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Thoughts

Republic

The Republic is in essence a dialog where Plato’s Socrates lays out what it would take to construct a utopian city.

Where forced labor doesn’t destroy one’s body and may in fact make one stronger, forced learning will never take hold in the mind. One must want to learn to actually learn. While this is surely not completely true, imagine someone that throws themselves into learning something and another that is conscripted into learning. The former will certainly attain a much deeper understanding through their education. This is important in the context of city building, because the leader that wants to lead more than learn will be inferior.

To this end, the leader that wants to govern on a high level must have essentially total control of the people. Women will be held in common, children will be raised by the state. The leader (king) must be knowledgeable in war, peace, and philosophy. This sets up a conflict already. If the children are raised by the state to be easily controlled, they will never develop into a good leader.

Assuming you can start from the ideal regime, a monarchy, after each generation of deterioration in the stock of citizens, your city will fall first into an oligarchy. The leader of this regime will certainly be cunning, as their wealth is at least a sign that they are capable of business, but not a sign that they would make a good leader. This is likely the regime of most of the planet today.

From oligarchy the next arising order will be democracy. This is lauded today, but in reality such a system only arises when there are far and few men that could be counted as leaders. The decision making falls to the common man who, without an inkling of understanding and unrestrained freedom, makes decisions based on his narrow view. These decisions will ultimately lead to a degradation of society and a clamoring for a strong leader, a tyrant.

“Well, then,” I said, “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy, I suppose-the greatest and most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom.”

From tyranny, the best a city can hope for is a “good” tyrant. This could be construed as a good king, a philosopher king. Which brings us full circle. Interestingly the only difference between the best (monarchy) and worst (tyranny) regimes is lies in the heart and mind of the leader. The middle regimes (aristocracy, oligarchy, timocracy, democracy, etc) seem to be little more than the road between the extremes.

In all regimes but a monarchy with a philosopher king sitting on the throne, the leaders and would-be leaders will plot and scheme to advance their own interests and retard the advancement of all others’ interests.

The simplest form of this kind of oppression is easy to see in the system of taxation:

“And, also, so that, becoming poor from contributing money, they will be compelled to stick to their daily business and be less inclined to plot against him?”

A similar argument can be made by replacing time with money. Instead of stealing your productivity via taxation and forcing you to “stick to their daily business”, entertainment (Hollywood) and mindless communication (social media) steal your time. There is no difference to using your time to toil for taxes and using your time to entertain yourself; at the end of the day your would-be rulers have control over you.

Plato concludes that there are three classes of humans:

“Then that’s why we assert that the three primary classes of human beings are also three: wisdom-loving, victory-loving, gain-loving.”

These map generally onto all men as:

• Wisdom-loving = philosopher/academic
• Victory-loving = armed forces member
• Gain-loving = businessman

Interpretive Essay

The second half of this book contains an essay that I think adds much to the original work. If you are studying on your own, it certainly gives you more to think of, or at least another perspective to ponder. While I don’t agree with everything said from here on, I think it is completely worth the time to read.

On the point of justice, eros and youthful passions lead Cephalus to be torn between sinning and repenting. While driven by these things one will not end up with justice or philosophy of a gentleman, they will be lead by bodily satisfactions. Only by taming this part of our soul can we be in control of ourselves and have any chance at attaining the good. This thinking is mimicked by Plato and Aristotle in other stories likening emotions to a horse that left untamed will wander hither and thither, but once tamed will take you anywhere you want to go.

Moving our attention to the city, we find that a “city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties.” These parties or faction will compete with one another and whichever wins will be the dictator of law. This competition strengthens each faction. In the end, it really doesn’t even matter which faction wins because:

There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end.

Whomever wins will use laws to maintain their dominance and restrict their competition. Education is the source of all control:

The instrument for controlling the warriors is education and, therefore, from this point forward education is the central theme of the Republic. The city’s way of life depends on the character and hence the education of the rulers.

You can indoctrinate your warriors to kill and die for you. You can leave the masses uneducated and unable to compete with you. You can give your heirs the utmost proper education so that they might maintain your legacy. Control of education is control of society.

Next we move our attention to what today we might call entertainment. On one hand entertainment can be used to sap the precious time of any would-be challengers to the leadership, but on the other it can also inspire champions of change.

Plato argues that the poet can enchant the audience and make them believe his stories. This is again a double edged sword where one can spin a tale that make you forget your woes from the unjust world you actually live in or one can lead you by inspiration to take up arms against the unjust world.

Finally, one can not talk about Plato’s Republic without mentioning the cave. In the essay Bloom argues that there are “two fatal temptations” put forth in the allegory of the cave:

The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.

The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas.

The liberation, once effected, results in great happiness; the soul carries on its proper activity with its proper objects. And, as a result, the freed man has a great contempt for the cave, its shadows and its inhabitants. He wants always to live out in the light; the others do not know they are slaves, so they are content; but he knows it and cannot bear to live among them. Nothing in the city contributes to his specific pleasures, and he wants nothing from it; he is not, as are all others, a potential exploiter of the city.

In closing Bloom reminds us that political science should help us understand regimes much like a doctor understands the body:

Political science must be evaluative; just as a doctor must know what a healthy body is, a political scientist must know what a healthy regime is. Such a political science provides a much richer and more comprehensive framework than that provided by our contemporary political science with its over- simplified dichotomies, democratic versus totalitarian or developed versus underdeveloped.

How true it rings when he speaks of our modern oversimplifications. What must Bloom think of the latest fad of forced truncation in communication - Twitter.

Further Reading

• Rousseau’s Emile, the greatest modem book on education.

Exceptional Excerpts

the only guardian of the guardians is a proper education(It is this theme to which the reader’s attention must be brought.

love of honor and love of money are said to be, and are, reproaches?

to getting away with it, we’ll organize secret societies and clubs; and there are teachers of persuasion who offer the wisdom of the public assembly and the court. On this basis, in some things we’ll persuade and in others use force; thus we’ll get the better and not pay the penalty.’

• Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give to it."

“First, as it seems, we must supervise the makers of tales; and if they make 37 a fine tale, it must be approved, but if it’s not, it must be rejected. 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. Most of those they now tell must be thrown out."

“Now I, for one, would assert that some god gave two arts to human beings for these two things, as it seems-music and ‘gymnastic for the spirited and the philosophic-not for soul and body, except incidentally, but rather for these two. He did so in order that they might be harmonized with one another by being tuned to the proper degree of tension and relaxation."

“But in truth justice was, as it seems, something of this sort; however, not with respect to a man’s minding his external business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn’t let each part in him mind other people’s business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself; he arranges himself, becomes his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts, exactly like three notes in a harmonic scale, lowest, highest and middle. And if there are some other parts in between, he binds them together and becomes entirely one from many, moderate and harmonized. Then, and only then, he acts,

“I say that one type of regime would be the one we’ve described, but it could be named in two ways,” I said. “If one exceptional man rose among the rulers, it would be called a kingship, if more, an aristocracy."

“All these women [educated as guardians] are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their tum, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent."

“It’s likely that our rulers will have to use a throng of lies and deceptions for the benefit of the ruled.

if a foolish adolescent opinion about happiness gets hold of him, it will drive him to appropriate everything in the city . with his power, and he’ll learn that Hesiod was really wise when he said that somehow ‘the half is more than the whole.’" 26

“Such a man [a true philosopher, seeker of only truth] is, further, moderate and in no way a lover of money. Money and the great expense that accompanies it are pursued for the sake of things that any other man rather than this one is likely to take seriously."

“Don’t you also share my supposition that the blame for the many’s being harshly disposed toward philosophy is on those men from outside who don’t belong and have burst in like drunken revelers, abusing one another and indulging a taste for quarreling, and who always make their arguments about persons,25 doing what is least seemly in philosophy?"

“such a man must go the longer way around and labor no less at study than at gymnastic, or else, as we were just saying, he’ll never come to the end of the greatest and most fitting study."

“Haven’t you noticed that all opinions without knowledge are ugly? The best of them are blind. Or do men who opine something true without intelligence seem to you any different from blind men who travel the right road?"

“Shall we not then,” I said, “set down as a study necessary for a warrior the ability to calculate and to number?"

“In the first place,” I said, “the man who is to take it [philosophy] up must not be lame in his love of labor, loving half the labor while having no taste for the other half This is the case when a man is a lover of gymnastic and the hunt and loves all the labor done by the body, while he isn’t a lover of learning or of listening and isn’t an inquirer, but hates the labor involved in all that. Lame as well is the man whose love of labor is directed exclusively to the other extreme."

“Because,” I said, “the free man ought not to learn any study slavishly. Forced labors performed by the body don’t make the body any worse, but no forced study abides in a soul."

“All those in the city who happen to be older than ten they will send out to the country; and taking over their children, they will rear them-far away from those dispositions they now have from their parents-in their own manners and laws that are such as we described before. And, with the city and the regime of which we were speaking thus established most quickly and easily, it will itself be happy and most profit the nation in which it comes to be."

“All right, This much has been agreed, Glaucon: for a city that is going to be governed on a high level, women must be in common, children and their entire education must be in common, and similarly the practices in war and peace must be in common, and their kings must be those among them who have proved best in philosophy and with respect to war."

[the 4 regimes are:] “the one that is praised by the many, that Cretan and Laconian regime; and second in place and second in praise, the one called oligarchy, a regime filled with throngs of evils; and this regime’s adversary, arising next in order, democracy; and then the noble tyranny at last, excelling all of these, the fourth and extreme illness of a city."

“Well, then,” I said, “from there they progress in money-making, and the more honorable they consider it, the less honorable they con- sider virtue. Or isn’t virtue in tension with wealth, as though each were lying in the scale of a balance, always inclining in opposite directions?"

“And this regime’s sympathy and total lack of pettiness in despising what we were saying so solemnly when we were founding the city-that unless a man has a transcendent nature he would never become good if from earliest childhood his play isn’t noble and all his practices aren’t such-how magnificently it tramples all this underfoot and doesn’t care at all from what kinds of practices a man goes to political action, but honors him if only he says he’s well disposed toward the multitude?"

“Then, “I said, “he [democratic man] also 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 gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him; and if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction; and if it’s money-makers, in that one. And there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life sweet, free, and blessed he follows it throughout.“22

“That a father,” I said, “habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shall before or fear of his parents - that’s so he may be free;

“Then, summing up all of these things together,” 1 said, do you notice how tender they make the citizens’ soul, so that if someone proposes anything that smacks in any way of slavery, they are irritated and can’t stand it? And they end up, as you well know, by paying no attention to the laws, written or unwritten, in order that they may avoid having any master at all."

“Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery, both for private man and city."

“Well, then,” I said, “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy, I suppose-the greatest a;nd most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom."

“But I suppose that when he is reconciled with some of his enemies outside and has destroyed the others, and there is rest from concern with them, as his first step he is always setting some war in motion, so that the people will be in need of a leader."

“And, also, so that, becoming poor from contributing money, they will be compelled to stick to their daily business and be less inclined to plot against him?"

kingly, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, tyrannic.

it’s plain to everyone that the part with which we learn is always entirely directed toward knowing the truth as it is; and of the parts, it cares least for money and opinion."

“Then that’s why we assert that the three primary classes of human beings are also three: wisdom-loving, victory-loving, gain-loving."

the kind of pleasure connected with the vision of what is cannot be tasted by anyone except the lover of wisdom."

Interpretive Essay

“For the contest is great, my dear Glaucon,” I said, “greater than it seems-this contest that Concerns becoming good or bad-so we mustn’t be tempted by honor or money or any ruling office or, for that matter, poetry, into thinking that it’s worthwhile to neglect justice and the rest of virtue."

Cephalus’ youthful passions, however appealing, seem to have led him into activities that are contrary to justice, and his old age is spent worrying about them and atoning for them. Thus, from the point of view of justice, eros is a terrible thing, a savage beast. For a man like Cephalus, life is always split between sinning and repenting. Only by the death of eros and its charms can such a gentleman become fully reliable, for his eros leads neither to justice nor philosophy but to intense, private bodily satisfaction.

Socrates, as the Republic reveals, is not averse to lies and is certainly no respecter of private property.

Thus far, Socrates has led us to the observation that in order to do good to friends and harm to enemies one need only be a philosopher and give up one’s attachments to those whom most men call friends.

The city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties, and the party which wins out over the others is the source of the law. There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end.

The carpenter’s, bricklayer’s, and plasterer’s alts are not sufficient unto themselves; they must be guided by the architect’s art. Money, or what we would call the economic system, is a sort of architectonic principle; for in ordinary cities the amount of money paid for the products of the arts determines what arts are practiced, how they are practiced, and what kind of men practice them. Money is the common denominator running through all the arts;

Money cannot discern the nature of each of the arts nor evaluate the contribution their products make to happiness; the price paid for the services of the arts is merely the reflection of the untutored tastes of the many or the rich. Money constitutes an artificial system which subordinates the higher to the lower. And the man who serves for money becomes the slave of the most authoritative voices of his own time and place, while renouncing the attempt to know, and live according to, the natural hierarchy of value. He is always torn between the demands of his art and the needs of the marketplace.

The warriors’ art, however, is really different, and its services cannot be measured by money, for money is a standard for evaluating the contributions made toward the satisfaction of desire or the” preservation of life. Spiritedness is beyond the economic system. The founders of modem economic science, who wanted it to be a universal political science, could do so only by denying the existence of spiritedness or understanding it as merely a means to self-preservation. Only men who pursue self-preservation and the gratification of bodily desire can be counted on to act according to the principles of economic “rationality."

Sheep dogs require shepherds. The warrior class would then be the link between the highest and lowest class, gaining its meaning from its service to the higher.

The instrument for controlling the warriors is education and, therefore, from this point forward education is the central theme of the Republic. The city’s way of life depends on the character and hence the education of the rulers.

The poets are taken most seriously as the makers of the horizon which constitutes the limit of men’s desire and aspiration; they form the various kinds of men, who make nations various.

He forces the poetically inclined Adeimantus to give up the greatest challenge of poetry-imitation. These are his reasons: the poet can make men believe that they see and hear his characters. This constitutes his real power-he enchants men so that they live the experiences he wishes to present. The poet hides himself behind his work, and the audience forgets, for the moment, that the world into which they enter is not the real one. The spectators have the sense of the reality of men and events which are more interesting and more beautiful than any they know in their own lives: This is what makes poetry so peculiarly attractive.

Adeimantus’ objection, then, is the same as Machiavelli’s: the best regime is a mere dream, for a good city cannot avoid ruin if it does not do the things which will enable it to survive among vicious cities.

The Enlightenment teaches that the cave can be transformed; Socrates teaches that it must be transcended and that this transcendence can be accomplished only by a few.

The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.

The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas.

The liberation, once effected, results in great happiness; the soul carries on its proper activity with its proper objects. And, as a result, the freed man has a great contempt for the cave, its shadows and its inhabitants. He wants always to live out in the light; the others do not know they are slaves, so they are content; but he knows it and cannot bear to live among them. Nothing in the city contributes to his specific pleasures, and he wants nothing from it; he is not, as are all others, a potential exploiter of the city.

Political science must be evaluative; just as a doctor must know what a healthy body is, a political scientist must know what a healthy regime is. Such a political science provides a much richer and more comprehensive framework than that provided by our contemporary political science with its over- simplified dichotomies, democratic versus totalitarian or developed versus underdeveloped.

Socrates’ political science, paradoxically, is meant to show the superiority of the private life. The most important point made in this section is that while the best city exists only in myth, the best man exists actually.

Table of Contents

• Preface 2E
• Preface
• Book 01
• Book 02
• Book 03
• Book 04
• Book 05
• Book 06
• Book 07
• Book 08
• Book 09
• Book 10
• Interpretive Essay

• Pages numbers from the pdf.

· Preface 2E

page 6:

• understands the charms—erotic, military, political, and religious–of music, which he takes to be the most authentic primitive expressions of the sours hopes and terrors. But, precisely because music is central to the soul and, the musicians are such virtuosos at plucking its chords, Socrates argues that it is imperative to think about how the development of the passions affects the whole of life and how musical pleasures may conflict with duties

• In the period just after World War II, no criticism of what Karl Popper called “the open society” was brooked. The open society was understood to be simply unproblematic, having solved the difficulties presented by older thinkers.

page 7:

• Perfect justice, Socrates argues in the dialogue, can be achieved only by suppression of the distinction between the sexes in all important matters and the admission of women on an equal footing to all activities of the city, particularly the most important, fighting and thinking.

• revolution in the family in which its functions are transferred to the community, so that women will not have to bear the double burden of career mothers. Day-care centers, abortion, and the desacralization of marriage are only a few of the easily recognizable elements of this revolution in favor of synthesizing the opposites man/woman into the unity

page 8:

• Rousseau’s Emile, the greatest modem book on education.

• If one takes the two books [Emile and Republic] together, one has the basic training necessary for the educational wars.

· Preface

page 13:

• Socrates in this passage teaches that a man of the Spartan type-the kind of man most reputed for virtue-really does not love virtue for its own sake, but for other advantages following upon it. Secretly he believes money is truly good. This is the same critique Aristotle makes of Sparta. The question raised here is whether all vulgar virtue, all non philosophic practice of the virtues, is based upon expectation of some kind of further reward or not.

page 15:

• the only guardian of the guardians is a proper education(It is this theme to which the reader’s attention must be brought.

· Book 01

page 38:

• justice, a thing more precious than a great deal of gold

page 48:

• Rulers rule for wages, not for anything derived from ruling (or any other art) in itself.

page 49:

• love of honor and love of money are said to be, and are, reproaches?

· Book 02

page 62:

• Similarly, let the unjust man also attempt unjust deeds correctly, and get away with them, if he is going to be extremely unjust. The man who is caught must be considered a poor chap. For the extreme of injustice is to seem to be just when one is not.

page 66:

• “the seeming overpowers even the truth"15 The quote is attributed to Simonides.

• as to getting away with it, we’ll organize secret societies and clubs; and there are teachers of persuasion who offer the wisdom of the public assembly and the court. On this basis, in some things we’ll persuade and in others use force; thus we’ll get the better and not pay the penalty.’

page 78:

• “Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give to it."

page 79:

• “First, as it seems, we must supervise the makers of tales; and if they make 37 a fine tale, it must be approved, but if it’s not, it must be rejected. 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. Most of those they now tell must be thrown out.”

· Book 03

page 88:

• Mentions of Hades must be censored as to allow the warriors to be courageous.

• “…but the more poetic they are, the less should they be heard by boys and men who must be free and accustomed to fearing slavery more than death.”

page 89:

• “Will we then take out the laments and wailings of famous men, too?” “If,” he said, “what went before was necessary, so is this.”

• “Then for him it is least terrible to be deprived of a son, or a brother, or money, or of anything else of the sort.” “Yes, least of all.” “Then he laments the least and bears it most gently when some such misfortune overtakes him.” “Quite so.” “So, we’d be right in taking out the wailings of renowned men and we’d give them to women-and not to the serious ones, at that-and to all the bad men. Thus the men we say we are rearing for the guardianship of the country won’t be able to stand doing things similar to those such people do.”

page 90:

• “Further, they shouldn’t be lovers of laughter either. For when a man lets himself go and laughs mightily, he also seeks a mighty change to accompany his condition.”

page 104:

• “isn’t this why the rearing in music is most sovereign? Because rhythm and harmony most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace with them; and they make a man graceful if he is correctly reared, if not, the opposite.

page 114:

• “Then, when a man gives himself to music and lets the flute play and pour into his soul through his· ears, as it were into a funnel-using those sweet, soft, wailing harmonies we were just speaking of-and spends his whole life humming and exulting in song, at first, whatever spiritedness he had; he softened like iron and made useful from having been useless and hard. But when he keeps at it without letting up and charms his spirit, he, as the next step, already begins to melt and liquefy his spirit, until he dissolves it completely and cuts out, as it were, the sinews from his soul and makes it ‘a feeble warrior.’“62

• Now what about the man who labors a great deal at gymnastic and feasts himself really well but never touches music and philosophy? At first, with his body in good condition, isn’t he filled with high thought and spirit, and doesn’t he become braver than himself?”

• “Very much.”

• “But what about when he does nothing else and never communes with a Muse? Even if there was some love of learning in his soul, be- cause it never tastes of any kind of learning or investigation nor par- takes in speech or the rest of music, doesn’t it become weak, deaf, and blind because it isn’t awakened or trained and its perceptions aren’t purified?”

• “That’s so,” he said.

• “Then, I suppose, such a man becomes a misologist 63 and unmusical. He no longer makes any use of persuasion by means of speech but goes about everything with force and savageness, like a wild beast; and he lives ignorantly and awkwardly without rhythm or grace.”

• “Now I, for one, would assert that some god gave two arts to human beings for these two things, as it seems-music and ‘gymnastic for the spirited and the philosophic-not for soul and body, except incidentally, but rather for these two. He did so in order that they might be harmonized with one another by being tuned to the proper degree of tension and relaxation."

page 117:

• Just as they lead colts to noises and confusions and observe if they’re fearful, so these men when they are young must be brought to terrors and then cast in tum into pleasures, testing them far more than gold in fire.

page 120:

• “see if this is the way they [soldiers/guardians] must live and be housed if they’re going to be such men. First, no one will possess any private property except for what’s entirely necessary. Second, no one will have any house or storeroom into which everyone who wishes can- not’ come. The sustenance, as much as is needed by moderate and courageous men who are champions of war, they’ll receive in fixed installments from the other citizens as a wage for their guarding; in such quantity that there will be no surplus for them in a year and no lack either. They’ll go regularly to mess together68 like soldiers in a camp and live a life in common. We’ll tell them that gold and silver of a divine sort from the gods they have in their soul always and have no further need of the human sort; nor is it holy to pollute the possession of the former sort by mixing it with the possession of the mortal sort

· Book 04

page 124:

• “What if they sent an embassy to the other city and told the truth? ‘We make use of neither gold nor silver, nor is it lawful for us, while it is for you. So join us in making war and keep the others’ property.’ Do you suppose any who hear that will choose to make war against solid, lean dogs4 rather than with the dogs against fat and tender sheep?”

• Divide and conquer with a twist, give all the loot to you allies. Reminds me of, though opposite, Carnegie allowing the name of a rail road he purchased (joint venture I think) to keep its name. This eased the other party who cared about such frivolities. Meanwhile Carnegie got control.

page 137:

• “Meddling among the classes, of which there are three, and ex- change with one another is the greatest harm for the city and would most correctly be called extreme evil-doing.”

• the money-making, auxiliary, and guardian classes

page 145:

• pretty much agreed that the same classes that are in the city are in the soul of each one severally and that their number is equal.”

page 147:

• “But in truth justice was, as it seems, something of this sort; however, not with respect to a man’s minding his external business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn’t let each part in him mind other people’s business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself; he arranges himself, becomes his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts, exactly like three notes in a harmonic scale, lowest, highest and middle. And if there are some other parts in between, he binds them together and becomes entirely one from many, moderate and harmonized. Then, and only then, he acts,

page 149:

• “There are,” I said, “likely to be as many types of soul as there e types of regimes possessing distinct forms.”

• “How many is that?”

• “Five of regimes,” I said, “and five of soul.”

• “Tell me what they are,” he said.

• “I say that one type of regime would be the one we’ve described, but it could be named in two ways,” I said. “If one exceptional man rose among the rulers, it would be called a kingship, if more, an aristocracy."

· Book 05

page 154:

• “If, then, we use the women for the same things as the men, they must also be taught the same things.”

page 160:

• “All these women [educated as guardians] are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their tum, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent."

page 162:

• “Do you breed from all alike, or are you eager to breed from the best as much as possible?”

• “From the best.”

• “My, my, dear comrade,” I said, “how very much we need . eminent rulers after all, if it is also the same with the human species.”

• “It’s likely that our rulers will have to use a throng of lies and deceptions for the benefit of the ruled.

page 164:

• “A woman,” I said, “beginning with her twentieth year, bears for the city up to her fortieth; and a man, beginning from the time when he passes his swiftest prime at running, [20] begets for the city up to his fifty- fifth year.”

page 166:

• “And what about the people in our city? What, in addition to citizens, does it say the rulers are?”

• “Saviors and auxiliaries,” he said.

• “And what do they call the people?”

• “Wage givers and supporters.”

• “And what do the rulers in the other cities call the people?”

• “Slaves,” he said.

page 170:

• if a foolish adolescent opinion about happiness gets hold of him, it will drive him to appropriate everything in the city . with his power, and he’ll learn that Hesiod was really wise when he said that somehow ‘the half is more than the whole.’" 26

• //Guardians shall bring their children to war. This way the children will learn and the guardians will fight fiercely, knowing their children’s lives are also at stake.

page 171:

• “Then this must be the beginning, making the children spectators of war.

page 178:

• it is by nature fitting for them both to engage in philosophy and to lead a city, and for the rest not to engage in philosophy and wisdom to follow the leader.”

page 179:

• “But the one who is willing to taste every kind of learning with gusto, and who approaches learning with delight, and is insatiable, we shall justly assert to be a philosopher, won’t we?”

· Book 06

page 189:

• “Such a man [a true philosopher, seeker of only truth] is, further, moderate and in no way a lover of money. Money and the great expense that accompanies it are pursued for the sake of things that any other man rather than this one is likely to take seriously.”

page 195:

• “Or do you too believe as do the many, that certain young men are corrupted by sophists…”

page 199:

• “So these men, for whom philosophy is most suitable, go thus into exile and leave her abandoned and unconsummated.

• “And what about this? When men unworthy of education come near her and keep her company in an unworthy way, what sort of notions and opinions will we say they beget? Won’t they be truly fit to be called sophisms,16 connected with nothing genuine or worthy of true prudence?"

• (16) A sophism is a clever trick or captious argument; it is the product of a “wise guy:” The maker of a sophism would be a sophist.

page 203:

• “Don’t you also share my supposition that the blame for the many’s being harshly disposed toward philosophy is on those men from outside who don’t belong and have burst in like drunken revelers, abusing one another and indulging a taste for quarreling, and who always make their arguments about persons,25 doing what is least seemly in philosophy?”

• //25 = Ad hominem.

page 208:

• “such a man must go the longer way around and labor no less at study than at gymnastic, or else, as we were just saying, he’ll never come to the end of the greatest and most fitting study."

page 210:

• “Haven’t you noticed that all opinions without knowledge are ugly? The best of them are blind. Or do men who opine something true without intelligence seem to you any different from blind men who travel the right road?"

· Book 07

page 225:

• “Shall we not then,” I said, “set down as a study necessary for a warrior the ability to calculate and to number?”

page 128:

• “And, further, the arts of calculation and number are both wholly concerned with number.“12

• “Quite so.”

• “Then it looks as if they lead toward truth.”

• “Preternaturally so.”

• “Therefore, as it seems, they would be among the studies we are seeking. It’s necessary for a warrior to learn them for the sake of his dispositions for the army, and for a philosopher because he must rise up out of becoming and take hold of being or else never become skilled at calculating.”

• “That’s so,” he said.

• “And our guardian is both warrior and philosopher."

page 238:

• “Is it your opinion,” I said, “that we have placed dialectic at the top of the studies

• “Keenness at studies, you blessed man,” I said, “is a prerequisite for them, and learning without difficulty. For souls, you know, are far more likely to be cowardly in severe studies than in gymnastic. The labor is closer to home in that it is the soul’s privately and not shared in common with the body.”

• “And, of course, a man with a memory and who is firm and wholly a lover of labor must be sought. Or in what way do you suppose anyone will be willing both to perform the labors of the body and to complete so much study and practice?"

• “No one would,” he said, “unless he has an entirely good nature.”

• “In the first place,” I said, “the man who is to take it [philosophy] up must not be lame in his love of labor, loving half the labor while having no taste for the other half This is the case when a man is a lover of gymnastic and the hunt and loves all the labor done by the body, while he isn’t a lover of learning or of listening and isn’t an inquirer, but hates the labor involved in all that. Lame as well is the man whose love of labor is directed exclusively to the other extreme."

page 239:

• “And likewise with respect to truth,” 1 said, “won’t we class as maimed a soul that hates the willing lie, both finding it hard to endure in itself and becoming incensed when others lie

page 240:

• “Because,” I said, “the free man ought not to learn any study slavishly. Forced labors performed by the body don’t make the body any worse, but no forced study abides in a soul."

page 244:

• “And ruling women, too, Glaucon,” I said. “Don’t suppose that what I have said applies any more to men than to women, all those who are born among them with adequate natures.”

“…when the true philosophers, either one or more, come to power in a city, they will despise the current honors and believe them to be illiberal and worth nothing. Putting what is right and the honors coming from it above all, while taking what is just as the greatest and the most necessary, and serving and fostering it, they will provide for their own city.”

• “How?” he said.

• “All those in the city who happen to be older than ten they will send out to the country; and taking over their children, they will rear them-far away from those dispositions they now have from their parents-in their own manners and laws that are such as we described before. And, with the city and the regime of which we were speaking thus established most quickly and easily, it will itself be happy and most profit the nation in which it comes to be.”

· Book 08

page 245:

• “All right, This much has been agreed, Glaucon: for a city that is going to be governed on a high level, women must be in common, children and their entire education must be in common, and similarly the practices in war and peace must be in common, and their kings must be those among them who have proved best in philosophy and with respect to war."

page 246:

• [the 4 regimes are:] “the one that is praised by the many, that Cretan and Laconian regime; and second in place and second in praise, the one called oligarchy, a regime filled with throngs of evils; and this regime’s adversary, arising next in order, democracy; and then the noble tyranny at last, excelling all of these, the fourth and extreme illness of a city."

• “For dynasties and purchased kingships and certain regimes of the sort are somewhere between these, and one would find them no less among the barbarians than the Greeks.”

page 247:

• so must we now consider first the regime that loves honor-I can give no other name that is used for it in common parlance; it should be called either timocracy or timarchy.3 And, in relation to this regime, we shall consider the like man, and after that oligarchy and an oligarchic man. Later, after having looked at democracy, we’ll view a democratic man; and fourth, having gone to the city that is under a tyranny and seen it, then looking into a tyrannic soul, we shall try to become adequate judges of the subject we pro- posed for ourselves.”

page 252:

• “And, I suppose, oligarchy would come after such a regime.”

• “What kind of arrangement do you mean by oligarchy?” he said.

• “The regime founded on a property assessment,“9 I said, “in which the rich rule and the poor man 1O has no part in ruling office."

• “I understand,” he said.

• “Mustn’t it first be told how the transformation from timarchy to oligarchy takes place?”

• “Yes.”

• “And really,” I said, “the way it is transformed is plain even to a blind man.”

• “How?”

• “The treasure house full of gold,” I said, “which each man has destroys that regime. First they seek out expenditures for themselves and pervert the laws in that direction; they themselves and their wives disobey them."

• “That’s likely,” he said.

• “Next, I suppose, one man sees the other and enters into a rivalry with him, and thus they made the multitude like themselves."

• “That’s likely.”

• “Well, then,” I said, “from there they progress in money-making, and the more honorable they consider it, the less honorable they con- sider virtue. Or isn’t virtue in tension with wealth, as though each were lying in the scale of a balance, always inclining in opposite directions?"

• “Surely, when wealth and the wealthy are honored in a city, virtue and the good men are less honorable.”

page 255:

• “There is,” he said, “no other transformation so quick and so sure from a young man who loves honor to one who loves money."

page 256:

• “For I don’t suppose,” I said, “such a man has devoted himself to education."

page 259:

• “Then democracy, I suppose, comes into being when the poor win, killing some of the others and casting out some, and share the regime and the ruling offices with those who are left on an equal basis; and, for the most part, the offices in it are given by lot."

page 260:

• “And this regime’s sympathy and total lack of pettiness in despising what we were saying so solemnly when we were founding the city-that unless a man has a transcendent nature he would never become good if from earliest childhood his play isn’t noble and all his practices aren’t such-how magnificently it tramples all this underfoot and doesn’t care at all from what kinds of practices a man goes to political action, but honors him if only he says he’s well disposed toward the multitude?"

page 264:

<a name=democratic_man”">

• “Then, “I said, “he [democratic man] also 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 gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him; and if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction; and if it’s money-makers, in that one. And there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life sweet, free, and blessed he follows it throughout.“22

page 265:

• “That a father,” I said, “habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shall before or fear of his parents - that’s so he may be free;

• “As the teacher in such a situation is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers,

page 266:

• “Then, summing up all of these things together,” 1 said, “do you notice how tender they make the citizens’ soul, so that if someone proposes anything that smacks in any way of slavery, they are irritated and can’t stand it? And they end up, as you well know, by paying no attention to the laws, written or unwritten, in order that they may avoid having any master at all."

• “Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery, both for private man and city."

• “Well, then,” I said, “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy, I suppose-the greatest a;nd most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom."

page 269:

• banishes, and kills, and hints at cancellations of debts and redistributions of land

• “Then this,” I said, “is the man who incites faction against those who have wealth.”

• “If he’s exiled and comes back in spite of his enemies, does he come back a complete tyrant?”

page 270:

• “In the first days of his time in office,” I said, “doesn’t he smile at and greet whomever he meets, and not only deny he’s a tyrant but promise much in private and public, and grant freedom from debts and distribute land to the people and those around himself, and pretend to be gracious and gentle to all?"

• “But I suppose that when he is reconciled with some of his enemies outside and has destroyed the others, and there is rest from concern with them, as his first step he is always setting some war in motion, so that the people will be in need of a leader."

• “And, also, so that, becoming poor from contributing money, they will be compelled to stick to their daily business and be less inclined to plot against him?"

· Book 09

page 281:

• “And it’s plain to everyone that there is no city more wretched than one under a tyranny and none happier than one under a kingship.”

page 285:

• kingly, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, tyrannic.

page 286:

• it’s plain to everyone that the part with which we learn is always entirely directed toward knowing the truth as it is; and of the parts, it cares least for money and opinion."

• “Then that’s why we assert that the three primary classes of human beings are also three: wisdom-loving, victory-loving, gain-loving."

• Victory-loving = honor/reputation loving.

page 287:

• the kind of pleasure connected with the vision of what is cannot be tasted by anyone except the lover of wisdom."

page 288:

• “Therefore,” I said, “as for experience, he [lover of wisdom] is the finest judge among the three men.”

• “And, moreover, only he will have gained his experience in the company of prudence.”

page 292:

• “Therefore, those who have no experience of prudence and virtue but are always living with feasts and the like are, it seems, brought down and then back again to the middle and throughout life wander in this way; but, since they don’t go beyond this, they don’t look upward toward what is truly above, nor are they ever brought to it; and they aren’t filled with what really is, nor do they taste of a pleasure that is sure and pure; rather, after the fashion of cattle, always looking down and with their heads bent to earth and table, they feed~ fattening them- selves, and copulating; and, for the sake of getting more of these things, they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of iron, killing each other be- cause they are insatiable; for they are not filling the part of themselves that is, or can contain anything, with things that are.”

· Book 10

page 308:

• “For each thing there are these three arts-one that will use, one that will make, one that will imitate.”

page 309:

• “Therefore, with respect to beauty and badness, the imitator will neither know nor opine rightly about what he imitates.”

• “Then it looks like we are pretty well agreed on these things: the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates; imitation is a kind of play and not serious; and those who take up tragic poetry in iambics and in epics are all imitators in the highest possible degree.”

page 313:

• we shall say the imitative poet produces a bad regime in the soul of each private man by making phantoms that are very far removed from the truth and by gratifying the sours foolish part

page 315:

• “For the contest is great, my dear Glaucon,” I said, “greater than it seems-this contest that Concerns becoming good or bad-so we mustn’t be tempted by honor or money or any ruling office or, for that matter, poetry, into thinking that it’s worthwhile to neglect justice and the rest of virtue."

page 323:

• who bound Ardiaeus [a terrible tyrant] and others hands, feet, and head, threw them down and stripped off their skin. They dragged them along the wayside, carding them like wool on thorns; and they indicated to those who came by for what reason this was done and that these men would be led away and thrown into Tartarus.’

· Interpretive Essay

page 341:

• Cephalus’ youthful passions, however appealing, seem to have led him into activities that are contrary to justice, and his old age is spent worrying about them and atoning for them. Thus, from the point of view of justice, eros is a terrible thing, a savage beast. For a man like Cephalus, life is always split between sinning and repenting. Only by the death of eros and its charms can such a gentleman become fully reliable, for his eros leads neither to justice nor philosophy but to intense, private bodily satisfaction.

page 344:

• the Republic culminates in the elaboration"of a regime in which the only title to property is virtue and which is hence communistic.

page 347:

• A sick friend is justly treated when given medicine whether he likes it or not.

• Concerning, why deny what the sick person wants? For their own good? Who is to tell someone else what the good is?

page 349:

• Socrates, as the Republic reveals, is not averse to lies and is certainly no respecter of private property.

page 350:

• This is what Socrates meant in the Apology when he told of his quest for wise men. Poets and statesmen, he found, knew literally nothing, whereas artisans did indeed know something. Unfortunately their knowledge was limited and partial, and Socrates said that he would prefer to be ignorant as he was than knowledgeable as they were. For they were content with their competence and closed to the larger questions. To be ignorant in Soc- rates’ way is to be open to the whole.

page 352:

• Once the distinction between what is good and one’s own is made, the principle of loyalty to family and city is undermined. In order to be just, one must seek good men wherever they may be, even in nations fighting one’s own nation. If the good must be pursued, then caring for one’s own must be extinguished, or it will make one unjust and impede the quest for the good. This undermines family and city; and they must attempt to prevent the distinction from even coming to light. Certainly, Polemarchus would regard the abandonment of his primary loyalties as the destruction of the purpose and dignity of his life. If, however, he is to be consistent with the argument, he must make this sacrifice. A man who wishes to be just must be cosmopolitan.

_ Thus far, Socrates has led us to the observation that in order to do good to friends and harm to enemies one need only be a philosopher and give up one’s attachments to those whom most men call friends.

page 356:

• The city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties, and the party which wins out over the others is the source of the law. There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end.

page 361:

• This wage-earner’s art is ubiquitous. It accompanies all of the arts and directs their action. It is thus an architectonic art. Contrary to Soc- rates’ argument that each art is complete and perfect in itself, needing nothing beyond itself, a super art is necessary to supplement all the arts.

• The carpenter’s, bricklayer’s, and plasterer’s alts are not sufficient unto themselves; they must be guided by the architect’s art. Money, or what we would call the economic system, is a sort of architectonic principle; for in ordinary cities the amount of money paid for the products of the arts determines what arts are practiced, how they are practiced, and what kind of men practice them. Money is the common denominator running through all the arts;

• Money cannot discern the nature of each of the arts nor evaluate the contribution their products make to happiness; the price paid for the services of the arts is merely the reflection of the untutored tastes of the many or the rich. Money constitutes an artificial system which subordinates the higher to the lower. And the man who serves for money becomes the slave of the most authoritative voices of his own time and place, while renouncing the attempt to know, and live according to, the natural hierarchy of value. He is always torn between the demands of his art and the needs of the marketplace.

page 369:

• According to Glaucon, the character of justice can be discovered in its origin; the nature of a thing, in his view, is to be understood by that from which it comes, by its beginning and not its end. Nature dictates the pursuit of one’s own good, but because of the scarcity of good things, this pursuit must be carried on at the expense of others. It is good to take from others what belongs to them, and it is bad to have things taken which belong to oneself; but the badness of the latter exceeds the goodness of the former. For those who cannot succeed at taking without also being taken from, it is better to compromise, giving up the one and gaining immunity from the other. Such a compromise, however, constitutes no more than a human construction, a contract. It does not overcome nature, which still impels a man to get what he wants without considering the contract; it is simply a recognition of the imprudence of doing so. Since the city’s justice does not make men good or happy, able men who have the arts of force and deception can, and in all reason should, continue to follow the dictates of nature. In other words, superior men are not bound by the contract for they do not receive any advantage from it.

page 377:

• The warriors’ art, however, is really different, and its services cannot be measured by money, for money is a standard for evaluating the contributions made toward the satisfaction of desire or the” preservation of life. Spiritedness is beyond the economic system. The founders of modem economic science, who wanted it to be a universal political science, could do so only by denying the existence of spiritedness or understanding it as merely a means to self-preservation. Only men who pursue self-preservation and the gratification of bodily desire can be counted on to act according to the principles of economic “rationality.”

• Sheep dogs require shepherds. The warrior class would then be the link between the highest and lowest class, gaining its meaning from its service to the higher.

page 378:

• The instrument for controlling the warriors is education and, therefore, from this point forward education is the central theme of the Republic. The city’s way of life depends on the character and hence the education of the rulers.

page 379:

• The poets are taken most seriously as the makers of the horizon which constitutes the limit of men’s desire and aspiration; they form the various kinds of men, who make nations various.

• Today culture is shaped by Hollywood, music, entertainment (poets) in general.

page 387:

• He forces the poetically inclined Adeimantus to give up the greatest challenge of poetry-imitation. These are his reasons: the poet can make men believe that they see and hear his characters. This constitutes his real power-he enchants men so that they live the experiences he wishes to present. The poet hides himself behind his work, and the audience forgets, for the moment, that the world into which they enter is not the real one. The spectators have the sense of the reality of men and events which are more interesting and more beautiful than any they know in their own lives: This is what makes poetry so peculiarly attractive.

• He cannot force the spectators to listen to him or like and enter into the lives of men who are repulsive to them. He must appeal to and flatter the dominant passions of the spectators. Those passions are fear, pity, and contempt. The spectators want to cry or to laugh. If the poet is to please, he must satisfy that demand.

page 399:

• Adeimantus’ objection, then, is the same as Machiavelli’s: the best regime is a mere dream, for a good city cannot avoid ruin if it does not do the things which will enable it to survive among vicious cities.

page 408:

• Full communism, from Socrates’ point of view the only form of just regime, requires not only the abolition of private property but also the sharing of women and children and the rule of philosophers.

page 411:

• The character of the women in a society has a great deal to do with the character of the men; for when the men are young, the women have a great deal to do with their rearing, and when they are older, they must please the women.

page 413:

• If the family, which is surely somehow natural, remains the only object of loyalty, the clan or tribe can never be surpassed. To become either a member of a city-or a philosopher-one must break with one’s primary loyalty.

page 431:

• The Enlightenment teaches that the cave can be transformed; Socrates teaches that it must be transcended and that this transcendence can be accomplished only by a few.

page 433:

• Philosophy or science is concerned only with man or the city, not with this particular man or this particular city. Few men-and no cities-can live with this perspective.

• Xenophon (Memorabilia, I, i). He was in the habit of telling his friends that art or science could teach a man how to sow a field well or how to build a house well, but it cannot tell him whether he will reap what he has sown or live in what he has built. Science is indifferent to the fate of individuals. Those for whom this is intolerable need a supplement to reason; they must tum to the Delphic oracle, to the divine, in order to satisfy themselves. Thus our love of our own ties us to the cave, and that powerful passion must be overcome in order to move upward on the line of knowledge. And he who does must leave his kin, be regarded as a traitor by them, forego the rewards offered to the man who joins in their self-deception, and run the risks of punishment prescribed by their laws. These are the bonds which tie us to the cave and its images. To break them requires rare passion and courage, for the lion in our souls, spiritedness, guards the gates of the dungeon.

• The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.

• The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas.

page 435:

• The liberation, once effected, results in great happiness; the soul carries on its proper activity with its proper objects. And, as a result, the freed man has a great contempt for the cave, its shadows and its inhabitants. He wants always to live out in the light; the others do not know they are slaves, so they are content; but he knows it and cannot bear to live among them. Nothing in the city contributes to his specific pleasures, and he wants nothing from it; he is not, as are all others, a potential exploiter of the city.

• At last the problem of finding disinterested rulers is solved. But it also becomes clear that the philosophers do not want to be rulers and that they must be compelled. Compulsion is necessary since rhetoric could not deceive philosophers. Now the tables are turned. Previously it appeared that the philosophers are anxious to rule and must persuade a recalcitrant populace. In the investigation of the philosophic nature it has by accident, as it were, emerged that philosophers want nothing from the city and that their contemplative activity is perfectly engrossing, leaving neither time nor interest for ruling. So, if philosophers are to rule, it must be the city that forces them to do so; and it is in the philosophers’ interest to keep the knowledge of their kingly skills from the people. It is a perfect circle. The people must be persuaded to accept the philosophers; but the philosophers must be compelled to persuade the people to compel them to rule. And who would do that? This is not an accidental difficulty of communication between the two sides; it is grounded on real conflicts of interest.

page 436:

• In the light of the splendor of the soul’s yearning after the whole, the city looks very ugly. This is the true comedy-taking the city with infinite seriousness, beautifying it with every artifice, making it a veritable Callipolis, and then finding that compared to the soul which was supposed to be like it, it is a thing to be despised. This fair city, the goal of so many aspirations, now looks like a cave, and its happy citizens like prisoners; it is comparable to the Hades of which Achilles complained, and the attachment to it is a species of folly. From the point of view of the city, the philosopher looks ridiculous; but from the point of view of the whole, the citizen looks ridiculous. Socrates asks which of the two contexts is the more authoritative.

page 439:

• The thinkers of the Enlightenment, culminating in Marx, preserved Socrates’ ultimate goals but forgot his insistence that nature made them impossible for men at large.

page 442:

• Political science must be evaluative; just as a doctor must know what a healthy body is, a political scientist must know what a healthy regime is. Such a political science provides a much richer and more comprehensive framework than that provided by our contemporary political science with its over- simplified dichotomies, democratic versus totalitarian or developed versus underdeveloped.

page 443:

• Aristotle elaborated Socrates’ sketch and turned it into a true political science by adjusting his standard to the possibilities of political life.

• This is what Hitler said, the one who lays the foundation should have no concern for the practical; those that come later attend to such practicalities as implementing a regime.

• Socrates’ political science, paradoxically, is meant to show the superiority of the private life. The most important point made in this section is that while the best city exists only in myth, the best man exists actually.

page 446:

• The order of the cities in dignity and goodness-timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny-accords with Adeimantus’ tastes and common sense, although it is not in any way demonstrated. Following the principles tacitly established in the Republic, a city must provide for the sustenance of the body, be able to defend itself, and have as rulers men who care for the common good. The cities’ ranks seem to correspond to their capacity to meet these conditions. Only aristocracy meets them fully, but timocracy comes closest to so doing. Sparta, the model of the timocratic regime, is a republic with a long history of stability and is able to defend its liberty courageously and skillfully. Al- though the rulers secretly lust for money, their love of honor protects their devotion to the public, and they are too ashamed to sacrifice their duty to acquisition. Moreover, if their courage is not that of the educated auxiliaries who are convinced that death is nothing terrible, and if they are somewhat too savage, it is undeniable that they can fight very well.

• Next in order comes the oligarchic regime, which has neither the perfect rulers of the aristocratic regime nor the love of honor, and hence the courage, of the timocratic regime. The oligarchs tum all of· the city’s resources to their private gain and are both unwilling and unable to fight. But their continence and sobriety in acquiring and keeping property lend to the regime a certain stability. Because it lacks even the stability cif oligarchy, democracy comes fourth. The democrats are incapable of ruling themselves, so they must choose leaders. These demogogues despoil the rich for their own profit while trying to satisfy the demands of the poor. Finally, the city’s property is wasted. Democracy is essentially a transitional regime because its principle, freedom, does not encourage the respect for law requisite to the maintenance of a regime. It prepares the way for tyranny, admitted by all to be the worst of regimes, the regime in which the ruler exploits the city simply for his personal benefit.

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• This is because both tyrant and philosopher depreciate law or convention (nomos) in their quest for nature (physis). Eros is nature’s demonic voice.