Wouldn’t we say that morality can be a property of whole communities as well as of individuals? (II, 368e)
To meet Glaucon’s challenge Socrates makes the move that dictates everything that follows. He suggests that morality may exist in communities as much as in individuals, and that since communities are bigger than individuals, it may be easier to see what morality truly consists in by first studying them. By investigating the well-ordered community, in which morality or justice, or the right and harmonious ordering, is found in the body politic, we can better understand it in the individual. It’s a very attractive idea, but its success is bound to depend upon the kind of mapping that can be made from the body politic to the individual. For example, the question of whether a state is rightly ordered will be one about the relations between its members. So what corresponds to this in an agent? An agent, considered as a mind or soul, does not have members. As a person, at best I have qualities and properties. I think things, want some things, fear others, and so forth. But how do these different features correspond to the individual citizens within a community? If the correspondence is weak or fanciful, the comparison may not be much use after all.
In general it is useful to distinguish three parts of any analogy. There is the positive part of the analogy, the negative part, and the open ground in the middle, the part that may or may not make the analogy fruitful. Consider the classic scientific analogy between a gas and a container of bouncing billiard balls, which is the model at the heart of the kinetic theory of gases. The positive part of the analogy is that molecules, like billiard balls, have velocity and momentum, that their direction can change as they collide with the sides of the container that holds them, that they therefore exert force on the walls of their container, and that they can be more or less densely packed. The negative part is, for instance, that billiard balls are large enough to handle, are manufactured, cost money, and are variously coloured. None of these features is of any interest to the way the model is to be used – but neither do they constitute disanalogies that damage the point of the comparison. Open ground in the middle might be that billiard balls have a finite size, and that when they become quite densely packed they bump into each other more than if they are thinly scattered: these features are just the ones in which the analogy directs us to think about and that might prove suggestive and fruitful, as in fact they did.
We should bear this in mind when we contemplate the ‘utopian’ character of the republic that Plato is about to sketch. There is no doubt that he himself is often taken to be the grandfather of utopian writings in general, the ancestor of endless visionary books about Arcadia, the Golden Age, the Land of Cockaigne, the Garden of Eden, or the Islands of the Blest. There are some plums in this pudding such as Thomas More’s Utopia of 1515, or Samuel Butler’s Erewhon of 1872, but in general utopian writings have a bad image nowadays. They often sound weird, impractical, visionary, if not outright mad. It does not endear us, for instance, to H. G. Wells that he wrote at least five books sketching utopias, of which A Modern Utopia of 1905 is probably the only one remembered. We tend to respond better to books in which our fears have been realized and things have gone wrong – not books that articulate their author’s dreams and ideals, but ones which reveal and focus our fears, such as George Orwell’s 1984. Hell is always easier to paint than heaven.
However, the points just made about the use of analogy help to rebut the charge of utopianism. If Republic is read as presenting a thought-experiment, it may not matter if there are unrealistic elements in it. They may be irrelevant to the point being made, and there is ample evidence that Plato does not care if his ideal community cannot actually exist. This does not automatically imply that he incurs the charge of irrelevant dreaming. For comparison, consider one of the most famous thought-experiments in the history of science. Faced with the Aristotelian theory that a heavy body falls much faster than a lighter body, Galileo asks us to imagine a falling weight in the form of a dumbbell (two heavy ends connected by a thin bar). Now imagine the bar becoming progressively thinner, until it is a mere wisp, and then imagine that it is finally severed completely. Is it really credible that the resulting weights suddenly slow down at this last moment, when they cease to be one and become two? With a jerk? Now, it is irrelevant to the power of this thought-experiment to protest (for instance) that nobody could fall alongside the dumbbell for long enough or with control enough to effect the final snip, so that the scenario is ‘impractical’. Similarly, it may be irrelevant to the purposes for which Plato is using his thought-experiment to protest about impractical elements in the design of the community. It all depends on what the positive analogy tells us about the open ground in the middle.
So let us return to the comparison with our minds. A mind can be thought of as composite, an aggregate of features just as a city is an aggregate of people. It can be thought of as ‘modular’ like a Swiss army knife, in which different tools do different jobs. It can be thought of as integrated or harmonious, or by contrast fragmented and disorderly, just as a city can be. So Plato has an ample starting point, a positive part which gets the analogy off the ground. And in fact the modularity he is going to rely upon is not at all complex. He sees the soul as built from faculties, just as the city contains different classes with different kinds of job. As in the famous image of the charioteer from the Phaedrus (246a), the soul is thought of as tripartite. There is the charioteer, reason, attempting to control the two horses, which we can label desire and spirit. The correspondence is with three classes in society. The ruling elite likewise controls the auxiliaries or military wing, and the shoemakers and the rest who produce the goods and services on which the city relies – the artisans.
Obviously, there is an ample negative part to the analogy as well. In a state some citizens are rich and some poor. They relate to each other by trade. But nothing in the mind counts as the ‘wealth’ of an individual faculty or feature, nor can we well imagine one faculty, reason, say, trading with another, such as desire. But this negative analogy may not matter. It will hinge on whether the open ground in the middle proves fruitful, and that must wait on the development. Hence, we should neither embrace the analogy uncritically nor dismiss it at the outset: everything will depend on how the comparison unfolds.
Socrates believes that communities are formed when people find they are not self-sufficient, but have requirements that involve the assistance of others. For a group or community to be effective it cannot be that everyone does every job. There has to be specialization if things are to be rightly ordered. In individual arts and crafts there will be only some people who know what to do and when to do it. There will arise mechanisms of exchange, internal and external trade, and gradual expansion as people’s wants expand and specialists become capable of meeting them. But with expansion comes encroachment on neighbours’ land, and with that comes war, requiring yet another specialization, that of the military. With this comes the need for government, the need for the ‘guardians’ or the ruling elite. These have one specialist function: the management of the community. They are the custodians of the community welfare. They require a special combination of abilities. First, they will need to be courageous, passionate and strong.
However, they should really behave with civilized gentleness towards their friends and neighbours and with ferocity towards their enemies. Otherwise it won’t be a question of waiting for others to come and destroy them: they’ll do the job first themselves. (II, 375c)
At first sight these are contradictory qualities, but Socrates reminds the audience that domestic farm dogs, for instance, are bred for just this combination of gentleness towards friends and flocks, and aggression towards things that threaten them. The combination also requires knowledge. The farm dog can tell its friends from strangers, and the ruling elite need to do something similar, for which they too will need education (II, 376a).
To us there is an obvious split between the military and the political. Military rule is one system, but not the best. For Plato it is not so clear. When he introduces his idea of the rulers, the famous ‘guardians’, he seems to blend the two, requiring a member of his elite to be both ‘passionate, quick on his feet, and strong’ (military virtues) and also to have ‘a philosopher’s love of knowledge’ (a ruler’s virtue; see II, 376c). It rapidly becomes clear, however, that what really matters to Plato is the function of protecting order in the state and sustaining its stability: the job of the ruling elite. Later on he does split the elite into two. There are the real ruling class, who eventually turn out to be philosophers, and purely military or policing functions belong to the next class down who are called ‘auxiliaries’ (II, 414b). They are told by the elite what to do. To us, this makes it a bit odd that at the beginning the real elite had to be strong and passionate as well as capable of ruling wisely. We don’t expect our political class to be good shots and fast runners. They have enforcement agencies to do that for them. But Plato seems unable to bring himself entirely to separate fitness to rule from military prowess. Greece was not very far from its heroic age (Socrates’s popularity seems largely to have stemmed from his awesome fortitude as a soldier).
So far Socrates may seem to have given a perfectly plausible story about the evolution of civil community. But beneath the surface there are currents which may already make readers uneasy. For example, he holds both that it is impossible that anyone should be suited for more than one task, and that the state or community has the right to prohibit anyone who tries, such as a shoemaker who tries to farm or weave or build (II, 374b). Good order, for Plato, implies a ‘principle of specialization’ or principle of single-mindedness. Shoemakers make shoes, and rulers rule, and this can be enforced by the collective. It also determines the kind of education different people are to get, as we shortly see. Even worse, the differential breeding and education of the ruling elite is already foreshadowed. In short an authoritarian, perhaps totalitarian, tone can already be heard. The question of how much this matters completely divides Plato’s critics from his admirers.
The view that Republic is little more than an apology for the totalitarian state was voiced in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, when the rise of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union made totalitarianism a matter of some anxiety. The charge was put fairly mildly by the left-wing Member of Parliament and classical scholar Richard Crossman, in his book Plato Today, published in 1937, and much more forcibly by Sir Karl Popper, in the first volume of his three-book classic of polemics, The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945.1 Plato is there seen as the direct ancestor of Nazism, Stalinism, and any other system that subordinates the individual to the collective. He is also seen as the dangerous, utopian social engineer, providing blueprints for improvement regardless of the messy and recalcitrant nature of the human material with which he has to work.
The intemperate nature of Popper’s attack in particular led to energetic rebuttals from the succeeding and contemporary generation of Plato scholars. There are two main lines of defence. The first stresses that Plato is not offering a blueprint for anything. Socrates several times says that neither the perfectly moral person, nor the imagined community which is to provide a model for him, need exist (e.g. V, 472d–e, or IX, 592b). It does not matter whether it is even possible that it should exist, or whether it is purely a thought-experiment. The second defence reminds us that the political philosophy of Republic is subordinate to the moral philosophy. The political descriptions are there in order to help answer Glaucon’s challenge. Morality, right order or justice in the state is the magnifying glass with which we can see those things in the individual self. So features of the state that might offend us, such as its coercive power over its members, need not do so, if they drop out of the analogy when it is put to use.
The first defence can only get us so far. Let us agree that it is perfectly in order to sketch an ideal without caring whether it is or can be realized. This is not pointless fantasy. Ideals can motivate us: we can work towards them, trying to model ourselves or our community on them. We can use them as a rule or template with which to judge how far short we fall. They can inspire us. But Crossman or Popper can then put their objection in exactly those terms: look what happens when you are inspired by the totalitarian, authoritarian, collectivist ideal. You get Hitler and Stalin, either of whom might themselves have invoked Republic as their blueprint. Even movement towards Plato’s ideal state tramples on values of democracy, egalitarianism and freedom. Far from providing an ideal, Plato has provided the road to a nightmare.
This reply is right as far as it goes, but remains far from conclusive. It all depends on what movement ‘towards’ an ideal is supposed to be. The vicious dictator, preying on both his own people and on neighbours, may not represent a ‘step’ towards the society Plato is imagining. He is not a step towards the human equivalent of the well-trained sheepdog. Neither Hitler nor Stalin has made the first step of ascent towards the character that alone qualifies someone as a ruler, and there is much more about this to come in Republic. Their radical, ghastly imperfections mean that nothing they could provide by way of government counts even as a move towards good order, the rule of morality in the state. That is indeed why Popper can terrify us by invoking them. It is why we fear them so much. But it also means that one cannot cite their infirmities as an objection to the ideal state of Republic.
This reply works, but at a cost. It is indeed true that Hitler represented no kind of candidate for Plato’s ruling elite. But the authoritarian or totalitarian state clearly shares many features with the ideal republic. If, simply in virtue of those features, we find it abominable, then the whole plan of Republic is compromised, unless indeed these features can be regarded as dispensable.
This leads to the second defence, which reminds us that the political is only offered as a magnifying glass. When we look at right order and morality in the soul, incidental features of the political state may drop out altogether. And perhaps among those incidental features are the ones involved in democracy and liberalism, and which appear to be threatened as the Platonic state develops. To take a crude example, it may be quite impossible to see what in an individual moral agent would count as there being a voting procedure (or no voting procedure) among the members of a body politic. In that case the absence of such a procedure in Plato’s state would be no obstacle to its intended use as a signpost to what would count as right order and morality in an agent. When Plato talks of coercion in the body politic, this rings alarm bells. But if the analogy is with self-control in the individual mind, then perhaps it need not do so. Self-control in an individual may be good where control of the individual by the collective is not.
This reply is also correct as far as it goes, but it also gives rather a lot of ground – more than many Platonists would like. Used indiscriminately, the defence only works by undercutting the value of the analogy in the first place. More than that, it is hard to believe that Republic has nothing interesting to say about politics. And it is impossible to accept that Plato’s construction is as tight as is here implied, as if everything is and remains subordinate to the business of meeting Glaucon’s challenge. Plato relishes the details of his state, and gives far more of them than he can transport back into the analogy with the mind. For example, some of the most notorious proposals to come concern property ownership and distribution, the equality of the sexes, eugenic policies in which the rulers lie to people about whom they may marry and when they may copulate for the sake of improving the race, and even the banishment of artists from the state. But how can those be part of the positive analogy? How would we model them in the well-ordered mind? I myself may or may not be a paragon of virtue. But in so far as I am, it can’t be because some part of me, such as reason, possesses no property, or educates another part, the women, in the same way as the men. It cannot be because one module or feature lies to another about the right person with whom to have a baby. These features belong to the negative part of the analogy. We cannot transport them across to gain any illumination about the individual mind, and what would make it just or well ordered. Hence, when we find Plato devoting pages to them, we must suspect that the politics has taken on a life of its own. Glaucon’s challenge is, at least temporarily, shelved. We remain entitled to worry about things in the ideal republic that strike us as off-colour. One of these follows immediately.