’s state is to mold souls: It is not its project to conquer the world, for racism or for communism. It has no other project than to mold souls. And not much molding of low-grade souls is possible.

Those who think Plato’s state totalitarian either read the Republic carelessly or concern themselves only with the governing class or do not know what the word “totalitarian” means. For what one can say, using the relevant words with proper discrimination, is that the Republic is a combination of totalitarianism for the guardians and authoritarianism for the masses. Totalitarianism and authoritarianism are distinct concepts, as may be brought out by considering what their opposites are. The opposite of authoritarianism is democracy, and of totalitarianism is liberalism. The authoritarianism-democracy continuum is a matter of who rules over whom, while the totalitarianism-liberalism continuum is a matter of what aspects of life come under political rule. Marks of totalitarianism are the Hitler Youth and the Soviet Young Pioneers, organizations that recruit private life to political goals, and note that they both un-Platonically presuppose that ordinary people can be heroes and heroines. You can have totalitarian democracy, where such institutions enjoy popular support, and you can have liberal authoritarianism, where the rulers allow the people extensive freedom in their private lives: they are denied political rights, but their private lives are entirely their own. What Plato prescribes, you might now agree, is totalitarianism for and within the ruling class and an authoritarian relationship between the rulers and the ruled.78

21. Now you might think that my description of the lower orders as virtueless is contradicted by Plato’s assignment to them of the particular virtue of temperance. In the standard presentation, the guardians have wisdom, courage, and temperance, or self-mastery, the auxiliaries have courage and temperance, and the producers have only temperance, but they do have it, they do have that one virtue. But I now want to show, on the basis of what Plato himself says, that the producers cannot be credited, unequivocally, with even so much as the virtue of temperance. Plato’s dim view of the capacities of the producers means that he does not really apply his doctrines of function and virtue to them.

(a) First, consider function. We have already seen that Plato slides away from his insistence that each producer be wholeheartedly committed to the activity which constitutes his contribution to the city, but here I have a further point in mind. The function a group performs in the city is supposed to be one they are particularly good at performing, given which of the three elements, reason, spirit (or self-assertiveness), and bodily desire, is dominant in their members. And this works tolerably well for the two upper orders: where reason predominates, as it does in the guardians, the virtue of wisdom flourishes, but good rule requires wisdom, so the souls of the guardians make them good at carrying out the ruling function. Once again, when spirit dominates, as it does in the souls of auxiliaries, then courage flourishes. But good soldiering requires courage, so the souls of the auxiliaries make them good at fulfilling the function of defense. Notice, now, that this formula cannot be carried through for the ordinary people, in whom carnality or bodily desire is dominant. For dominance of bodily desire does not fit a person particularly well to the function of producing material means of life that satisfy bodily desire. Being dominated by a desire for material things does not generate special competence at creating them. Indeed, the best businesspeople and workers are often the most ascetic ones, least taken up with their own bodily satisfactions.

That carnality dominates in the bronze folk might well mean that it would be better for everybody if the bronzies are producers rather than soldiers or, God forbid, rulers. But it does not follow that they will produce better than people of a different mettle would. In fact, Plato tends in the Republic at various points to conflate two or more of the following three questions: (1) What can X do better than anyone else can? (2) What can X do better than anything else X can do?79 (3) What is it best that X do, given what there is to do and who there is to do it? Undoubtedly where X = a bronze person, the answer to (3), on Plato’s premises, is “produce,” and pretty clearly the answer to (1) is nothing, and the answer to (2) is unclear: they might make better soldiers than producers (though not as good soldiers as the silver folk can be) yet it might be better that they be producers.

(b) Now, I said that the best businessmen and workers are often the most ascetic ones, least dominated by bodily desire. And it is a reasonable thought that being a good producer requires self-control, self-discipline, self-mastery, or what Plato calls temperance. And it is indeed true that Plato puts temperance or self-mastery as the virtue of the lower classes, not, of course, as a virtue exclusive to them, but as a virtue which not only guardians and auxiliaries but they too have. Yet we can argue that temperance, unlike courage and wisdom, which are properties of the souls of the superior, is not a property of the souls of the producers.

The supporting stretch of text here, from which I’ll quote more than one bit, is 430–32. Note first that (431c–d) temperance, or self-mastery, obtains in the state only because “the desires of the common majority are controlled by the desires and the intelligence of the minority of better men.”⁸⁰ If that is so, then the members of the inferior multitude do not control their own desires and therefore lack the virtue of self-mastery.⁸¹ If they behave temperately, that is a feature not of their souls but of their situation, perhaps a result of sumptuary legislation, although no such thing is mentioned. The point is confirmed by Plato’s analysis of self-mastery at 430e–431a:

“Isn’t the phrase ‘self-mastery’ absurd? I mean, anyone who is his own master is also his own slave, of course, and vice versa, since it’s the same person who is the subject in all these expressions.”

“Of course.”

“What this expression means, I think,” I continued, “is that there are better and worse elements in a person’s mind, and when the part which is naturally better is in control of the worse part, then we use this phrase ‘self-mastery’ …”82

Recall, now, how temperance in the state is characterized (see beginning of this paragraph): it is the circumstance that the better part of the state is controlling the worse. Since, in an inferior person, the part better by nature lacks the power to control the worse—otherwise temperance in the commonwealth would not have to be characterized as I just reported—it follows that the members of the multitude lack the virtue of temperance. And we are indeed told that their souls display a riot of desire, “whereas simple and moderate [forms of desire] which are guided by the rational mind with its intelligence and true beliefs, are encountered only in those few people who have been endowed with excellence by their nature and their education” (431c).⁸³

It might be suggested, in mitigation of my charge that even if they behave temperately the people do not possess the virtue of temperance, that they are themselves temperate at least insofar as they accept their guardians’ control over them. Perhaps that does modify my claim. But, even so, it remains true that the people are able to be temperate only when in a relationship with higher others in the community. As Plato himself says: “unlike courage and wisdom, both of which imbued the community with their respective qualities while being properties of only a part of the community, self-discipline literally spans the whole octaval spread of the community. … we couldn’t go wrong if we claimed that self-discipline was this unanimity, a harmony between the naturally worse and naturally better elements of society as to which of them should rule both in a community and in every individual” (431e–432a).⁸⁴ My point can be put thus: there is temperance, so characterized, in Plato’s state only because there cannot be temperance, so characterized, in the inferior members of it. If they had self-control, they would not need to be controlled by their governors.85 A man cannot be his own master if he needs to be under another’s mastery.⁸⁶

22. Low-grade people are in every sense incapable of virtue except when they are appropriately related to people of a different grade. But something like the opposite might seem to be true of those possessed of golden nature, that is, it might seem that commerce with people of other grades detracts from, or threatens, the virtue of the guardians. To be sure, the guardians require a community with low-grade people in it in order to be formed into virtuous people, if only because even guardians need to eat and someone has to produce the food: and, since they also need to keep on eating once their studies are consummated and they are ready to embark on the supremely just life, the life most in contact with justice, the life of philosophy, they need a wider supporting community even then. But this doesn’t mean that they need a wider community to be virtuous as such. As far as what they need is concerned, they just need a community to stay alive, and they only need a wider community to be virtuous because they can’t be virtuous if they aren’t alive, and the wider community is needed for being alive. It is not because of the nature of their souls that they need a wider-than-guardian community to be virtuous, but because of the nature of their perishable bodies, while it is because of the nature of their souls that the lower orders need people of other grades to be around. They need them to keep them in order. (Deliver us from temptation!)

But I said not only that the guardians don’t need other people for virtue as such, but that their case seems to be the opposite, in this respect, of the producers, and I meant by that something stronger than what I have said thus far. I meant not merely that the guardians do not need the others but that their very virtue would flourish with less restriction only if there were no others: not only do they not need to have other people around, for the sake of the stability of their virtue, but they need not to have other people around, for their virtue to flourish maximally.

The thought justifying that more extreme claim is that, insofar as the guardians turn away from the Forms and relate to other people, which they must do because they have to rule, then that must derogate from their virtue. How can it not spoil their justice, at least a little, to be in the company of the less than fully just, on the Platonic view, so strongly and repeatedly stated in the exposition of the guardians’ educational regimen, that people tend to take on the character of, or be affected by, what is in their vicinity? That’s the premise for all those cultural regulations about banning various forms of poetry and so on. (See 401c–d for future development of this theme: note “salubrious” at 401c.)87 How can they not become less just when they turn from contemplating the Forms and their fellow Forms-contemplators to contemplating the canaille? At 412d Plato says that the ruling guardians will “devote their lives to wholeheartedly doing what they regard as advantageous to the community.”⁸⁸ But is such zeal truly consistent with having to look away from the Forms and take up the toils of ruling that they face when they return to the cave? Plato expressly says, and even hopes, that the guardians will not regard ruling as a “desirable thing to do” (520d).⁸⁹ He wants rulers who don’t want to rule so that their relationship to power will not be a corrupt one. But is that consistent with the zeal that he attributes to the ruling guardians at 412d?⁹⁰ How can they devote themselves wholeheartedly to what they find undesirable? See how Plato describes their burden at 540b:

[T]hey spend most of their time doing philosophy, but when their turn comes, then for the community’s sake they become involved in its affairs and slog away at them as rulers. This is something they do as an obligation, not as a privilege. Because they have this attitude, they’re constantly training others to follow suit.⁹¹

Which is to say that they won’t monopolize power, because they don’t like exercising it.

A major question about the Republic is whether Plato succeeds in showing that a just life is a happy life. I have raised a further question: suppose Plato does show that a just life, a life of contemplation of the Forms, is a happy one, because one in which the soul is supremely well ordered. Does not the requirement that these contemplators turn from contemplation to the job of ruling then mean that they have to sacrifice not only happiness but also justice?92 Isn’t Plato asking the rulers to be unjust, or anyway less just than they could be, when he asks them to look away from the Forms? I shall first deal with that question and then address the separate “happiness” challenge.

One might think that Plato is only in trouble if one of the challenges succeeds and the other fails, since, if both succeed, if the guardians are neither just nor happy, then they are not a counterexample to Plato’s proposition that the just are happy. But Plato seeks not only to clear that proposition, that the just are happy, against a counterexample of the contemplated kind but to substantiate it, and he fails to do that if the guardians fail to illustrate both justice and happiness.

To be sure, Plato himself says that it is an entirely just demand that each guardian should do his bit of ruling: he owes that to his country. Here is Hussey’s translation of the relevant passage:

“Well then, Glaucon,” I said, “consider that we shall not then be committing any injustice against those philosophers who appear in our city. What we shall say to them will be just, when we impose on them the extra necessity of taking care of the others and guarding them. We shall say that it is reasonable, that those who in other cities turn out to be such do not take a share of the labours in those cities, since they grow up in them spontaneously, against the wishes of the constitutions of any of those cities, and it is fair that what is self-sown, since it is not dependent on anyone for being brought up, should not be willing to pay anyone the dues required for upbringing.” (520a–b) (The italicized words translate the Greek adikésomen (to do something unjust) and dikaia respectively, both rooted in dikê, the root for justice.)⁹³

But our philosophers, so Plato says, cannot say that. In all justice, they should discharge an obligation which they have to the city.

That may sound plausible to our modern ears, but wait a minute! Justice is supposed to be psychic harmony, and, if it is, then it is quite unclear that it would be unjust for the guardians not to engage in government. For if justice is psychic harmony, then the guardians are characterized by the highest form of justice only when they are doing philosophy. Plato nowhere suggests, after all, that an interest in philosophy and contemplation can be too strong in a person, and that interest is, surely, sacrificed when they step out of the ivory tower and return to the cave, or city hall, and he seems to more or less say so himself. Plato seems to need an unPlatonic concept of justice to defend his injunction that the philosophers are obliged to rule, an unPlatonic concept of justice which, moreover, in this context, recommends a course which diminishes the justice of the guardians, in the Platonic sense of “justice.” The uses of “injustice” and “just” in the passage seem to have nothing to do with justice as it is expounded in the Republic. One might conjecture that Plato thinks that those who have observed with the eye of the intellect what justice is will see that what he says in the passage is endorsed by justice, but we would simply have to take Plato’s word for that. There is no argument to substantiate it in the Republic (or elsewhere in Plato).

Let me separate two problems here. The first problem is that there is an apparently unPlatonic conception of “justice,” justice as reciprocity, at work in the 520a–b passage: Plato seems to need, and to use, an unPlatonic concept of justice to defend his injunction that philosophers are obliged to rule, and one, moreover—this is the second problem—which recommends a course which is anti- the Platonic conception of justice. The second problem is how the guardians can fail to be departing from justice in Plato’s sense when they turn to ruling.

About the first problem I can only say what I did in the penultimate sentence of the paragraph two paragraphs back. But about the second problem I suggest the following elements of a solution. The solution says that engagement in ruling does not make them less just but simply diminishes their opportunity to exercise that virtue. Their virtuous character is acquired and sustained through Forms-contemplation, but their virtue is not so precarious that it begins to decay as soon as they do something else. And that seems to me a good line of defense. It might still be true that the rulers are not as happy as they would be if all they did was contemplate the Forms: we’ll come to the happiness problem in a moment. But it works against the charge that they are less just than they would be if all they did was contemplate the Forms.

To this one might add that, while Forms-contemplation is the highest activity, it might nevertheless be an activity which can indeed reach saturation point (as just mentioned): beyond a certain amount in a given stretch of time, further Forms-contemplation could be pointless (genug shoin!).94 Just as, beyond a certain point, further weight lifting is pointless, and you should go forth and use your muscles, not build them up further. And that would mean that there could be scope for other activity, hence, in principle, for ruling, in a life that was thoroughly just.

23. I turn to the happiness charge. Here is how Glaucon formulates it at 519c–d:

“Our job as founders, then,” I said, “is to make sure that the best people come to that fundamental field of study (as we called it earlier): we must have them make the ascent we’ve been talking about and see goodness. And afterwards, once they’ve been up there and had a good look, we mustn’t let them get away with what they do at the moment.”

“Which is what?”

“Staying there,” I replied, “and refusing to come back down again to those prisoners, to share their work and their rewards, no matter whether those rewards are trivial or significant.”

“But in that case,” he protested, “we’ll be wronging them: we’ll be making the quality of their lives worse and denying them the better life they could be living, won’t we?”⁹⁵

But, so one might remind Glaucon, Plato is not committed to the proposition that his rulers’ interests are entirely in conformity with the interests of their community, and, therefore, entirely satisfied. All that Socrates has to show is that the justest people are also the happiest, that you are happier if you are just than if you are unjust, not that the just are in no way unhappy. If Plato can show that the just man is happier than anyone else, he has met the challenge at the beginning of the Republic, which was to show that the just man is happier than the unjust man. To show that he need not show that the perfectly just man is perfectly happy or even that the juster you are the happier you are, and vice versa. Even his heady claim that

[t]he happiness which people attribute to Olympic victors is due to a tiny fraction of what our guardians have. The guardians’ victory is more splendid, and their upkeep by the general populace is more thorough-going. The fruit of their victory is the preservation of the whole community, their prize the maintenance of themselves and their children with food and all of life’s essentials. During their lifetimes they are honoured by their community, and when they die they are buried in high style. (465d–e)⁹⁶

does not imply that everything in their lives is a blessing, that there is nothing they are obliged to do that conflicts with something else that they would prefer to do. Olympic victors didn’t lead perfect lives. Nobody ever promised anybody a rose garden.

24. My answer to the two charges runs, thus far, as follows. Engagement in ruling might count as diminishing the exercise of justice, but that does not mean that it diminishes the volume and purity of that virtue in the guardians’ souls. And while such engagement might indeed diminish the happiness of the guardians, they could remain happier, because just, than anyone else.

Let me now strengthen this defense of Plato further by expounding a view which says that, among nonphilosophical activity, ruling is, for Plato, a particularly apt way of completing a life both of justice and of happiness, because if you are just then you will indeed have an actual desire to rule, that will make you happy when it’s satisfied. But what would make the just have such a desire?

Following Richard Kraut,97 Irwin suggests that Plato’s theory of love explains why the philosopher-guardians have an actual desire to carry out what 520 lays on them as a reasonable and fair obligation.⁹⁸ According to that theory, which is expounded in the Symposium, we want to augment and propagate what we love, and, since the philosophers love justice or psychic harmony, they will want so far as they can to implant it in the members of the city’s other orders. So on this view, and contrary to my first excessively modest defense (see 22 above), it is a special exercise of the very virtue of justice that is involved when the guardians rule. This would mean that it is false that they rule simply to make sure that they are not themselves ruled by unjust people who would deprive them of their permanent semisabbatical. It may indeed be an unavoidable necessity (521),⁹⁹ without detracting from their possession and exercise of justice.¹⁰⁰ On this view, one might say, they do not turn their backs on the Forms when they rule: they simply apply them in practice.

(Finally, can one reconcile the Kraut/Irwin view with Republic 520d, which suggests—see above, 22—that ruling will not be “highly desirable” for the guardians? Yes, because you can have higher and lower desires. Parents who seek with enormous desire to have babies might still find it a drag to have to get up at night.)

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle, a student of Plato, also identified himself with the aristocratic cause, but he did not appeal to a realm of nature that transcended the nature of everyday experience, and he criticized Plato’s project of constructing an ideal state, charging it with an unrealistic idealism. Aristotle claimed that various provisions of the Republic were unworkable because against the grain of human nature. In particular, Plato strips the guardian class members of personal property and family ties, in the conviction that a communism of material goods and personal relations alike would bind people together. For Plato, family and private property derogate from wholehearted service to the state: they generate attachments which conflict with loyalty to the community. But Aristotle judged that without nuclear family affection and some private property an individual would not be fully formed, and that it was only on the basis of such particularist formation that a person could extend himself or herself to wider social involvement.

A word in defense of Plato here. At the end of the first paragraph of book 2 of the Politics, the book which reviews ideal states, Aristotle offers a methodological admonition which is clearly (from the context) meant to apply against Plato. He says that

when we proceed to seek for something different from the forms of government we have investigated, we shall not be thought to belong to the class of thinkers who desire at all costs to show their own ingenuity, but rather to have adopted our method in consequence of the defects we have found in existing forms.101

But it begs various questions to imply that Plato was not himself proposing to act as doctor to a deficient actuality. Plato’s ideal state promotes those virtues in which, so he believed, Athens was deficient, and there is plenty of reference to existing defects requiring remedy in the Republic. Nor is it clearly the case, as Aristotle sometimes suggests, that Plato is willing to legislate only for ideal human raw material, that he does not take people as they actually are. For, first, this characterization cannot be squared with the fact that Plato must suppose that the majority in his city will be made of inferior, bronze, stuff (see above). And second, his opinion of the human nature of even the higher citizenry cannot be entirely rosy, for otherwise it would not be necessary to educate them so assiduously over so extended a period.102

Like Plato, Aristotle rejected the Sophist opposition between nature and convention. He thought that human society could have, and often did have, a natural form: indeed he thought that all terrestrial things would achieve a perfection appropriate to themselves if allowed to undergo an unobstructed growth. So, unlike Plato, he did not look to an order of nature transcending experience which human society should emulate. The Sophists were wrong to oppose nature and convention not because a higher nature should govern convention but because men are by (ordinary, terrestrial) nature convention-making animals. Under appropriate conditions, a human community achieves a perfection proper to itself: there is no need to intercede and impose a form. One must, however, study what the circumstances are in which a harmonious structure is spontaneously achieved.

Aristotle’s emphasis in his conception of society and politics on growth and the proper conditions of it is continuous with a teleological biologism pervasive in his view of the world. Everything in nature, including its very elements (earth, air, fire, and water) possesses natural tendencies of development, tendencies which explain observable phenomena, which, consequently, are not to be explained by theories of mechanical interaction.

If you look at Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul) you will not discover a sharp opposition between vital functions such as breathing, digestion, and sleep and conscious mentation. There is not, as in Plato, a gulf between the senses and the mind, connected respectively with lower and higher orders of nature that are hostile to one another. Instead, mind grows out of sensation; the higher functions are developments of the lower ones, not supernatural activities for the time being tied to a material existence. In Plato’s supernaturalism humanity is to imitate a nature of a higher order. In Aristotle the human is nature’s supreme achievement: human life is not the imprisonment of a supernatural soul in a material body.

The natural state of a thing is its final form, the shape it takes when it is fully grown. Thus the acorn is by nature an oak, and the polis or human society is the natural destiny of the fully developed human being. When Aristotle urges that man is a political animal, that the state exists by nature, he does not mean that it has an origin connected with primitive impulses, but that it is in the nature of human beings that, when properly developed, they live in polities. Nature is associated with the fully developed rather than the primitive, and the state exists by nature because it fulfills human nature.103

There is a connection between Aristotle’s view of nature and society and his engagement in the empirical study of politics. A greater respect than Plato had for the observable world went with a greater interest than Plato had in studying it. Aristotle studied the actual conventions or nomoi that people had adopted, connecting their variations with the types of people who had adopted them. He collected 156 constitutions and wrote commentaries on them, but of that, fortunately, only the Constitution of Athens survives. Aristotle thus practiced as a dispassionate political scientist, showing like a physician what sorts of measures could be used to sustain or subvert what sorts of constitutions. Though himself favorable to aristocracy, he explained how any government, including aristocracy itself, might be resisted and destroyed by those wishing to do it in.

Plato’s temper was, manifestly, more radical than Aristotle’s. Plato thought that anything short of the ideal was not really worth striving for, whereas Aristotle found something of value in virtually any human association. Aristotle was prepared to advise states of all kinds on how best to preserve their stability, because he believed that every human community must be realizing some of the goals he hoped to fulfill in his ideal scheme. Aristotle was a physician to actual states, prescribing, with great diagnostic insight, various medicines for various ailments in the social structure. But Plato could never prescribe anything but the most drastic form of surgery. His advice would always be: scrap your existing institutions, recast your city in the mold of the ideal. The poet Ezra Pound wrote, “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.”¹⁰⁴ Plato agrees. Aristotle does not. And he is right. For to treat as worthless anything which does not fully embody our highest ideals is to take a dangerous and ultimately self-destructive course, both in politics and in ordinary life.

Because of his focus on the real world, Aristotle can claim the title “father of political science,” for he did not restrict himself to the normative questions that were the main preoccupation of his predecessors. But he also displays his preferences, and in his own fashion perpetuates the reversion to pre-Sophistic tradition that Plato had effected. He believes in a natural division of mankind into freemen and slaves, a division warranted by the fact that some people possess only an inferior sort of rational capacity (they can carry out but not clearheadedly formulate plans) and are best suited to serve those who are more generously endowed. And he urges that the best possible state is a democracy in form, economically based on a class of small farmers. These will be too far from the Assembly, he points out, to visit it very often and disturb its functioning. For Aristotle everything in nature and society has a natural relationship of subordination to something else. The body exists to further the purposes of the soul, the passions exist to further the purposes of intellect and morality, and the lesser classes in the state exist to further the purposes of men of leisure who pursue knowledge and engage in civic life.

Aristotle’s preferred community is a small community. He argues for severe restrictions on the size of the polis. The Sophists, Socrates, and Plato also thought in terms of small-scale communities. Aristotle himself was tutor to Alexander the Great, but I do not think he realized that his pupil would bring an end to the context which Aristotle and his predecessors thought necessary for successful politics, through his conquest of Greece and Asia and his synthesis of Greece and the Near East into one vast Hellenistic world.

For Aristotle, man is a political animal, an animal in a polis. This is much less true, in one of the senses that it carries, of Plato, for whom, one might claim, government is a distraction from the highest human fulfillment, in which those capable of that fulfillment, which lies in contemplation of the eternal, engage in order to safeguard their continued contemplation of it. For Plato governing is a burden which people of culture from time to time assume, so that uncultured people will not govern and ruin the city. For Aristotle running the city is a principal way in which a person of culture can be fruitfully exercised, a form of, rather than a distraction from, self-realization. But all that is possible only in a polis, and now the polis disappears, new schools of thought arise stressing a person’s link with his fellow human beings, whoever and wherever they may be, Greek or barbarian, free or slave. The development of this theme belongs to Stoicism and to the Christian tradition.

APPENDIX 1105

Now when speaking of the original pre-Sophistic engulfment, I showed how it was associated with an aristocratic ideology. And this association is to be found in Aristotle as well, whose tendencies are no less aristocratic than Plato, but who realizes more than his teacher the natural obstacles to the realization of aristocratic principles, but also that a great deal will take care of itself as long as a polity is functioning naturally. Thus he argues forcibly for the old doctrine of the natural division of mankind into slave and free, and identifies this with the division between barbarian and Greek. The barbarian is by nature suited to serve the Greek, because of the barbarian’s inferior rationality. He develops himself to the full only when under the instruction and dominion of another: thus slavery is his natural estate. Again, most Greeks are by nature unsuited to the deliberation required in political life; they are suited to manual toil, and form the basis of the state, from whose citizenship they are excluded in Aristotle’s ideal picture. They are the matter underlying the state; its form is provided by those of a higher nature. (More on matter/form soon.)

Whereas the Sophists took law to be conventional, to be conscious human edict, and hence urged that it be changed if necessary, avoided if undesirable, Aristotle assimilates law to nature by conceiving of it as custom which develops with the development of the state. As I argued earlier, this makes law a matter of habit, of arrangements naturally adopted. Thus there is no legislature in Aristotle, as there is none in the Laws. But whereas Plato’s Laws derive from heaven, the laws in Aristotle are the outgrowth of human life on earth.

Aristotle also has arguments against the contract theory. (Arguments later lifted by Hegel in his contrast between civil society and the state.) Certain institutions in society are regulated by agreement, by contract, certain economic activities and social pastimes.106 But such contractual arrangements only form the basis on which the state, not itself contractual, grows. For the community within which they are made is not itself contracted into, either in fact or in principle. The law of the community is not, as the Sophist Lycophron¹⁰⁷ suggested, a “guarantor of men’s rights against one another.” Its purpose is loftier: the encouragement of virtue in human beings so that they develop as far as their natures are capable of doing.

Now, Aristotle is often spoken of as the father of political science, a field distinguished from political philosophy through its more empirical character. I have reserved this point until now because I want to connect it with the view of nature which he held and which I have now outlined. Again, the Sophists had opposed nature and convention; and Aristotle’s response can be phrased thus: man is by nature a convention-making, i.e. law-adopting animal, and the laws men live by and through which they realize themselves can be traced to their nature-given characters, and are not a result of will (pure free choice). This view provoked him to study the actual conventions men had adopted, the actual legal systems which grew naturally among them.108 And so he, assisted by students, collected 156 constitutions, and wrote commentaries on them thereby practicing as a dispassionate political scientist. Sadly, only the Constitution of Athens survives. He appreciated the variety of human institutions and showed how different kinds of political societies could be kept stable according to their own principles in the beyond. More on this when I contrast Aristotle with Plato.

Matter and Form

Aristotle’s optimistic approach to nature is evident in his theory of matter and form, a theory which applies to all things in the universe, and whose influence can be identified in many of his formulations in the Politics. Everything is divided into matter and form. But of everything we can ask—what is its matter, what is its form? We can define the matter of a thing as that out of which it has been made, the stuff it is made of, and the form is that into which it has been made, the shape it has assumed at the end of its development. Matter and form are relative terms, for the same thing can be form relative to one thing and matter relative to another. It will be form relative to something lower than it in the scale of development, matter relative to something higher than it in that scale. Thus earth (cold and dry), air (hot and wet), fire (dry and hot), and water (wet and cold) are form relative to primary matter; but matter relative to substances like copper and brass and human flesh which are formed out of them. Again, copper and brass will be matter relative to bronze, a form of copper and brass; bronze will be matter relative to a statue of Venus. Human flesh will be matter relative to the bodily form of a human being, and the same body will be matter when compared to the human soul, the principle which unites and gives shape and purpose and structure to the activity of the body. Thus the master/slave relation of which I spoke before is a totality of which the master is the formative principle, the source of direction, and the slave provides the material basis for achieving things.

The passage from matter to form is the actualization of a potentiality. The copper and brass are potentially bronze; physical flesh is potentially ensouled; the Greek and barbarian are potentially master and slave, in a relation which assumes the form proper to their respective substance or matter. And what is superior over potentiality is actuality, which is another way of asserting the superiority of form over matter. The movement we observe in the world is everywhere a striving toward form, a tendency on the part of things to embody shape and structure. Now we know Plato also made the Forms or principles superior to matter; but he placed them in a suprasensible world, and the wise philosopher king had to try to realize them on earth. For Aristotle, Forms exist in the world itself; they are what explains what takes place within it.

Forms exist in the world. What are the consequences of this? Well, Aristotle becomes the first patron of the concrete universal (Hegel’s term). Socrates sought for a universal justice, etc., apart from particular right usages. Aristotle is concerned to find justice embedded in right usages, concerned to discover the universal in the particular: there is no abstract universal, only concrete universals. So you will not find in Aristotle the type of Socratic reasoning we found so unsatisfactory: A is B, C is B, but A is B through being D, so C must also be D. Aristotle is concerned with how the universal embodies itself differently in each particular. So Aristotle resists the idea that justice in the state must mirror justice in the individual. The general law of principle operates in several spheres, its embodiment varying according to the matter it is shaping. Again, separate kinds of goodness belong to man, woman, child, slave; separate goodnesses to ruler of a family, of a slave, of a state, because the material context of rule differs. Barker contrasts Aristotle’s view of affectional connections with Plato’s:

The argument implied by Aristotle is that the ordinary system of the family and of family relationship (1) enables A, B, and the rest to feel to a man, in their different ways and from different angles, “that keen sense of something idion [i.e. of personal interest] which the change proposed by Plato would take away or seriously diminish” (Newman’s note), and (2) enriches the man himself, who is placed in these different and individual relations to A, B, and the rest, by giving him, as it were, a number of facets, which would be absent on the Platonic plan, and the absence of which would leave him one plain, dull, and unrelieved surface.109

The point is that the universal relation of human affection is not and cannot be made a monochrome thing, but differentiates itself into specific forms for differently related people. “It is as if you were to turn harmony into mere unison, or to reduce a theme to a single beat.”¹¹⁰

Morals and Politics

In a short section in the Ethics, quoted by Barker,¹¹¹ Aristotle states his view of the relation between ethics and politics, and we may profitably examine this before passing to book 1 of the Politics. He represents human spheres of activity as a hierarchy, in which the community is the highest, because most comprehensive, and he maintains that the social good is the supreme good to which other goods must be subordinated, into which they must be integrated. This means that for Aristotle there can never be more than a superficial conflict between what is morally required and what is politically good. Where what I feel it right to do appears to conflict with the general advantage, I must be confused. Thus he says that the goodness of the man and the goodness of the citizen coincide in the well-ordered state.

Today I submit we must find this doctrine hard to accept, principally because our concepts of morality and politics have changed. For Aristotle a man’s end is to develop a good character, and this is associated with being happy. To be moral is to have a good character, fine dispositions, noble desires. And the end of the community is to develop such good characters in its members. But today we do not tend, in the West anyway, to allocate such a function to the community, or at any rate to government. In fact, the community of course “socializes” us, but (a) we sharply distinguish community and government, whereas Aristotle makes government an ineliminable aspect of community, and (b) this socialization is more making us feel bad if we don’t follow social rules, rather than implanting a healthy character in us. Where a government, like the Soviet one, explicitly states as one of its aims the education of the character of the people, we find this totalitarian. We think there are ends in politics, but we conceive of them as the production of welfare and opportunities for people, not the shaping of their characters.

And we also do not have Aristotle’s concept of morals, which we do not link so indissolubly with the virtuous man, the man who has been trained to do what is best. Aristotle’s ethics is to be contrasted with that of Kant, and we are not as far away from Kant as Aristotle is. While for Aristotle the good man is he who has good desires, for Kant the good man is he who can suppress and restrain his desires and do the right thing. Being moral in Kant is not behaving according to the dictates of a finely ordered nature, but cleaving to principle, often in defiance of the proddings of our nature. And so whereas Aristotle associates good character and happiness, we find no such association in Kant. For Kant the best man is he who has the most strength to suppress wickedness, for Aristotle he who is devoid of wickedness, who functions harmoniously.

So we do not see the good man as he who has developed a good character and we do not see the good state as that which develops good characters. So we do not share Aristotle’s conviction of the compatibility of moral and political values, and with us there are often conflicts between moral and political values. Conscientious objection does not arise as a problem for Aristotle. There are different forms of conscientious objection. There is the form where the objector wishes to lay a moral condemnation against the state. He does not experience a conflict between moral and political values, but simply sees the state as immoral. But there can be another form of conscientious objection, where the objector accepts the legitimacy of the state’s aims, say the destruction of fascism, and acknowledges only war can do this, but declares himself morally repelled by the prospect of killing another man. In such a case, unlike in my first case, a man experiences a conflict between the demands of morality and the demands of politics. And it is such a conflict which Aristotle’s philosophy does not countenance.

I now want to look at book 1 of the Politics. There is a good deal about slavery in it, and I have already spoken of that. Most of the book is fairly straightforward, and I do not propose in lectures to summarize what is straightforward in Aristotle. What I want to talk about in book 1 is Aristotle’s economic theory, because it reflects his aristocratic antibourgeois biases, and because it is historically very important. In his book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R. H. Tawney made a statement which has been cited many times since: “The last of the schoolmen was Karl Marx.”112 By the schoolmen he meant the scholastic philosophers, primary among whom was St. Thomas Aquinas. And Aquinas borrowed most of his philosophy, including his economic doctrines, from Aristotle. So the suggestion is that there are Aristotelian roots for some of Marx’s basic concepts and judgments. And they agree in both opposing the principles of capitalist society, Marx as a socialist, Aristotle as an aristocrat. I shall show how this Aristotelian anticipation of Marx is to be found in book 1.

A key distinction in Marx’s economics is that between use-value and exchange-value. The use-value of a product is determined by the extent to which it satisfies human needs. Its exchange-value is determined by the number of products or the amount of money it will command on the market. Now capitalist society is a society whose principle is production for exchange. The worker produces products which he does not use: they are appropriated by the capitalist who does not use them either, but exchanges them on the market, so that he can buy more means of production, wherewith to produce more products to buy more means of production … So the whole society is geared to more and more production, not to more and more satisfaction of human needs. The use-value of a product is secondary for capitalism, whose energies are directed to producing more and more, without limit; to accumulating exchange-value, rather than enjoying the wealth produced: thus “Accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the prophets.”¹¹³ The system is condemned by Marx who looks forward to the era of socialism, when production will be determined by use, directed to satisfying human requirements.

Now the distinction between use- and exchange-value can be found in Aristotle, and also the Marxian attitude of friendliness toward use-value and hostility toward exchange-value. Aristotle expresses the distinction as that between household management, which seeks to satisfy the needs of the members of a family or society, and the unlimited art of acquisition, whose aim is the unlimited accumulation of wealth, undirected to satisfying needs. Aristotle favors the feudal principle in which a body of men produce their needs, part of the product being allocated for the needs of the lord, to whom men have a certain loyalty, transcending economic bonds. He speaks of the exchange of a product as a perversion of its natural function. To take, for example, a shoe to market in the hope of selling it for gain is disparaged: “Since the shoe has not been made for the purpose of being exchanged the use which is being made of it is not its proper and peculiar use.”114 This must be read in conjunction with “[Nature] makes each separate thing for a separate end; and she does so because each instrument has the finest finish when it serves a single purpose and not a variety of purposes.”¹¹⁵ Thus the merchant who uses the shoe only to exchange it is misusing it. Like Marx, Aristotle fulminates against the unlimited desire for wealth, dissociated from the needs it is the purpose of wealth to satisfy, the worship of accumulation as such. Again, Marx had said that man’s products should satisfy his needs so that he can exercise his skills, release his potentialities, in emancipation from economics. When all human talents are harnessed to economic life, man is a degraded being. We find the same feeling in Aristotle.

[Those engaging in the art of acquisition use] each and every capacity in a way not consonant with its nature. The proper function of courage, for example, is not to produce money, but to give confidence. The same is true of military and medical ability; neither has the function of producing money: the one has the function of producing victory, and the other that of producing health. But those of whom we are speaking turn all such capacities into forms of the art of acquisition, as though to make money were the one aim and everything else must contribute to that aim.¹¹⁶

Of course Aristotle is not a socialist, because he believes in production for use within a hierarchy, rather than in an egalitarian community. But the comparison just shows how much feudalism, which capitalism destroyed, and socialism, which seeks to replace capitalism, have in common. There are expressly feudal elements in Aristotle to which Marx would not subscribe. The art of war is represented as a natural way of gaining commodities-for-use.117 We know how this art was glorified in the Middle Ages. That it is feudal in character is urged by Schumpeter, the theorist of capitalism, who sees wars in the capitalist era as atavistic reversions, leftovers from precapitalist societies. The idea is that the merchant, the bourgeois man, wants peace between states, for the purpose of carrying out world trade. World trade is not something to which aristocrats, against trade as such, incline.¹¹⁸ This puts Aristotle in touch with the Old Oligarch, a pre-Sophistic defender of aristocracy against the rising bourgeoisie who would have razed the Piraeus to the ground as the source of degeneration in Athens.¹¹⁹

Aristotle also anticipates another element in Marxism, the idea that the nature of a state, the form of a government, is largely determined by the class composition of its members, and that a change in political life is a direct consequence of a change in the socioeconomic fundament of politics. It is in book 4, chapter 3,¹²⁰ that the first thesis is explicitly stated. And the second can be found in book 5, chapter 2, paragraph 6, where a disproportionate increase in the power of a class is presented as an occasion of revolution.¹²¹

Aristotle as Follower and Critic of Plato

I have already spoken of the temperamental difference between Plato and Aristotle, and have suggested the difference in tone in their response to the Sophists. If we want to employ labels, we can call Aristotle a conservative and Plato a reactionary. A reactionary is a radical conservative. He wants to use every means to instate a hierarchical government, and eliminate the power the people have won for themselves. A conservative seeks what is good in what exists, and reflects wisely that popular power is only apparent. More generally, apart from the common right-wing political allegiance, a radical hopes to change the world; a conservative subscribes to Bradley’s statement that “[t]he wish to be better than the world is already to be on the threshold of immorality.”¹²² The wish to propose principles to the world of politics which develops its own principles is a futile and dangerous wish. So everywhere in Aristotle we find expressions of what might be called good Tory sense: let’s not rock the boat, let’s enjoy what we can by keeping things as they are.

But while these arguments go to show that in some cases, and at some times, law ought to be changed, there is another point of view from which it would appear that change is a matter which needs great caution. When we reflect that the improvement likely to be effected may be small, and that it is a bad thing to accustom men to abrogate laws light-heartedly, it becomes clear that there are some defects, both in legislation and in government, which had better be left untouched. The benefit of change will be less than the loss which is likely to result if men fall into the habit of disobeying the government.123

Now let us look more particularly at Aristotle’s differences from and agreements with Plato. First I shall treat book 2, where he criticizes Plato’s Republic explicitly. Then I shall show that throughout Aristotle there are echoes of Plato’s teaching. Finally I shall indicate a further difference not found in book 2.

At the beginning of book 2, in chapter 1, paragraph 1, Aristotle seeks to distinguish himself from proponents of ideal states, Plato included.

When we proceed to seek for something different from the forms of government we have investigated, we shall not be thought to belong to the class of thinkers who desire at all costs to show their own ingenuity, but rather to have adopted our method in consequence of the defects we have found in existing forms.¹²⁴

But is Plato’s procedure really any different? Implied throughout the Republic is a criticism of Athens, and what Plato sponsors in his ideal state is precisely those virtues in which, according to Plato, Athens was deficient. The Republic may be unworkable, but it seems to be inspired by what Aristotle here anyway treats as legitimate, the desire to remedy existing defects. Again, it is not the case as Aristotle often suggests that Plato is interested in legislating only for ideal human raw material, and does not take men as they really are. For how does this attribution square with the fact that most of Plato’s men are men of bronze. Plato has a none-too-optimistic opinion of the human nature of the members of the Republic: that’s why even for those of higher nature he proposes such extensive education, decades long.

APPENDIX 2¹²⁵

Indeed, the factor of education in the Republic seems to be what Aristotle fails to notice, and this tends to vitiate his criticisms of Plato’s communism. He uses common sense about common men to show that they will not willingly bend to the system of communist living, but his reflections, a Platonist could argue, will not apply to the men who are educated according to the Republic’s scheme. Thus he speaks of problems of assault, unnatural affection, and homicide arising out of Plato’s scheme,126 but why should men whose souls are educated to harmony be drawn to such crimes? He speaks of discontent and dissension being bred among the auxiliaries,¹²⁷ but these men are supposed by Plato to be trained, like certain fierce dogs, to accept proper authority. Aristotle says that the evils Plato wishes to expel are not due to the absence of communism, but to wickedness in human nature, wickedness which he no doubt thought an educational system could not eliminate.¹²⁸ But he never argues that it can’t. And so he does not properly meet Plato’s challenge.

Aristotle also gives an absurd moral argument against communism, to the effect that, even if it succeeds, it will so unify the men in the ruling class in the Republic that they will have no chance to exercise charity and benevolence toward one another.¹²⁹ This argument is on a level with that given by some Christians in the nineteeth century against relief of the poor—that it destroys the possibility of the virtue of charity; or public education—it eradicates the virtue of responsibility in fathers. Whether you find such an argument compelling depends on whether you see being moral as something necessary to keep society together, or as something valuable in itself, such that something of value would be lost if society could be kept together without it. I incline to the former view. Being moral serves a certain function. This is its justification. Where that function is otherwise served, morality loses its value.

But the gist of Aristotle’s attack is his inability to believe that a man can sustain affection and concern for hundreds of people in an intense way.¹³⁰ He would thus have to accuse the poet John Donne of speaking senselessly when he asserts his sense of connection with all mankind. Now I think a deep feeling of affection for many many people can exist when people are thrown together in a political movement, inspired by ideals. Anyone who knows what relations between people can sometimes be like within a communist movement knows this. And Plato’s rulers are like people bound to one another through the ideals of a movement to which they all belong. Plato thought the feeling of affection could be generated in his communism because he had an insight into the nature of totalitarian culture, an insight Aristotle lacked.

Finally, Aristotle claims that the farmers and artisans in Plato’s state will be rebellious, will resent supporting the guardians.131 But he does not show why Plato is wrong in thinking that they will in fact give their allegiance because they will benefit from the settled order Guardian rule brings to a community, which, according to Plato, men would cling to if they ever experienced it.

Let me now point out echoes of Plato in Aristotle’s political theory, some of a general kind, some on points of detail. I shall instance four interesting ones, then go on to some contrasts.

(1) There is a point which Aristotle recurrently makes, advancing it for the first time in book 1.2.8. This is his claim that although the human association comes into being in order to sustain people in existence, its ultimate raison d’être is to provide opportunity for the good life.¹³² I want to suggest that there is nothing distinctively Aristotelian about this point. It is unquestionably implied in Plato’s Republic, which explains the origin of the state in human needs which require a social division of labor for their satisfaction, which Plato delineates as the “healthy state,” but which also sees the end of the state as the nurture of souls into harmony and justice. The same is true of the origin and value of guardians. They are introduced to protect the (now luxurious) state, but the ultimate value of having them is so that philosophy may be instantiated in the world.

So they agree, in a broad sense, on the origin and end of the state, but probably Plato thought that its proper end was never truly catered for in actual states, whereas Aristotle probably identified some good, something of value in social life as such, even in deficient states. And in Plato society is more or less a launching pad for individual virtue, the harmony in the soul; whereas in Aristotle individual virtue is to a much greater extent realized in and through social relations. The good ruler in Aristotle, unlike in Plato, is not submitting to the burdens of living in a cave, but is fully content as a ruler, shows his full development in his relations with other men.¹³³

(2) Now just as the state, for both, has the original purpose of sustaining material needs and the ultimate purpose of catering for the needs of the soul, so, for both, there are members of the state occupied with the primitive purpose and others with the more lofty one. For Plato’s third estate provides for the physical needs of everyone, including the guardians, but is not invited to enjoy the pleasures of philosophy. And for Aristotle, farmers and artisans are not or should not, properly speaking, be a part of the state, but only its necessary condition. They ought not to share in that citizenship, that knowledge of how to rule and how to obey, which is so essential in Aristotle’s view of human virtue, the knowledge, in brief, of how to behave in the most excellent way toward your fellow men. This is reserved for a small class who do not engage in physical labor.

Of course, there is once again a difference to be noted. For while Aristotle would wish the working class out of civil life, he feels it would be folly to exclude them utterly. And so he says:

It may be also be argued, from another point of view, that there is serious risk in not letting them have some share in the enjoyment of power; for a state with a body of disenfranchised citizens who are numerous and poor must necessarily be a state full of enemies.134

And he decides they may be given certain limited civic rights and powers, large enough to satisfy them, too little to create problems. Again we can think of him saying to Plato, “Look, friend, don’t worry. You are too frightened of giving a sop to the masses.”

Any craving which the masses may feel for position and power will be satisfied if they are given the right of electing magistrates and calling them to account. Indeed there are instances which show that the masses will be contented with a still smaller measure of power.¹³⁵

(3) Both think in medicinal terms about the state, speak of its health, trace its characteristic illnesses, its pathology (Plato in book 9, Aristotle throughout the work). But the difference between the two is the difference between the pure diagnostician and the healer. For Aristotle seeks to show states, any kind of states including tyranny, how they can repair and avoid damage to their particular bodies politic. He lists numerous devices whereby power can be consolidated, order restored or preserved. Plato only shows how order breaks down. And the reason why he doesn’t attempt what Aristotle does is not because Aristotle is a Machiavellian prepared to suggest devices even to bad states, whereas Plato is more pure, but because Plato firmly believes that once the rot has set in, there is nothing for it; there is no returning to a healthier condition. He does not believe that diseases in society can be halted so that any society can be improved. The only thing you can do to secure social order is to raze everything to the ground, expel all those over ten, and build afresh on new principles. Ezra Pound said, “What thou lovest well, remains; the rest is dross.”¹³⁶ Plato agrees. Aristotle doesn’t. This is the difference between an uncompromising radical and a mellow conservative.

(4) Finally there is an echo in Aristotle of Plato’s strictures on extreme democracy. Remember Plato’s account of the life led by the democratic man, “He spends his hours pursuing the pleasure of the moment.”137 Plato’s disapproval of this disorderliness is repeated in Aristotle:

The democratic … ends with the view that “liberty and equality” consist in “doing what one likes.” The result of such a view is that, in these extreme democracies, each may live as he likes—or as Euripides says, “For any end he chances to desire.”¹³⁸

In both, there is drawn an antithesis between democracy and good order. And Aristotle also accepts Plato’s idea that order is secured when each man sticks to one function.¹³⁹ In particular, he believes in a rotation of power among the citizens, obeying and ruling in turn, learning how to rule by learning how to obey, and vice versa.

So these are four similarities, though not complete similarities. I now pass on to three decisive differences, in addition to those which arose in book 2.

(1)¹⁴⁰ Whereas both want to give office to the best and wisest men, the men whom we many call men of merit (and Aristotle uses this term), they offer very different reasons for doing so, reasons connected with their differing evaluations of the happiness to be derived from ruling. For whereas Plato wishes to install men of merit because in that way the state will be best served, Aristotle assigns power to men of merit because this is a reward for their excellence. Power is a prize in Aristotle, and the best man or men deserve to have it. For Plato, he should be given it because he will make best use of it. Indeed, for Plato, political power is no reward for the man who has become a philosopher. It is a burden he has to assume.

This difference is connected with their different concepts of justice. Each believes it is just to give power to men of merit, Plato because they are best suited to this function, Aristotle because they most deserve this reward. For Aristotle justice consists in the distribution of goods and positions to men according to a principle of equality. For Plato it is the distribution of men into positions according to the functions that have to be fulfilled in society. And Aristotle distinguishes two notions of equality, arithmetical, or numerical, and geometric, or proportional. The first is the democratic notion which he rejects, and consists in giving each man the same amount of everything, including the same chance at political office; the second, more aristocratic notion, is the distribution of gifts to men in proportion to merit, though Aristotle sometimes slips into saying in proportion to merit and wealth, although he does connect the two: “Nobility of birth … simply consists in an inherited mixture of wealth and merit.”141 “It may be remarked that while oligarchy is characterized by good birth, wealth and culture, the attributes of democracy would appear to be the very opposite—low birth, poverty, and vulgarity.”¹⁴²

This idea of geometric equality was not original with Aristotle. It dates from the aristocratic Pythagoreans of the fifth century, and can be found in Plato too, but again, tied to the idea of function, rather than reward. In sum Plato’s justice distributes duties according to capacity, Aristotle’s according to desert.¹⁴³

(2) The next difference emerges in Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s healthy state. You remember that Plato introduces no government in that state. A governing authority is only required, in the form of guardians, once we pass beyond it into the luxurious state. Aristotle objects that even the primitive state must have a government:

He begins by stating that the four most necessary elements for the constitution of a state are weavers, farmers, shoemakers and builders. … as though a state merely existed for the supply of necessities, and not rather to achieve the Good … The four original parts—or whatever may be the number of the elements forming the association—will require some authority to dispense justice and to determine what is just.¹⁴⁴

Now we can take Plato as saying: if men were restrained in their desires, they could live in a primitive healthy anarchic community, without a government. Once appetite asserts itself more strongly, once we cater to Glaucon’s demands for luxury, a government becomes necessary; we need a political life in addition to economic and social life. But once we have political life, we can develop a spiritual life for the guardians, which transcends political life. For Aristotle you cannot conceive of society, even a primitive one, without government (this is the force of his criticism at 4.4.13 just cited) and also, as I said before, political life is in itself valuable for in governing and being governed men can express their highest faculties and abilities.

(3) Finally, Plato and Aristotle have divergent assessments on what to expect of the judgment of a group of men collected together. Aristotle has faith in it; Plato distrusts it. Aristotle says,

Just as a feast to which many people contribute is better than one provided by a single person, so, and for the same reason, the masses can come to a better decision in many matters, than any one individual. Again a numerous body is less likely to be corrupted. A large body of water is not so liable to contamination as a small; and the people is not so liable to corruption as the few. The judgement of a single man is bound to be corrupted when he is overpowered by anger, or by any other similar emotion; but it is not so easy for all to get angry and go wrong simultaneously.145

Let me immediately say that Aristotle is speaking only of citizens here, in his restricted sense: he is not propounding democratic ideology. Plato would raise his eyebrows at all this talk about the incorruptibility of a group of men. He had more insight into mob psychology, into how emotion could more easily sway a man when he was in a group. And once again I want to say he appreciated, what Aristotle didn’t, the culture of totalitarianism, a point I made in connection with his belief, attacked by Aristotle, that universal affection might prevail among the guardians, and a point equally applicable here.

If we now turn our attention away from the specific lines of Aristotle’s thought, and the question how he answers the Sophists, and how he echoes and also differs from Plato, we can safely make the general statement, that the political thought of Aristotle, like that of his predecessors, is firmly fixed on the conception of man living in a small community, to which the term “polis” referred. The questions of politics were framed in terms of such a small-scale social unit, however divergent the answers given by the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and when Aristotle argues for the interdependence of man and society, for the fact that man can only fulfill himself in community and does so fully in community, he has in mind a community of the shape and size of the Greek city-state. In states beyond that size, the values derived from social living are not to be had.¹⁴⁶ But while Aristotle is committing his thoughts to paper, the death-knell of the civilization he is extolling is being sounded. Macedonia is ending the possibility of society on a small scale, through her conquest of Greece and Asia, her synthesis of Hellenes and Barbarians into one Hellenistic world. The political thought of this world does not respect the walls of the polis, and in a way, it does not respect politics itself. It is apolitical in force, urging men to find salvation in private life. Man has not found it possible to enjoy the values the polis brought in the huge states which succeed the polis. The Christianity of Augustine enforces this disposition. The Civitas Terrena is an inferior order; the true social order is the Civitas Dei, beyond this world. Only in the modern era do thinkers again seek to weld individual and society together in harmonious union, do they try to revivify the legacy of Greece. For this is the aspiration of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. But Rousseau realizes that the satisfactions to be gained from political life are difficult to attain in a large country like France. He becomes a tragic proponent of decentralization, conscious of the futility of his own proposals. Hegel does not oppose the large modern state but deceives himself into thinking that it can weld individual to community just as the polis did. Each man can fulfill himself freely and fully by performing his social duties, concentrating on the activities proper to his station. Marx’s thought takes a different turn. If Rousseau recognized that classical values could not be realized in the modern state, and Hegel pretended they could, Marx demanded that the state be abolished and the values be realized in stateless community. Where Hegel falsified reality and thus came to terms with it, Marx saw the reality and refused to make his peace with it. The modern world, dominated by the hopes of these thinkers, is also not at peace with itself.

1 Plato, The Republic (358c–359b), p. 46.

2 Not all contractarian accounts of justice debase it. Rawls’s contractarian account notoriously—if that is the right word!—doesn’t. But Glaucon’s does.

3 He responds to Glaucon as though he’s responding to the sharp contrast between nature and convention in Antiphon’s poem: see below.

4 Robin Waterfield, commenting on 359b of the Republic at p. 386 of his translation.

5 For that concept of engulfment, see my History, Labour, and Freedom, pp. 187–89.

6 Though I am not myself sure that it actually is: see Roger Wertheimer, The Significance of Sense: his case for the univocity of the modal “must” might be extended to the word “law,” as designating what must happen.

7 The early Greeks, so my colleague Myles Burnyeat says, had no concept of a law of nature as such, but only of natural regularities that reflect justice. [This is the first of a number of footnotes in which Cohen quotes or responds to comments attributed to Myles Burnyeat. Reprinted with kind permission of Myles Burnyeat—Ed.]

8 Quoted in Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 130. This is Theophrastus reporting Anaximander, and Hussey, The Presocratics, p. 23, translates it as follows: “[Anaximander says that] the destruction of things that are [that is, that exist] takes place by their turning back into those things from which they had their origin, according to necessity; for they make requital and recompense to one another for their injustice, according to the assessment of Time.” Hussey remarks that “Time” may here refer to “a divine power, namely the Unbounded,” which imposes the retributive law. (Ibid., p. 24.)

9 Quoted in Barnes, The Presocratic Philosphers, p. 131.

10 See on Anaximander, Irwin, Classical Thought, p. 23; on Heraclitus, ibid., pp. 47, 52. And consider Hussey, The Presocratics, p. 17: The “easily observable cycles [of nature] must have been the best guarantee for the Milesians of the existence of a controlling law in the universe: the parallel with the periodic rotation of political office necessary among equals was close at hand.” See ibid., p. 40, for nuance in the relationship between human and divine law in Heraclitus, and pp. 48–49 on some possible differences between the Anaximanderian and Heraclitean conceptions of natural justice, also discussed by Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 130.

11 Heraclitus, quoted by Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 98.

12 Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, pp. 97–98.

13 For an interesting discussion of the texts of Anaximander and Heraclitus used above, see Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 129ff. Barnes says on p. 130 that Anaximander was “seduced” by the fact that nomos and dike applied both to human and to natural law. I think it far more likely that the double application reflected a conceptual assimilation than that it generated it.

14 Irwin, Classical Thought, p. 39.

15 Hussey, The Presocratics, p. 19.

16 Ibid., p. 47.

17 Ibid., p. 29.

18 [The text at this point has the comment: “[See, however, Hussey’s good critique of this].” This refers to a set of notes Edward Hussey gave to Cohen. I thank Edward Hussey for this information.—Ed.]

19 For similar structure of blamability in Confucius, see Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure, p. 189.

20 Plato, Protagoras, introduction.

21 “Sophists, with their practical interest in law-court speeches, were particularly interested in questions of guilt and responsibility, and the cases in which a human agent could claim to have been ‘overcome’ by some force so that the act in question was not truly his. But the greatest insight into the complexity of human motivation at this time is to be found in the Attic tragedians, and in the delicately clinical analyses of Thucydides” (Hussey, The Presocratics, pp. 122–23).

22 Myles Burnyeat says that this attribution misuses the text, which says that “[e]yes and ears are poor witnesses for men, if they have barbarian souls” (Fragment 107, Diels-Kanz), and that in this sense he would have said that most Greeks had barbarian souls. But (1) how does Burnyeat know the latter? and (2) there would still be a link to ethnic barbarian-ness. (Consider “goyishe kop” [Yiddish for “gentile head,” a remark indicating that gentiles are not as clever as Jews.—Ed.]).

23 Quoted by Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 114.

24 See Schlaifer, “Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle.”

25 [A note in the text at this point says: “The development of this claim below needs wholesale clarification.”—Ed.]

26 [“Beautiful people have beautiful things,” or, alternatively, “Nice people have nice things.”—Ed.]

27 [This is a slightly inaccurate account of two lines from the poem “Is There for Honest Poverty,” also known as “A Man’s a Man for A’ That.” The correct couplet is this:

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.

—Burns, Selected Poems, p. 181.—Ed.]

28 Myles Burnyeat admonishes: But Pindar also said—laws differ from state to state, and each praises their own. Pindar is singing to tyrants, who aren’t ruling because that’s how it’s always been, they seized power. See also the different poet Simonides, near beginning of Protagoras. So some say this, some say the other, and so the contrast is OK, but not the temporal contrast.

29 On the comparative neglect of ethics in pre-Socratic philosophy, see Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 121–22.

30 Hussey, The Presocratics, p. 116.

31 [A footnote here says: “Myles: there are only two relevant texts: Antiphon, whom I quote later, and Hippias in the Gorgias [CHECK].”—Ed.]

32 Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 98. Dodds reflects on the significance of this: “We can see why Plato, like the Nazis and the Russians, wished to restrict the opportunities of foreign travel. (He would forbid it to persons under forty: an experience so unsettling is only safe when middle age has fortified the mind against the infiltration of new ideas; and even then he would put the returned traveller into a sort of intellectual quarantine until he has been pronounced free from germs of dangerous thought.”) See Plato Laws, 950d, 952b–d. Also the permitted travel would only be on public duty, “as a herald or on an embassy, or on a sacred mission” (Plato, Laws 950d, p. 461).

33 Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 98.

34 For ambiguities in that distinction, on which at least some Sophists played, see Hussey, The Presocratics, pp. 123–25.

35 “It may not be superfluous to point out that thinking in these terms could lead to widely different conclusions according to the meaning you assigned to the terms themselves. Nomos could stand for the Conglomerate, conceived as the inherited burden of irrational custom; or it could stand for an arbitrary rule consciously imposed by certain classes in their own interest; or it could stand for a rational system of State law, the achievement which distinguished Greeks from barbarians. Similarly Physis could represent an unwritten, unconditionally valid ‘natural law,’ against the particularism of local custom; or it could represent the ‘natural rights’ of the individual, against the arbitrary requirements of the State; and this in turn could pass—as always happens when rights are asserted without a corresponding recognition of duties—into a pure anarchic immoralism, the ‘natural right of the stronger’ as expounded by the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue and by Callicles in the Gorgias. It is not surprising that an antithesis whose terms were so ambiguous led to a vast amount of argument at cross-purposes. But through the fog of confused and for us fragmentary controversy we can dimly perceive two great issues being fought out. One is the ethical question concerning the source and the validity of moral and political obligation. The other is the psychological question concerning the springs of human conduct—why do men behave as they do, and how can they be induced to behave better?” Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 182–83.

36 [A footnote appears here: “Myles [Burnyeat]: indeed, maybe none did, because Thrasymachus is merely descriptive. He doesn’t appeal to nature, Callicles isn’t a Sophist, and Antiphon … might just have been describing the difference between nature and law, as Barnes says. … Is this consistent with the Antiphon text, whose translation Myles does not impugn?”—Ed.]

37 “When law and human nature conflict, which ought we to follow? Is the social restraint which law imposes on nature a good or a bad thing? For the Sophists that was the grand question. They did not all answer it in the same way. Protagoras’ view of the matter, as represented by Plato, is much like that of Herodotus (who may well have been influenced by him). There are better and worse laws, but the laws of any state are valid for that state for so long as the people believe in them. It is the business of a wise man to get the laws improved by peaceful propaganda. But laws there must be: without diké and aidos, respect for the legal and moral rights of others, there can be no civilization; life in the state of nature is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Protagoras himself drafted a legal code for the new colony at Thurii, and since he did so as the trusted friend of Pericles we can infer that he was considered a sound democrat. He belonged to the optimistic generation which grew up immediately after the Persian Wars, the generation which gave currency to the idea of progress.” Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 99.

38 (1) The promise of improvement was a potentially dangerous one. According to Irwin (Classical Thought, p. 63), “The sophists aroused both enthusiasm and suspicion. They claimed to add something useful to the gentleman’s traditional upbringing, based on Homer, the poets, and the laws of the city. Their claims aroused suspicion that their teaching would be subversive. Many sophists fully accepted conventional norms and moral beliefs; and to this extent suspicion was unjustified. But the claim to improve traditional education implied scope for criticism; and to this extent social and political conservatives were right to be suspicious.”

(2) Hussey describes the “prevailing spirit of optimism” characterizing “the older generation of Sophists: … Protagoras, Gorgias, and Hippias. It merged with the scepticism of the age to produce a cheerfully pragmatic attitude towards life, and a conviction that the proper study of mankind was man. The irreducible variety of human behaviour and character was accepted, and above all there was a faith in the ability of the human mind to surmount almost all obstacles by intelligence, especially when intelligence was accumulated and organised as a body of skill and knowledge, as a techne. The concept of techne had long been present in the Greek language, but at this time it was sharpened and made more significant. It came to suggest not simply a traditional skill or craft but a clearly articulated system of theoretical or practical knowledge, organised according to the nature of the subject—in other words, it took on much of the sense of the word ‘science’ at the present day. It is as professors of a newly self-conscious techne, the ‘science of speaking,’ that the Sophists must be seen” (The Presocratics, p. 114).

39 Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 99.

40 [The text here contains a comment attributed to Myles Burnyeat: “Text Dodds bases this on is in Plato’s Protagoras, where justice and piety are relative, but goodness and advantage are not. So you can ask whether a community’s laws are advantageous to it. The utilitarian philosophy requires the nature/convention distinction. (This supports my position.)”—Ed.]

41 [The text here contains a comment attributed to Myles Burnyeat: “it’s Guthrie who says this, but he doesn’t support it well.”—Ed.]

42 Quoted in Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 101. Dodds comments interestingly on Sophistic antimoralism:

A liberalism which is merely individualist, which does not take the community as its moral unit, is always in danger of giving birth to its opposite, an individualism which is the reverse of liberal. The idea of nature was a critical weapon with two edges. Nature assures us that distinctions of birth and blood rest on arbitrary convention—man was created free. And liberalism welcomes the assurance. But suppose nature whispers that democratic justice and obedience to the will of the people are also an arbitrary convention, that man was created free to be himself and push the weak to the wall? So long as it treats the individual as an ultimate moral unit liberalism has no effective answer to Callicles. And Callicles is in a sense its child. Certainly he was no Sophist: he represents himself as a practical man who despises Sophists. And certainly Plato was right in making Gorgias shrink from Calliclean conclusions: the older Sophists were as anxious as Jeremy Bentham to fit their individualism into the framework of traditional ethical teaching. Yet it was they or their pupils who furnished Callicles with his intellectual weapons. Phusis became the slogan of the robber-individual and the robber-society, as “the survival of the fittest” was in the later nineteenth century and as “realism” is today. (The Ancient Concept of Progress, pp. 103–4)

43 Quoted in Irwin, Classical Thought, p. 57; I think Jonathan Barnes’s unwillingness to agree that Antiphon attacks nomos here is perverse: see The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 513ff. On pp. 513–14 Barnes writes: “Antiphon does not say ‘Follow nature when you can get away with it’; he asserts, as a statement of fact and not a suggestion for action, that if you do follow nature and get away with it you will act in your own interests.”

Antiphon says:

Justice, then, consists in not transgressing the laws and customs of the city of which one is a citizen. It follows that the way for a man to be just with most advantage to himself is for him to respect the laws when in presence of witnesses, but when he is alone and unwitnessed to respect the commands of nature. What the laws command is an extraneous imposition; what nature commands is a constraint that is part of our very being. The law is an artificial convention, not a natural growth; but nature is natural not conventional. If, then, you transgress the laws, you are free from shame and from penalty—provided that those who participate in the convention do not know, but not otherwise; whereas if you seek to repress, beyond the bounds of possibility, what inheres in your nature, the resulting damage to you cannot be any the less for being kept private, nor any the greater for being made public, because the damage is caused not by what people think but by what actually happens.

The point to which these considerations are leading is this: that many duties imposed by law are hostile to nature. Laws have been made for the eyes, to tell them what they shall and shall not see; for the tongue, what it shall and shall not say; for the hands, what they shall and shall not do; for the feet, where they shall and shall not go; for the mind, what it shall and shall not desire. Can it really be that what the laws forbid men is no less repugnant and alien to nature than what they command?

… If, then, we consider rightly, it is not true that what is painful benefits nature more than what is pleasant; and it is not true either that what is in man’s interest is the painful rather than the pleasant things. What is truly good for a man must benefit him, not damage him. (Quoted from Hussey, The Presocratics, pp. 124–25)

Myles thinks it’s not perverse: that Antiphon just contrasts nomos and phusis, but doesn’t say what to do about it. I think that mistakes the tone of the text.

44 See my Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, p. 107.

45 See, again, ibid., chap. 4, sec. 4, “Revolutionary Value of the Distinction” (between the matter and the form of society), pp. 195–98.

46 Translation from Barnes, “New Light on Antiphon,” p. 5.

47 Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 101.

48 Irwin, Classical Thought, p. 13:

Homer largely ignores the effects of the observance of Homeric morality on the non-heroic classes who are its victims. He attends to them in just one episode in the Iliad. Thersites—a brash, obstreperous, and (for good measure) ugly rabble-rouser, corresponding to some people’s prejudices about trade-union leaders—presents a good argument against the kings and their outlook, denouncing them as selfish parasites wasting the resources of the community. He is answered by the skilful debater Odysseus; this time, however, Odysseus relies not on his debating skill, but on forcible suppression. Homer is not the last conservative to approve of this treatment of subversive arguments presented by unmannerly people who do not know their place. Nor is he the last to represent the lower classes as agreeing with such treatment for those who complain about their betters.

49 Myles: But in Plato’s dialogues, so do Protagoras and Hippias.

50 Pindar, The Odes of Pindar, “Olympia 2,” p. 8.

51 Aeschylus, The Persians, p. 139.

52 [At this point, there is a comment: “Not for lecture: Aristotle Politics Bk IV, Ch XIII, para 8 is amusing in the present connection. For a perhaps exaggerated presentation of the significance of the offer to teach effective speech, see Hussey, The Pre-Socratics, p. 115.” The intended passage from Aristotle is probably this: “The poor will keep quiet even without sharing in the honours, provided no one outrages them or takes away any of their property. (This, however, is not easy; for those who have a part in the government do not always happen to be courteous.)” Aristotle, Politics: Books III and IV, p. 108.—Ed.]

53 More on the Sophists as teachers, from Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 103.

True, the Sophists were not required to teach a particular official doctrine, as many European professors are today; but neither were they free, like English professors, to inflict what they pleased on their pupils. They depended for a livelihood on their fees, as we do not; we can bore our pupils with impunity, they could not. Hence demand exercised a dangerous control over supply. What such men as Protagoras would have liked to teach, if I understand them rightly, was simply the art of citizenship; what the discontented young aristocrats of Athens required them to teach was something more specific—the art of acquiring personal power in a democratic society. If the seed of the new learning produced a strange crop, we must remember that Alcibiades was a pupil of Socrates, and blame the soil before we blame the seed.

54 [There is a footnote at this point that reads: “See, now, NB—Burnyeat, ‘The Impiety of Socrates’.” Presumably Cohen intended to revisit this section in the light of Burnyeat’s paper, published in 1997.—Ed.]

55 Nagel, The Last Word.

56 [The text at this point includes an aside: “Possibly: excursus on the nature of ordinary language philosophy, and why, pace Arne Naess, it doesn’t do surveys of how people speak. See Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?.”—Ed.]

57 [The text at this point includes the comment “(Santayana on the Timaeus).” It is not clear what this refers to, although Santayana’s marginal notes on the Timaeus have now been published. See Santayana, Marginalia, Book Two.—Ed.]

58 In representative democracy, on the Burke/Mill view, you could want your representative to make the decision, e.g. because you think he’s good at telling what the order of value is.

59 Plato Republic, p. 46.

60 Ibid., p. 128.

61 See, further, ibid. (451d), p. 162; Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, p. 300; Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, pp. 80–81.

62 They are a nuisance philosophically. I rather doubt, for example, that they constitute a fourth grade of person. They’re probably just enslaved conquered people, of different flavors. That is, they’re not slaves because of their low-grade flavor. It is, however, of immense historical and ideological interest that Plato mentions them in this throwaway fashion: that I do not doubt.

63 Plato, Republic, pp. 151–52.

64 Plato, Laws (888–89), pp. 631–32.

65 Stevenson, “Persuasive Definitions.”

66 Plato, Republic, p. 58.

67 Ibid. (419a), p. 122.

68 Ibid. (372e), p. 64.

69 Ibid., p. 389.

70 Ibid., 218–19.

71 Ibid., p. 155.

72 Ibid., p. 60.

73 Ibid., p. 94.

74 Ibid. (374c), p. 65.

75 [At this point the text contains the note: “[explain].”—Ed.]

76 Plato, Republic, p. 142. Myles Burnyeat comments: Plato’s audience would have realised that this was a very important boundary line. If they could butt into fighting, they could butt into ruling. Ordinary folk could man the triremes, but hoplites needed potatoes to arm themselves, and cavalry need to be able to afford horses.

77 Ibid., p. 155.

78 We can represent the matter in a 2-by-2 matrix:

	Liberal	Totalitarian
Democratic	liberal democracy	Chinese cultural revolution (in its self-description)
Authoritarian	some enlightened despotisms	Saddam Hussein

79 For bald confusion of (1) with (2), see 370a et circa, Plato, Republic, p. 60. He confuses justification of the division of labor on grounds of efficiency with justifying it on the grounds that people have different aptitudes.

80 Ibid., p. 138.

81 One may go further, and ask whether the auxiliaries, for their part, are truly courageous. For the Laches teaches that real courage requires wisdom, and the auxiliaries are merely indoctrinated. They indeed hold fast to what courage requires, but, as book 4 says, they act according to what their rulers say is or is not to be feared.

82 Ibid., p. 138.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., p. 139.

85 (1) For difficulties in Plato’s account of temperance, and their possible resolution, see Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, chap. 7, sec. 7.6, and his reference ahead.

(2) For an excellent account of the relations between justice and the other virtues, including temperance, see Irwin, ibid., pp. 206–7.

(3) [The note at this point contains the remark “For doubt that the auxiliaries really possess the virtue of courage, see 311 notes, pp. 47–8.” The “311 notes” originally written in 1965, contain at that point the following paragraph:

So the lowest class, I am maintaining, and shall return to this point under heading (3) and finally prove it, lack a characteristic virtue. But even the second class, the auxiliaries, lack a virtue they can call pre-eminently their own. The excellence allocated to them is courage. But courage for Plato is not fearlessness, for this can be foolhardy, but an ability to distinguish between situations and encounters which are dangerous and those which are safe. Now this ability can be based on knowledge or on right opinion. When it is based on knowledge it is more solidly grounded, and hence only then does the virtue flourish fully. But only the Guardians have this sort of courage. The auxiliaries whose development is arrested at the stage of right opinion do not have it. In the fullest sense then, the lowest class has no virtue, the second class only a very inferior sort, and the highest class enjoy a near-monopoly.—Ed.]

86 On the virtuelessness of the lower orders, see, further, Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 99, and his “The Analogy of Soul and State in Plato.”

87 Plato, Republic, pp. 99–100.

88 Ibid., p. 116.

89 Ibid., p. 248.

90 Ibid., p. 116.

91 Ibid., p. 275.

92 Adkins, whose pp. 290–92 of Merit and Responsibility make the case I am expounding, calls this “scandalous.”

93 [This translation was provided by Edward Hussey at Cohen’s request in 2004. Used by kind permission of Edward Hussey.—Ed.]

94 [A Yiddish expression: “enough is enough!”—Ed.]

95 Plato, Republic, p. 247.

96 Ibid., p. 181.

97 Kraut, “Egoism, Love and Political Office in Plato,” an admirably clear but implausible article, yet one well used by Irwin.

98 Irwin, Classical Thought, pp. 105–6.

99 Plato, Republic, pp. 248–49.

100 On the foregoing theme I recommend Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, pp. 290–92; Irwin, Classical Thought, pp. 105–6; Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, pp. 239–40, 241–43, 257–59; and Kraut, “Egoism, Love and Political Office in Plato.”

101 Aristotle, Politics (2.1.1), p. 39.

102 [The text at this point contains the note: “CONTINUE WITH 311, p. 76 WHEN LECTURING ON ARISTOTLE AT GREATER LENGTH.” “311” is a reference to the original lecture notes, written in 1965. It is unclear how much of this material was to be included, and so the original pp. 76 to 83, the final page of the original notes, are included as Appendix 2 to this chapter.—Ed.]

103 [At this point in the text Cohen includes the remark “(311–p. 66P3 continues here).” Once more it is unclear how much of this material Cohen intended to include, and so Appendix 1 contains the material from p. 66 to p. 76 of the 311 notes, with Appendix 2, as mentioned above, running from p. 76 to the end of the notes.—Ed.]

104 Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Canto 81), pp. 540–41.

105 [This is the section from the 311 notes, referred to above, starting from p. 66, paragraph 3.—Ed.]

106 Aristotle, Politics (3.9.13), p. 120.

107 Ibid. (3.9.8), p. 119.

108 Ibid. (3.17.1), pp. 149–50.

109 Ibid., p. 45n. The reference to Newman is to the editor of the Greek edition of the Politics, of which Barker made his translation.

110 Ibid. (2.5.14), p. 51.

111 Ibid., pp. 354–55. The sections quoted are bk. 1, chaps. 1 and 2.

112 Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 48.

113 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin), p. 742.

114 Aristotle, Politics (1.9.3), p. 23.

115 Ibid. (1.2.3), p. 3.

116 Ibid. (1.9.17), pp. 26–27.

117 Ibid. (1.8.12), p. 21.

118 Ibid. (7.6.4), p. 294.

119 On Pireaus see ibid. (5.3.15), p. 211. On Aristotle as anticipating historical materialism, see (1.8.5–8), p. 20, and the next two references.

120 Ibid. (4.3), pp. 160–62

121 Ibid. (5.2.6), p. 207.

122 Bradley, “My Station and Its Duties,” p. 199.

123 Aristotle, Politics (2.8.22–23), p. 73.

124 Ibid. (2.1.1), p. 39.

125 [Although Cohen indicates that this material is to be inserted earlier in the lectures, it is placed here as in the original 311 notes it runs on directly from the previous appendix, as will be evident from the text.—Ed.]

126 Aristotle, Politics (2.4.10) p. 47.

127 Ibid. (2.5.25), p. 54.

128 Ibid. (2.5.12), p. 50.

129 Ibid. (2.5.10), p. 50.

130 Ibid. (2.4.8), p. 47.

131 Ibid. (2.5.22), p. 53.

132 Ibid. (1.2.8), pp. 4–5.

133 Cf. ibid (7.3), pp. 287–89, which tends against this thesis.

134 Ibid. (3.11.7), pp. 124–25.

135 Ibid. (6.4.4), p. 263.

136 Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Canto 81), pp. 540–41.

137 [It is not clear which translation Cohen is using here, but the text is Plato, Republic (561d), p. 301.—Ed.]

138 Aristotle, Politics (5.9.15–16), p. 234.

139 Ibid. (2.9.13), p. 86.

140 [A note in the manuscript in handwriting reads: “Robinson’s comment p. 31 in his edition of Books III and IV dubifies much of what I say here.” Aristotle, Politics Books III and IV.—Ed.]

141 Ibid. (4.8.9), p. 176.

142 Ibid. (6.2.7), p. 259.

143 Ibid. (7.9.6), p. 302.

144 Ibid. (4.4.13), p. 165.

145 Ibid. (3.15.7, 8), p. 142.

146 He urges this strongly in ibid. (7.4.7–14), pp. 291–92.