Republic Outline and book IV and the happy city and kallipolis and all things in common

Our first reaction to S's description of the living arrangement of the rulers at the end of Book III is to marvel at how spare they are and wonder who, in the light of such circumstances, would want to become a ruler. In Book IV S begins by answering objections about his treatment of this subject. Then he turns to some comments about defending the city, the need to preserve a city from change and, finally, the reason why laws are often more harm than good in a society.* Let's turn

[*I think that Plato has a naive view of legislation in the Republic, and that this view comes out in 425d-427c. He "corrects" this with his long treatment of actual legislation in a later work, the Laws. Some may argue that the short shrift given to legislation in the Republic is by design: Plato wants to emphasize the earlier stages of education and the centrality of shaping the soul of the young person, but I think that he hasn't fully thought through the issue of how law can be the carrier and preserver of society's values.]

briefly to each of these.

Answering Objections

Adeimantus objected to S's description in Book III--"But one might well say that your guardians are simply settled in the city like mercenaries and that all they do is watch over it" (420a). S responds: "in establishing our city, we aren't aiming to make any one group outstandingly happy but to make the whole city so, as far as possible" (420b). The task of fashioning the "happy city" is not picking out a few happy people and putting them in it, "but making the whole city happy" (420c). Because Plato is so committed to language of proportion and harmony, some of his description in 421 seems to be based on that kind of language. In any case, the auxiliaries and guardians must be "compelled and persuaded" to adopt this policy in order to make sure that each group gets "its share of happiness" (421c).

This leads to a consideration of the things that corrupt a city. Foremost on S's list are wealth and poverty (421d). The former corrupts because it encourages idleness while the latter is bad because it prevents the craftsperson from having tools and thus leads to poorer quality goods.

But such a city will be a fierce fighting machine, too. It might be able to take on and defeat two rich cities because, like a lithe runner running away from two fat opponents, he can separate the two and then dispatch of them one at a time (422c). Such a "lean and mean" state would engender fear in others for who would "choose to fight hard, lean dogs, rather than to join them in fighting fat and tender sheep?" (422d). S then wanders through a few more ideas and arrives at the point that the essential point is that the city remain one city. "As long as it is willing to remain one city, it may continue to grow, but it cannot grow beyond that point" (423b), even though Plato is tantalizingly imprecise on what he means by this.

Miscellaneous Other Points and The Need for Stability

S first clarifies what he said in Book III by stressing that there can be movement between classes of people. "If an offspring of the guardians is inferior, he must be sent off to join the other citizens and that, if the others have an able offspring, he must join the guardians" (423d). The point is that each person will be directed to "what he is naturally suited for" (423d) and that each person will do "the one work that is his own" and thus will "become not many but one" and then the whole city "will itself be naturally one not many" (423d). It really is quite a stirring vision that S describes.

Then, in passing, he mentions another idea, an idea that is not developed at all. "Marriage, the having of wives, and the procreation of children must be governed as far as possible by the old proverb: Friends possess everything in common" (423e-424a). This not only comes out of nowhere but is nowhere defended or argued. And so, I will just leave it hanging, also.

But the important point Plato gets to is that the "guardians must beware of changing to a new form of music, since it threatens the whole system" (424c). Because the establishment of rhythm in the soul is the most important part of education, any change in "rhythmic education" will be jarring to the person. What is the ultimate effect of rhythmic change? "Lawlessness easily creeps in unnoticed" (424d). Little by little this lawnessness then will flow over into the person's character and ways of life (424d). "Then, greatly increased, it steps out into private contracts, and from private contracts, Socirates, it makes its insolent way into the laws and government, until in the end it overthrows everything, public and private" (424e). All just by changing the rhythm of the music. But, on the other hand, if children play the right games from the beginning, they "absorb lawfulness from music and poetry," and such an education follows them in everything, and "fosters their growth, correcting anything in the city that may have gone wrong before" (425a).

The Role of Laws in the Kallipolis

Because of S's strong commitment to the basic education of the person, it is useless, really, to try to pass laws about how to conduct business or life. "It isn't appropriate to dictate to men who are fine and good. They'll easily find out for themselves whatever needs to be legislated about such things" (425e). However, if people are not educated correctly, no amount of passing of laws will make things better. People will spend their lives in futility, "enacting a lot of other laws and then amending them, believing that in this way they'll attain the best" (425e). This is a very amusing process for S, sort of like physicians who try to prescribe cures for people who are beyond hope. "Their medical treatment achieves nothing, except that their illness becomes worse and more complicated" (426a).

I think that beginning in 426b-c Plato lapses into some highly autobiographical material whose precise contours we cannot understand 2500 years later. That is, I see him referring to cities which do not welcome criticism (which he dislikes; 426c) as perhaps indicative of some situations he had observed in his own life. The upshot, however, is that when people who are not fully educated pass laws it is like people telling you how tall you are if they are ignorant in measurement (426d). The true lawgiver, then, oughtn't to bother with laws or constitutions for civic society--either in a badly or well-governed city, "in the former, because it's useless and accomplishes nothing; in the latter, because anyone could discover some of these things..." (427b). The city should pass some laws, but these relate to service to the gods (427c).

Now, the city is established (427d), and now we can ask where justice is. That is the subject of the next few outlines.

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