Philosophy Now – Issue 90

https://philosophynow.org/issues/90/Platos_Just_State

Plato’s Just State

Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan.

One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato
describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern it, what sort of education
the children would have, and so on. He goes into great detail, laying out ideas that may at
times strike the modern reader as wrongheaded, petty, or even immoral. Sir Karl Popper
argued in The Open Society and Its Enemies that Plato’s ideal state is totalitarian, with little
freedom of expression allowed, little diversity, and a perverse commitment to a Spartan-like
regimentation of social life. Others see evidence of democracy in Plato’s description, for
instance in the egalitarianism that characterizes certain aspects of his educational program. I
want to ask to what extent Plato’s vision is still relevant – whether it has anything valuable to
say to us. And is the Platonic state just or unjust? Is it entirely impracticable, or are there
elements that can and should be put into practice? How adequate is the theory of justice on
which it is founded? After discussing these questions I will briefly consider the form a modern
version of this utopia might take.

Plato’s Definition of Justice

“To do one’s own business and not to be a busybody is justice.” (Republic 433b.) Although the
modern reader may find it odd, this is the definition of justice Plato offers. The idea is that
justice consists in fulfilling one’s proper role – realizing one’s potential whilst not overstepping
it by doing what is contrary to one’s nature. This applies both to the just state and to the just
individual. In the just state, each class and each individual has a specific set of duties, a set of
obligations to the community which, if everyone fulfils them, will result in a harmonious
whole. When a person does what he is supposed to do, he receives whatever credit and
remuneration he deserves, and if he fails to do his task, he is appropriately punished.

Thus justice is “the having and doing of one’s own and what belongs to oneself” (434a). Excess
and deficiency of any kind are unjust. In this formulation the Platonic definition of justice
seems plausible. A thief, for example, is unjust because he wants to have what is not his own. A
doctor who does not care about curing his patients of illnesses can be called unjust because he
is disregarding his proper role. A murderer acts unjustly since he deprives his victim of that
which rightly belongs to him, namely his life. In general, unjust people either do not realize the
virtues and duties proper to their situation in life, or treat someone worse than he deserves.
Similarly, an unjust state fails to accomplish the functions of a state. According to Plato, these
functions of the state include making possible the conditions under which everyone can feed,
clothe and shelter themselves, as well as seek the Good.
Plato’s conception of justice is informed by his conviction that everything in nature is part of a
hierarchy, and that nature is ideally a vast harmony, a cosmic symphony, every species and
every individual serving a purpose. In this vision, anarchy is the supreme vice, the most
unnatural and unjust state of affairs. The just state, then, like nature, is hierarchical:
individuals are ranked according to their aptitudes, and definitively placed in the social
hierarchy.

The individual soul, too, is hierarchical: the appetitive part is inferior to the spirited part,
which is inferior to the rational. Yet each has a necessary role to play. Reason should govern
the individual, but the appetites must also to an extent be heeded if the person’s soul is to be
harmonious and not in conflict with itself. And if every aspect of the soul accomplishes its task
well, or fittingly, the result is necessarily a ‘moderate’ and ordered state of affairs. The virtuous
individual has a well-ordered soul, which is to say that he knows what justice is and acts
according to his knowledge. He knows his place in the state; he knows what his aptitudes are
and he puts them into practice. He also adheres to the dictates of reason, doing everything in
moderation.

The Platonic worldview is quite foreign to the modern liberal democratic world. We are
accustomed to a dynamic, free, at times chaotic society, which knows almost nothing of rigid
hierarchies. People are not ranked according to their intrinsic value or their value to society,
and any philosophy that reeks of a caste system is decisively rejected. We are not committed to
analogies between nature and society; and we do not think of the world as a harmony, even
ideally. We like order, but we do not consider it supreme among values. We admire ambitious,
driven people, rather than those who are at peace with themselves or do everything in
moderation. In general, our culture places little emphasis on a specific ideal, choosing instead
to censure types of behavior which interfere with other people’s pursuit of happiness. Plato,
however, would consider our ideal state unjust, decadent, anarchical.

Plato lived in an Athens that to his chagrin was in danger of losing its cultural and military
preeminence, and was succumbing to disintegrating influences from abroad and from within.
He had lived through the terrible time of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, and the Thirty
Tyrants, and therefore had intimate experience of the horrors of anarchy. In short, he saw an
older, supposedly better, world crumbling around him, and he wanted to understand what
had gone wrong and how it could be fixed. The result was that he emphasized order and
homogeneity, and upheld the claims of the state over the claims of the individual, while
thinking that in a just state full of just individuals, the laws of the former would harmonize
with the desires of the latter. For Plato, justice was to be sought in the old, in the static – the
assimilation of the individual into the community – not in the new or the dynamic. While Plato
did value freedom, he did so much less than we moderns do, as is evidenced in his not
emphasizing it in his discussions of justice.

Thus, despite whatever superficial similarities there may be between Plato’s idea of justice and
our own, they are fundamentally different, since his worldview is diametrically opposed to
ours. In a particular case, such as that of a murder, Plato might judge as we do (largely because
we seem to have intuitive ideas of how humans ought to be treated). However, both his explicit
definitions of justice and the deeper intuitions that inspire his definitions differ from ours. We
conceive of justice as oriented around ideas of individual freedom and the priority of the
individual over the community, and we consider it sometimes not only permissible but even
meritorious to disobey the state’s laws if they violate certain intuitions about individual rights.
Plato’s concept of justice is instead inspired by his conviction that the collective takes ethical
precedence over the individual, that there is a cosmic order into which each person is
supposed to fit, and that virtue, and to an extent duty, is far more important than rights.
The differences become apparent when we look at larger scales than individuals’
transgressions. Many would agree with Plato that theft is unjust or that the professional who
ignores his duties can be called ‘unjust’, and also that tyranny is unjust. But in this last case our
respective judgments are based on different reasons. We would say that the tyrant’s injustice
consists in his suppressing freedom, killing innocent people, and disregarding democracy and
self-determination. Plato, on the other hand, would say that the tyrant is unjust insofar as his
acts promote anarchy and prevent his subjects from seeking the Good and living in harmony
with themselves and the community. The tyrant upsets the natural order of things.

Another illustration of the difference in our outlooks is in our conceptions of the ideal or just
person. According to Plato, the ideal person is a philosopher, since his wisdom means his soul
is in complete harmony with itself. The philosopher’s rational faculty governs his passions and
appetites, never allowing them free rein, but still respecting their claims on him and indulging
them when expedient. He has knowledge of himself and society; he knows what it is to be
virtuous; he has a certain amount of equanimity, and he never loses control over himself. By
contrast, Plato’s unjust person is divided against himself, torn between his passions and
appetites, and has no respect for reason, which alone could unify his soul such that he would
be an individual in the literal sense of the word ‘in-dividual’.

Our notion of the ideal person is far less specific than Plato’s. Like Plato’s, it does, to an extent,
incorporate the notion of ‘virtue’; but for us virtue is conceived as treating others well rather
than as functioning healthily within a community. Our ideal can be called more ‘relational’, in
that it emphasizes how others should be treated rather than emphasizing the character of
one’s psyche.

Given these differences, one obvious question is which concept of justice (or more
fundamentally, which worldview) is better, Plato’s or ours? I have elaborated on neither,
merely sketching them. Still, let me suggest an answer: neither Plato’s nor our own is totally
satisfactory, but each has its strengths. The most defensible notion of justice, socially or
individually, would be a combination of the two, selecting the strengths from each and
reconciling them. It would emphasize both the importance of community and the importance
of the individual, while succumbing neither to the potential totalitarianism of the Republic, nor
to the excessive individualism of modern culture. In the following I’ll briefly describe Plato’s
utopia, then consider if it would be desirable to put it into practice.

Plato’s Ideal State

Every reader of the Republic is told that Plato’s intention in discussing the just state is to
illuminate the nature of the just soul, for he argues that they are analogous. The state is the
soul writ large, so to speak. For example, the divisions of the state correspond to divisions of
the soul. But since the soul is difficult to analyze, in the dialogue Socrates says that he will first
speculate on the state, and then rely on his speculations to illuminate the nature of justice in
the individual.

Superficially, it appears that the lengthy discussion of the state is therefore primarily an
interpretative device. Clearly, though, it is more than that. Plato may not have believed that his
utopia would work in practice, or even that it would be desirable to institute some of his more
radical suggestions, but he certainly attributed some value to his discussion independent of its
illustrative function. Judging by Socrates’ language, it’s reasonable to suppose that Plato would
have liked to have seen some of his ideas actually implemented in a city-state. He was
dissatisfied with the city-states of his day, and was proposing an alternative. So let’s look at its
details.

In Plato’s ideal state there are three major classes, corresponding to the three parts of the soul.
The guardians, who are philosophers, govern the city; the auxiliaries are soldiers who defend
it; and the lowest class comprises the producers (farmers, artisans, etc). The guardians and
auxiliaries have the same education, which begins with music and literature and ends with
gymnastics. The arts are censored for educational purposes: for example, any poetic writings
which attribute ignoble doings to the gods cannot be taught. Only poetry which nourishes the
budding virtues of the pupils can be part of the curriculum. Similarly, musical modes which
sound sorrowful, soft, or feminine, are banished from the education of the guardians. This
apparently leaves only the Dorian and Phrygian modes, of which . Socrates approves because
they incite the listener to courage, temperance, and harmonious living. Certain instruments,
such as the flute, are also forbidden from the ideal city-state, as are certain poetic meters, since
Socrates associates them with vice.

Indeed, then, life in Plato’s ideal state has affinities with life under a totalitarian government.
The laws which Socrates suggests are repressive. People are allowed to have only one
occupation – namely that for which they are best suited by nature. Evidently there is no
division between the public and the private. Only what is conducive to temperate living is
encouraged, and excess and vice of any kind are strongly discouraged. Neither wealth nor
poverty is permitted, as each leads to vice.

Plato’s thoughts on women and children may be even more horrifying to the average liberal.
He argues via Socrates that the traditional form of the family should be done away with. Men
should have women and children in common, such that no man knows who his children are or
has excessive love for one woman in particular. Even mothers are not allowed to know who
their children are. Their children are taken from them after birth, and they are given other
children to suckle as long as they have milk.

Plato’s breeding principles sound ominously like the Nazi idea, and Spartan practice, of killing
weak and deformed infants. He says:

“the best of either sex should be united with the best as often [as possible], and the
inferior with the inferior as seldom as possible; and they should rear the offspring
of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock is to be maintained in first-
rate condition. Now these goings-on must be a secret which only the rulers know, or
there will be a further danger of our herd, as they may be termed, breaking out into
rebellion.”

More congenial to modern sentiment is Plato’s suggestion that women in the guardian class
should receive the same education as men, so that the best of them can assist in war and
governance. There is no private property or money except insofar as it is necessary, among the
lower classes; therefore there will be no disputes about what belongs to whom – just as there
will be no disputes about which women belong to whom, and who one’s children are. In
general, the goal Plato is aiming at is that everyone thinks of everyone else as a member of
their family, such that there is little or no strife between people and they all desire the same
thing – which is harmony, temperance, gentleness toward fellow-citizens and harshness
toward people from other states – a unified front on all issues, as it were. The health of the
community is the overriding principle in all spheres of life. All of Plato’s radical prescriptions
follow from that one principle.
Sedition & Subversion
What are we to make of these ideas? What should we take from them? Do they represent a
mere historical curiosity – a way of gaining insight into Plato’s mind or into his culture – or do
they have independent philosophical and political merit?

My opinion is that their obvious totalitarianism makes it a very good thing that Plato’s just
state was never constructed. This is where my fidelity to modern ideologies shows itself. I
think that Hegel was right in his assessment of liberalism: it has so to speak ‘discovered’ the
importance of subjectivity, and thus serves as a needed corrective to totalitarian excesses. The
individual is not ethically subordinate to the community; her health, and especially her
freedom, are no less important than communal harmony. Indeed, unless a person feels free, he
cannot be psychologically healthy.

Plato underestimates the value of self-determination: its foundational importance to self-

respect and hence to justice, even in his sense of the term. Plato’s guardians perhaps exhibit
the virtues and enjoy the satisfactions of self-determination; but everyone else in Plato’s utopia
is to be forced by the philosopher-king(s) to live their lives in a fundamentally unfree (non self-
determining) way. They will thus lack complete self-respect and contentment: the mere
knowledge that they are in an inferior position relative to others will breed discontent, which
will upset their psychological equilibrium, the harmony of their faculties and desires with
each other, and with their place in the world. In other words it will set each of them at war
with himself and with the state. Accordingly, as Plato himself implies, this will make for unjust
individuals. By denying most of its citizens true freedom – the opportunity to discover
themselves and their talents unhindered by oppressive laws promulgated by an oppressive
regime – Plato’s utopia will make their dissatisfaction with themselves and the community
inevitable, which is bad not only in itself but also because it means people are unjust, ie self-
divided. Thus the Platonic utopia makes impossible the very virtues it was meant to promote.

The need for recognition is a basic psychological need. People want to recognize themselves in
their activities, in the world, in other people’s reactions to them. But no one who is conscious
of oppressive restrictions on his behavior can think that his deepest sense of himself is being
recognized by the community which censors him. Rather, he may be full of resentment,
tormented by repressed desires, and desperate to break free of the shackles and spontaneously
affirm himself – to actualize his full, rich sense of who he is and wants to be. No one can feel
good about himself unless his activities grow out of his own ideals and self-perceptions. They
must emerge organically from his spontaneous sense of himself. Genuine recognition is
impossible except on the basis of freedom, so any social order that does not allow freedom
among its participants is inherently unstable, having the potential for rebellion built into it.
Every major culture in history, then, has been erected on somewhat tenuous and transient
foundations; but Plato’s utopia in particular would soon collapse.

Plato was right that the interests of the individual ultimately coincide with the interests of the
community, for a community is only as healthy as the people who participate in it, and vice
versa. Where he went wrong was in failing to understand the prerequisites of the self-
harmony that he rightly thought constituted individual and communal happiness – the
prerequisites being freedom, and the perception that one’s sense of self is appreciated by
others. Modern liberal ideologies over-compensate for this deficiency in Plato. They have an
impoverished view of what freedom is and why it is good, for they exalt the concept of an
isolated, ahistorical individual who needs nothing but protection from other people rather
than genuine and durable ties with them. Protection is of secondary importance: the essence of
freedom, the reason why it is desired in the first place, is that it is inseparable from
interpersonal union – from mutual recognition of each person’s self-determined activities as
being his, as being him. In a truly free society there would be no atomization, and no artificial
legal barriers to interpersonal understanding and recognition, to communal self-realization.
People live in and through the community. Far from needing protection from it, they feel
deprived without it.

Other Ideal States

Socrates remarks in the Republic that although his (Plato’s) utopia may be unrealizable, it is
useful as an ideal or a standard by which we can criticize existing institutions. While I disagree
with Plato’s version of utopia, I agree that it is a worthy task to formulate social ideals. In doing
so, we at least posit an ideal state we can strive to realize, even if in its final details this is
impossible. With that in mind, I suggest that something like properly democratic communism
is the ideal we should use to critique the present, since it reconciles Plato’s emphasis on the
community with the modern emphasis on individual freedom. Indeed, Marx’s ideal of a
communist utopia is not merely ‘Marxist’; it is heir to both the Platonic and the liberal utopias.
This statement may seem paradoxical, if only because Platonism and liberalism are
diametrically opposed, as we have seen. But consider what is involved in Marx’s ideal society.
First of all, classes would not exist. That is, Marx claims in the Communist Manifesto (1848) that
after a period of state socialism and redistribution of wealth, separate classes will no longer
exist and the state will no longer be needed.

Marx’s classless utopia is not as blatantly incompatible with Platonism as it might seem, since,
for one thing, the Marxist definition of ‘class’ is very different from the Platonic. Plato
incorporates a fusion of political and economic criteria: the lowest class is involved in
productive economic activities but has no political power, while the highest class has all the
political power, but no economic activity. For Marx, on the other hand, the definition of class is
exclusively economic, based on the group’s role in the process of production. For Marx there
are basically two classes, namely the capitalists and the workers.

My points are, first, that rather than contradicting Plato, Marx adopts a different starting-point.
Second, while Marxist ideology does contradict Platonism in its classless and popularist ideals,
it does so on the basis of a deep sympathy with Plato’s goals. Both are concerned with the
health and wholeness of the community, the durability of its social structures, the happiness of
its citizens, and the justice of its political and economic arrangements. To that extent,
communism is a descendant of Plato’s republicanism: it too is an ideology built on the
conviction that the community is an organic whole and not merely an aggregate of individuals,
and therefore that social structures – the relational ties between people – take priority over the
behavior of atomized individuals, both in a scientific analysis of society, and also in the
formulation of an ethical ideal. Where Marx’s ideal state differs from Plato’s is not in its goal or
inspiration, then, but in its means of realizing its goal, or more accurately, in the structures it
posits as constitutive of that goal – viz, democracy, universal economic and political
cooperation, the absence of coercive social mechanisms, and so forth. These political
structures have more in common with liberalism than Platonism, as they place great emphasis
on the freedom of the individual.

Marx does reject liberal talk of rights and the rule of law, but he does so precisely because he
understands that such talk is symptomatic of the incomplete realization of the liberal goal of
self-determination. To achieve his purer vision of liberalism, Marx thinks that capitalism,
together with its ideologies exalting private property with its corresponding laws, rights, and
so on, must be transcended, as it suppresses and dehumanizes people.

Despite the differences between Plato’s conception of justice and our own, elements of his
philosophy can be reconciled with elements of our liberal democratic ideology. I also suggested
that Plato’s ‘communitarian’ intuition was largely right, even if his means of realizing it were
dangerously wrong. Also, the ideal individual should indeed be self-unified and have self-
control, and Plato was right that, on the whole, such individuals will not arise except in
socially harmonious conditions.

Marx retained some of Plato’s intuitions while discarding the totalitarian doctrines which
would make the achievement of Plato’s ‘perfect community’ impossible. I think we should do
as Marx did, at least in theory (even if in practice his ‘followers’ deviated far from his ideals),
and adopt the liberal features of Plato’s notion of social justice while casting off its totalitarian
undertones. If we did so, I suspect life would become a little better than it is now, in our
confused and atomized world.

© Christopher C. Wright 2012

Chris Wright studied postgraduate philosophy at the University of Missouri – St Louis.