by Julia Annas
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Plato’s Republic
In the Republic, Plato tries to show that what makes a human life happy is to be found in being a good, virtuous person – something that the person has to achieve for herself, while wealth, status and other things commonly valued are irrelevant to happiness. This challenging thesis is defended by a claim that virtue consists in the proper ordering and structure of the person’s soul, one in which reason rules (see Chapter 1). A properly ordered and so virtuous soul, compared to a properly ordered and so healthy body, brings the person a happy life, while unhappiness results from the breakdown of the soul’s order. The framework of the book consists in Plato’s developing and defending this idea that, contrary to popular belief, happiness is to be found in virtue, the right ordering of the soul, even in the worst possible conditions of poverty and torture.
As a model for the structure of the soul, Plato sketches the structure of an ideal society, with different kinds of people ordered in mutually beneficial ways, ruled by ‘Guardians’ who are devoted to the common good in the way that reason is devoted to the good of the whole person. Plato develops this devotion to the common good to extremes: Guardians will have no family life or private property, and much of their life will be devoted to training in the abstract metaphysical theory of ‘Forms’ (on this see below p. 82). Strikingly, women as well as men will be Guardians – or, as they are sometimes called in view of their exacting philosophical education, ‘philosopher-kings’ (and philosopher-queens, of course).
This imaginative picture of an ideal society is developed further in narrative form in Plato’s story of Atlantis, found in his Timaeus and unfinished Critias. The ideal society, projected back into history, is ranged against the exotic, romantic but corrupt society of Atlantis, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and later sunk there. This story, which Plato never finished, is probably his most influential contribution to literature outside the philosophical tradition.
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But should we read the work this way? How else might it be read?
In the ancient world the Republic was read as one of Plato’s dialogues, but by no means as the most important or as central for his thought. When philosophers began to study Plato’s thought systematically, the dialogue they privileged was the Timaeus, a poetically written cosmology. What the Republic was mainly famous for was the idea that ideal rulers would have no private family life, but ‘women and children would be in common’, which was notorious, but was seen as eccentric rather than profound. Plato’s political ideas in the work, while criticized by Aristotle, did not enter the mainstream of ancient political thought, although political ideas in other dialogues, the Statesman and Laws, did.
In the streams of medieval transmission of Plato’s works the Republic was studied in the Islamic tradition, in which it was seen as suggestive of the idea of unified spiritual and secular power in ideal religious leaders. This idea did not develop in the Christian West; a tendency to think in terms of separation of church and state was aided by ignorance of the work until quite late. The work came into prominence at the Renaissance, and Italian thinkers who saw themselves as Platonists thought of it as an ideal Utopian fantasy. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Plato fell into philosophical neglect, and the Republic was regarded as a mere oddity, if it was regarded at all. (See box, p. 82).
Then, in the nineteenth century, Plato had a dramatic change of fortune, rising to the pre-eminence in study of ancient philosophy which he has kept ever since. The story of the rise of Plato in England is especially interesting, since there were three phases, each in response to a different philosophical approach.
The first English translation of the whole of Plato’s works was made in 1804 by Thomas Taylor. Taylor was a self-educated man for whom Plato was a labour of love in a difficult life, so it is painful to have to say that the translations are awful. Taylor saw Plato’s ideas in the framework of Neoplatonism, a later mystical elaboration of some of Plato’s metaphysical ideas, and the result appealed to Romantic writers, but had influence on Wordsworth’s poems rather than on philosophers.
The first concerted attempt to see Plato as a philosopher to whom argument matters was produced by the philosophers of the early nineteenth century that we call Utilitarians. This is quite surprising, since Utilitarian ideas about ethics and metaphysics are almost totally opposed to Plato’s. Nevertheless, it was the circle of John Stuart Mill which revived the idea of Plato as a philosopher for whom arguments are what matter. The Utilitarian philosopher George Grote’s Plato (1865), the first account based on solid scholarship, discussed every dialogue separately with its own theme and purpose, presenting Plato as engaged in an open-ended philosophical search, sometimes dogmatic and sometimes arguing against others without coming to a conclusion himself. Grote disagrees with Plato’s ideas, but sympathetically presents him as following different arguments and directions. In this picture of Plato as essentially an argumentative searcher for truth the Republic appears as just one dialogue among many, containing some political ideas which are not seen as its centrepiece.
The Plato that won out, however, was a third Plato, the Plato of the Idealist philosopher Benjamin Jowett. Jowett translated all Plato’s works (published in 1871) in a readable way that for the first time made Plato accessible to the general public. (We take translations for granted, but the Republic has been translated into languages such as Korean and Icelandic only in the last few years; when readers need to read Greek or to go through another language, Plato is accessible only to an educated élite.) Jowett saw Plato as a systematic thinker who points towards Idealism, and for him the Republic is central for the way in which he sees Plato bringing ethics and metaphysics together with politics. Moreover, he saw the political ideal as central, and in this he was followed by nearly everyone who has read the work since.
Why would Plato’s ideal state seem like a serious contribution to political thought (as opposed to a Utopian fantasy)? By the middle of the nineteenth century political thinking was concerned with issues to which the Republic seemed relevant. Democracy and universal voting, long scorned as undisciplined mob-rule, had come to be a real political option, and the democratic city-states of ancient Greece came to replace the ancient Roman republic as a model in terms of which English and American politicians and political thinkers thought about their own states. Histories of ancient Greece began to present ancient democracy in a positive light for the first time. If the Republic could be seen as Plato’s response to democracy then there were a number of contributions, negative and positive, that it could make to nineteenth-century political debate. And it was so seen.
Jowett made the Republic central to classical studies (a place it has retained ever since) and this idea of it as a serious, challenging and idealistic political text has spread all over the academic world. The nineteenth-century male élite who read the Republic at university were supposed to be inspired by it to adopt an ideal of selfless devotion to the public good, an ideal which was to serve as an antidote to economic ambition, which was seen as selfish. The idea of Guardians was seen as meritocratic: political rule should be earned by education and hard work, not inherited as an aristocratic privilege. Plato’s idea of women Guardians was useful as the expression of an ideal, reflection on which would enable men to absorb the idea of women as political equals in society, entitled to the vote and to education. (Here we And Victorian anxiety about sex entering: Jowett goes to great lengths to separate female Guardians from Plato’s ideas about ‘women and children in common’.) Plato’s insistence on a common system of public education for citizens was seen as an inspiration for the growing movement to democratize and spread education, and to see it as the state’s task to provide it. Plato’s complaints about democracy and his view that governing requires specialized knowledge were taken up in the ongoing debates about modern representative democracy and extensions of voting rights. The Republic provided materials for thinking about contem
porary issues, and nineteenth-century concerns lit up Plato’s ideal state as the controlling idea of the book.
Jowett’s interpretation of the Republic has had an astonishingly long life. In English-speaking countries, it has long outlived the vogue for Idealist philosophy, and the political debates, that produced it. Even today it is often assumed that the obvious way to read the book is as an idealist political statement, in which questions of metaphysics and ethics are developed within the framework of the ideal state. Scholars have differed on how ‘practical’ the ideas are meant to be: some have seen them as merely an ideal to inspire, others as a blueprint to put directly into practice. And during the twentieth century the general reaction to the work has changed around completely from respectful to hostile. The political battles of the Victorian era being over, the Republic has been brought into relation with darker, more modern ideas. From the 1930s, the Guardians have been seen as a totalitarian, sometimes fascist idea, and Plato’s insistence on common public education and culture has been claimed to be propaganda and brainwashing. (This idea was introduced to taint Plato by association with pre-war Nazi Germany, but has proved just as serviceable in associating him with post-war Communist régimes. See box, p. 31).
Nowadays, although the wilder and sillier accusations of fascism have been discredited, few teachers put forward the Republic as containing positive ideas to emulate and inspire. It is far more often put forward as an objectionable, élitist and exclusionary set of political ideas which students who are brought up to be tolerant and inclusive can easily criticize without exerting themselves. Still, the underlying assumption remains unchanged, that the main thing the book is doing is putting forward an account of an ideal political community whose structure and organization provide an answer to genuine questions of political debate.
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Is the Republic a political blueprint?
‘Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to Plato’s own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the State? . . . Through the Greek State Plato reveals to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of good – like the sun in the visible world; – about human perfection, which is justice – about education beginning in youth and continuing in later years – about poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind – about ‘the world’ which is the embodiment of them ” about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life . . . We have no need therefore to discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable or not . . . For the practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth.’
Benjamin Jowett, Introduction to his translation of the Republic
‘The philosopher-king is Plato himself, and the Republic is Plato’s own claim for kingly power.’
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol 1.
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It has been so useful in this role, and productive of so much philosophical engagement, that it is easy to overlook the point that the interpretation of the Republic as centrally political theory is a Victorian one, and that we no longer share the Victorians’ reasons for finding the work an evocative political model. We can see this by reflecting on the wide variety of mutually conflicting interpretations of the book that have been produced since the nineteenth century. The political interpretation has carried on, now partly because, as a work of political philosophy, the work is easy to criticize. Hence it has been treated as a teaching tool, providing an easy target for effortless demolition. But now that evaluations of the work have run the gamut, increasingly many scholars are looking at the foundations of the interpretation itself.
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The political ideal of the Republic
‘Plato is not an idealist, and the organic theory of society, as well as political totalitarianism, are altogether foreign to his thought. The human community, as he conceives it, is neither a mere juxtaposition of atomic individuals nor a superorganism living its own life apart from the individual members. It is rather a group of individuals unified by a shared purpose capable of eliciting co-operative acts.’
John Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law
‘I believe that Plato’s political programme, far from being morally superior to totalitarianism, is fundamentally identical with it.’
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol 1.
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Questioning the context and arguing with the text
Is the Republic a political work? This is too complex a question for a quick answer, but, now that you have seen that the political interpretation has a very recent particular source, you may well want to ask yourself how (if you have read the book) you were encouraged to read it, and why. You may want to go back to the text and ask for yourself whether the way you were encouraged to read it was the best way.
One very obvious point about the Republic is that the description of the ideal state takes up only a small part of the work. It is far too brief and sketchy to be a ‘blueprint’ for political action, and it does not give the work its framework. The main argument of the book is posed at the beginning of the second book and answered at the end of the ninth, and it consists of Plato’s attempt to answer the question, ‘Why should I be moral?’ Morality, it seems, benefits others rather than myself; would it not be better for me to live a kind of life in which I pursue my own ends in a way which ignores or exploits others? Plato thinks that a life in which morality is supreme can be rationally defended as the best life for an individual, even in the worst possible circumstances of the actual world. To make out his case, he introduces the ideal state as a parallel for the structure of the moral person’s soul; as he says at the end of the argument, the ideal state shows us the abstract structure which the moral person takes as an ideal to internalize in his aspiration to live a good life. But the ideal state is not the idea which structures the Republic, and the questions Plato asks about the actual world cannot be answered by reference to an ideal state without breaking the back of the work’s argument.
This is obviously only the beginning of an account of the work’s overall plan. You may want to ask yourself just what work the ideal state does in illuminating the structure of the individual’s soul. How serious are the political ideas, by comparison with those in Plato’s political discussions in the dialogues Statesman and Laws? Most radically, you may want to ask whether introducing an ideal state into an argument about individual morality was one of Plato’s better ideas. It has certainly been one of his more suggestive ones.
Why has the Republic been seen so often since the mid-nineteenth century as primarily a work of political theory? It is obvious that to some extent the Victorians, and subsequent generations, have used the Republic to develop their own ideas, and have read into the work what was necessary to do this. Plato’s Guardians have been seen as meritocratic officials by Victorians worried about creating a more just society. They have been seen as fascist Big Brothers by twentieth century thinkers worried about totalitarian states. But if the Republic can be used to come to such opposed conclusions, can we find a single political philosophy in it at all?
This can be a depressing thought. It can encourage the reflection that there is no real basis for an objective interpretation and assessment of the book, that each generation, or perhaps each reader, invents their own Republic, or at least the political philosophy in it. Outside academic postmodern circles, this is seen as a pessimistic conclusion to draw. The book certainly seems to be saying something which different readers with diverse concerns can argue about. It presents itself as a work of philosophy, encouraging us to make use of rational arguments and discussion as a way of arriving at the truth.
We can see the wild divergence of interpretations of the Republic not as a reason for lapsing into relativism about interpreting it, but as a sign of the richness and depth of the work. Even if, from Jowett onward
s, the political content of the work has been grossly inflated, the result has been a lively and creative engagement with the text, at the end of which we can look back and see how much or little there is to the development of various lines of thought in the text. We can admire the way that the Republic has entered into, and been used to further, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century political discussions. It is the best example of the way in which engaging with a work of ancient philosophy can be a two-way street; bringing it into a discussion can enrich that discussion, while also encouraging us to see the work in the light of that discussion.
