Challenged by Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic to help them understand the nature of justice and why they should want to be just, Socrates proposes founding a city in which they will find justice coming into being. He begins his task as founder by proposing the city by nature: a regime in which each member does that task for which he (or she) is best suited. The house-builder builds houses; he does not craft shoes. And the farmer farms; he does not weave cloth. This is the ‘‘true’’ city, Socrates tells Glaucon, who has just complained that such a city without any luxuries is fit for pigs (372e). Since Glaucon wants more than acorn tea and rude houses, Socrates persists and takes his audience through the founding of the fevered city of luxuries and then the city where those luxuries are purged, in part through the transformation of the poetry that is to be told to the young warriors of the city. ‘‘We’ll persuade nurses and mothers to tell the approved tales to their children and to shape their souls with tales more than their bodies with hands’’ (377c).2 And while the warriors are so molded by the revised and censored poetry, there emerges another group, the guardians, who are filtered out from the warriors to be the rulers of the entire city. Socrates offers the city his myth of the metals whereby the workers are forged in the earth with iron, the warriors or auxiliaries with silver and the rulers with gold. The myth affirms a hierarchy among the inhabitants of Callipolis according to the nature of their souls. By the middle of book 4 of the Republic Socrates announces to Adeimantus that his city has been founded (427c): the poetry has been reformed, the warriors will protect the city from its enemies, internal and external, and the warriors and guardians shall live in common, sharing goods and wives and children. Now it is time to find justice. ‘‘In the next place,’’ Socrates says to Adeimantus, ‘‘get yourself an adequate light somewhere; and look yourself - and call in your brother and Polemarchus and the others - whether we can somehow see where the justice might be and where the injustice’’ (427d).
Justice is not so easy to find in this city. First they discover wisdom: it is ‘‘good counsel [euboule]’’ (428b); then courage, ‘‘preserving of the opinion by law through education about what - and what sort of thing - is terrible’’ (429c); next, moderation, ‘‘an accord of worse and better, according to nature, as to which must rule in the city and in each one’’ (432a). And finally there is the virtue that is left over (432b, 433b), rolling around at their feet (432d), and we learn: ‘‘justice is the minding of one’s own business and not being a busybody’’ (433a). As we see in the construction of the just regime that emerges from the fevered and then the purged regime, and just as in the original city according to nature, the city of pigs according to Glaucon, justice is each person performing that task for which he or she is best suited. To slide from one job to another job is a violation now of the principle of justice.
On this understanding of justice, the regime of democratic Athens is most unjust; it is built on the principle of sharing in rule and everyone performing a multitude of tasks within the city. The system of offices distributed according to a lottery assures that individual citizens will not do only those tasks for which they are best suited. They will do all sorts of tasks - from serving as the tax collector to supervising weights and measures, from serving as road commissioners to carrying out executions. Only the ten generals, the supervisors of the water supply, the treasurers of the military funds and a limited number of other offices were elected.3 Further, the citizen who may have been the farmer and executioner one year is also sitting in the Assembly 40 times a year voting on the policies of the city. In the language of the Athenians, the citizen was a ‘‘busybody,’’ the polupragmOn, one who did many tasks and as a result exemplified exactly the opposite of what Socrates defines as justice in the Republic.4 Democratic Athens is the antithesis to the just city of Callipolis, where everyone had one task and no more,5 where there could not even be theater because in the very act of participating in the theatrical production one would play more than one role (394c-398c).
In a curious touch, in book 8 we find Socrates exploring the fundamental principles of a series of other regimes besides Callipolis, namely, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. There he offers a powerful description of what he calls a ‘‘democracy,’’ a regime with some similarities to - but also major differences from - the democracy in which Socrates and the Callicles of the Gorgias lived. This democracy is also the antithesis of Callipolis in its rejection of hierarchy and the fundamental principle of one man (woman)/one job. Indeed, the central characteristic of this regime is its refusal to identify any particular form for any being; boundaries between forms are permeable. We hear Socrates talk of animals who do not step aside for citizens (563c), of the freedom in the relations between women with men (563b), of fathers who habituate themselves to be like their children and fear their sons (562e), of teachers who fawn before their students and students who make light of their teachers (563a). And when we turn our attention to the democratic individual we find him marked by a refusal to attend to any particular job; instead ‘‘he lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing: now practicing gymnastics, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy’’ (561cd). So difficult is it in this regime to make any distinction between individuals or jobs that even executions are not carried out and we find the condemned stalking the land like a hero (558a). This floating between forms or definition captures what Socrates says is the primary characteristic of this regime. It is a regime defined most of all by freedom and license and the freedom of speech (557b). No poetry need be censored to purge citizens of extraneous desires. The city indeed welcomes the speech of all.
This is a regime marked by freedom, but not by power. It is a gentle democracy,6 but what follows is not gentle, though it imagines itself as free. It emerges from the inability to identify hierarchies, to distinguish necessary from unnecessary. It is the tyrannical regime with the tyrant at its helm that arises when ‘‘the leader of a people... tak[es] over a particularly obedient mob, does not hold back from shedding the blood of his tribe but unjustly brings charges against a man. . . and ... murders him, and doing away with a man’s life, tastes of kindred blood with unholy tongue and mouth, and banishes, and kills” (565e). Later, Socrates adds to this picture of the tyrant: ‘‘He will stick at no terrible murder, or food, or deed. Rather, love lives like a tyrant within him in all anarchy and lawlessness: and being a monarch, will lead the man whom it controls, as though he were a city, to every kind of daring that will produce wherewithal for it and the noisy crowd around it’’ (575a). The daring tyrant will attempt to subdue all those around him, to make them serve his lusts and imagined necessities. The tyrant Socrates imagines here matches the tyrant who will be extolled by Polus in the Gorgias, but it also captures fifth century Athens ruling over her empire, enslaving the Greeks.7 This is the Athens Socrates is eager to reform through his own political art in the Gorgias.
As presented in the Republic, then, democracy leads directly into the savagery of the tyrannical regime. To escape the injustices and violence of that tyranny, Socrates had founded Callipolis, though in doing so he had destroyed all freedom - from the simplest laughter, which may lead to a change in form (388e), to the censorship of poetry and the silencing of the one who sings songs not approved by the city, to the banning of performing multiple tasks in the process of self-rule. It is a regime in which a man like Socrates, who proudly proclaims himself to be a busybody (polu-pragmono, Pl. Ap. 31c), could not live and where he could not go around caring for the souls of the multiple members of the community. In the tightly organized Callipolis, Socrates’ attention to the particularity of the individual would violate the principles of the regime founded on conformity. Callipolis protects itself against tyranny through the creation of just the closed society with which Karl Popper, writing his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1962) in the wake of mid-twentieth century fascism, found so much fault.8 In the democratic city of Athens that appears in the Gorgias there is a place for the philosopher Socrates, who offers an alternative defense against tyranny. Here Socrates speaks to individuals privately, in the homes of citizens, in the agora, revising their understanding of power and freedom rather than creating the uniformity of a stultifying and sterile Callipolis. The Socrates of the Gorgias delights in multiplicity and variety; he does not excise diversity from his city. The philosopher-king yields in the Gorgias to the democratic philosopher who engages with and does not stand above the other members of the regime.
World History
