Table of Contents
Preface
It’s surprisingly common for people who have heard of the Republic to assume it is the founding document of western political philosophy. Reading it as an adult, after a teenage attempt at seventeen, my main takeaway is that Plato was sketching a hardcore totalitarian Greek ethnostate ruled by aristocracy.
The Regime
Kallipolis, Plato’s ideal city, is stratified into three classes:
- Rulers/gold. Philosophers who govern, hold no private property, receive no salary, and are forbidden to touch gold or silver.
- Guardians/silver. Soldiers and police, who are also propertyless and enforce the rulers’ will.
- Producers/bronze. Everyone else, who farm, trade, raise families, and do whatever the rulers tell them.
The whole society rests on a state-sanctioned myth which Plato calls the “noble lie”. Much later, the enemies of enlightenment argued that no state survives on rationalism alone, but ultimately rests on foundational myths, which sounds pretty similar to Plato’s intuition.
In Kallipolis, wives and children are communal among the rulers, marriage is arranged by the state, and offspring deemed “deformed” are quietly disposed of. We can clearly see eugenics built in, and there is no private life outside the state, which is a set of ideas that Fascists relied upon.
To be fair, the English title “Republic” is misleading. Politeia is closer to “regime”, so we can’t accuse Plato of hypocrisy. The closest contemporary analogs to his political project are ideologically driven one-party states where a self-selected cadre runs everything. Then again, it can be argued that all modern states are, in fact, “Republics” in disguise.
It is pretty interesting how the Republic addresses inequality. Plato argued that nobody should be richer or poorer than anyone else. It sounds similar to Leninism, which strived for aggressive redistribution but had no issues with rule by a self-selected ideological vanguard.
Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, called Plato’s blueprint totalitarianism, and it’s easy to see why.
The Authorship Mystery
The most awkward fact about the Republic is that Socrates wrote nothing, yet ends up being the main speaker. In fact, everything we know about the historical Socrates comes from his students (Plato and Xenophon), his enemies (Aristophanes), and biographers writing decades after his death.
Aristotle noticed this too and he thought the full metaphysical Theory of Forms and the political program belong to Plato, while the historical Socrates limited himself to seeking ethical definitions without separate Forms.
It would be fair to assume that the Republic is a work of fiction in which a character named Socrates says things Plato wanted to say.
Drunk Philosophy
A Greek symposium was basically a drinking party. Plato’s Symposium itself features a drunken Alcibiades crashing in halfway through to give a meandering panegyric to Socrates.
The Republic is set at a daytime conversation rather than a symposium, but I’d say all the signs are there. Thrasymachus, who shows up in Book I to argue that justice is just “the advantage of the stronger,” loses his composure under Socrates’ questioning and famously blushes when finally refuted. That doesn’t sound sober.
Gender Equality
Plato argues that women can be philosopher-kings on equal terms with men, given the same training. Most pre-modern writers do not even entertain this.
Plato starts from the premise that the guardian class needs every available recruit of talent, regardless of sex. If men and women differ only as one kind of human being differs from another, then there is no reason to deny women the same education.
Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, would later argue that women are deformed males, and that their inferiority is natural. In fourth-century BC Athens, women were excluded from voting, holding office, and the intellectual and political life of the polis, and could only own limited property through a male guardian.
The Republic was a direct attack on Greek traditions, although some argue that Plato was just a provocateur.
Notable Quotes
Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently.
But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son.
We can clearly see that Plato didn’t completely dismiss social mobility.
Our aim in founding the State was not disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole.
Utilitarian view of the state is common, and again those ideas resurfaced with the Enlightenment.
For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
Equalization of material conditions wasn’t virtue signalling indeed, Plato saw it as a way of avoiding class war.
Then no Hellene should be owned by them as a slave; that is a rule which they will observe and advise the other Hellenes to observe.
That’s why I called it an ethnostate. Republic is not an imperial project, it is only applicable to Greeks and others are considered inferior and fully outside of the political equation.
Human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.
How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
A famous cave analogy, underpinning Plato’s Theory of Forms.
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Strongly disagree there, given that Soviet literacy campaigns roughly tripled the rate, from around 30% in the Tsarist era to near-universal within a few decades, through compulsory education. Sometimes people don’t know what they need, some paternalism is helpful under certain conditions.
And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things for the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy?
Some things never change.
Conclusion
The Republic is a pretty wild, partly ironic book about a totalitarian utopia that Plato never expected to be implemented. Read it carefully, with the understanding that Socrates is just a character and many dialogues are more aimed to be provocative than to argue something seriously.
Every joke has a grain of truth, though.