While Plato scorned the sources of Athenian wealth (Grg. 517a-19b), he readily admitted the value of material flourishing to choice-making individuals. Plato’s Republic shows that he was also well aware of the close association of material flourishing with a community’s capacity to reap the social benefits of cooperation. The project of the Republic is the design of an ideal city by Socrates and his interlocutors. They seek to understand the role of justice in the individual soul and the community. The project begins with Socrates’ claim that organized communities originally emerged because individuals rationally desired to gain for themselves the material benefits of cooperation: Every person needs many things and no one is selfsufficiently capable of providing those things for himself. People thus require ‘‘partners and helpers’’ if they are to live truly human lives, and they ‘‘share things with one another, giving and taking, ... because each believes that this is better for himself’’ (369b-c, emphasis added). To be effective, this sharing must be systematic, and thus it requires the institutions of marketplace, currency, and retail trade (371c-d). With these premises established, and the institutions ofrational exchange in mind, Socrates sketches a small interdependent community, a modest ‘‘first polls.’’ Because the desires of the inhabitants are limited to the basics of reproduction, nourishment, and shelter, they need no elaborate systems of wealth-getting. Nor need they provide for the organized defense of their community, since their simple possessions are insufficient to attract the rapacious attention of outsiders. The level of social cooperation demanded is minimal; few incentives or sanctions are called for, so institutions can remain vestigial.
This first polis is praised by Socrates as healthy, but Glaucon berates it as fit only for pigs and demands a community provided with delectable food and real furniture (372a-d). After the first polis is abandoned, the ideal state that is the subject of the thought experiment of the Republic is presumed to be composed of individuals with Glaucon’s more expansive conception of individual utility: The expansion of the desires of the citizens to include luxury goods leads inexorably to an expanded institutional infrastructure to support and to defend them. As the polis grows in complexity, it must also occupy an expanded physical territory and gains a larger and more diverse population (372e-373d). The expansion of the imagined ideal polis sharpens the issue of public action. Socrates’ interlocutors in the Republic had previously agreed upon the ‘‘Unique Aptitude Doctrine’’ - this fundamental principle asserts that because true expertise can only be developed in a single realm of endeavor, each individual must engage in only a single occupation.8 Because the polis contains desirable luxury goods, it will excite the cupidity of outsiders and must be able to defend its members and their property from attack. The farmers, craftsmen, and traders who are the polis’ first members are forbidden by the Unique Aptitude Doctrine from serving as warriors. The ideal state’s population must therefore include a specialized military class, the Guardians (373e-374e).
What will prevent these fierce-spirited specialists in violence, with their internal monopoly of organized force, from acting violently toward one another, thus catapulting the polis into civil war, and from cooperating with one another in forcibly seizing the goods of the unarmed producing classes, thus institutionalizing piracy (375b-c, 416a-c)? Absent the right sanctions and incentives, Plato assumes that the members of the military class will choose, like Homer’s Agamemnon or the possessor of the famous invisibility-producing ‘‘ring of Gyges’’ (359c-360d), to maximize their own utility by taking the goods of others. There is no ‘‘human nature based’’ altruism (inherent concern for others’ interests) built into the foundation of Plato’s ideal state; it faces the incentive problems confronted by every complex society.
The ultimate goal of the dialogue is to demonstrate the utility of justice as an end in itself, that is, that actually being just (which includes not seizing the goods of others even if there is no chance of being caught) is more beneficial to the individual (i. e. maximizes his true utility) than is acting unjustly (by maximizing apparent utility) while appearing to be just. Yet the long dialogue also shows that genuinely grasping the true utility of justice is a difficult undertaking - perhaps achievable only by a very few specially talented individuals who have completed a long and rigorous philosophical education. Given Plato’s theory of knowledge, it is not open for him to resort to the democratic forms of knowledge aggregation and innovation discussed by Herodotus and Thucydides. Plato’s solution is to resort to the sort of strong ideology that Thucydides’ Pericles had proudly rejected and to a highly specialized form of monarchy that elides the problem exposed by Croesus’ analytic failure and consequent incapacity to fulfill his wants.
The problem is that the unarmed members of Callipolis own private property, but they will have no incentive to develop that property in economically productive ways if it is subject to arbitrary seizure by the Guardians. Plato recognized that, in the absence of secure property rights on the part of the unmilitarized classes, the society will not produce substantial returns to social cooperation and will fail. That recognition demands specialized institutions: an elaborate system of education for the Guardians, and ideological indoctrination for all citizens. The Guardians are trained from childhood to treat productive insiders as friends, rapacious outsiders as enemies. Each Guardian’s acquisitive tendencies and Tellus-like concern with posterity are, moreover, finessed by communal ownership of property, including wives and children. Specialized education and communal property in turn provide the springboard for developing the conjoined moral and metaphysical argument of the dialogue. Solving the public action problems that necessarily arise with the abandonment of the modest ‘‘first polis’’ eventually pays out in the theory of Forms, and the rule of philosopher-kings who have apprehended the Form of the Good. Thinking about rational choice and public action segues naturally to Plato’s highly distinctive conjunction of politics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
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