‘Republic (Book II)’: Why Be Just?
A review of ‘Republic (Book II)’ by Plato; Penguin Classics, 2007.
Plato’s Republic deals with the age-old question of what constitutes the ideal city. In the second book, one of the hinge points in Plato’s dialogue, Socrates responds to a challenge posed by his young friends, Glaucon and Adeimantus. They are unsatisfied with his earlier defence of justice and push him to say exactly why anyone should choose to be just if he could merely pretend to be and so enjoy the fruits of being unjust. What follows is a back-and-forth that builds from personal morality to the shape of a society.
The dialogue opens with Glaucon picking up where Thrasymachus left off. Thrasymachus had suggested injustice might be preferable to justice. Echoing this, Glaucon paints a grim picture of human nature: someone acts well only because she fears punishment. To hammer his point home, he invokes the myth of the Ring of Gyges, which deals with a shepherd who unearths a ring that makes him invisible. Since he can now do what he pleases, he seduces the queen and kills the king. Glaucon’s point is that given the chance to act with impunity, most of us would choose bad over good. Adeimantus makes a similar point in reverse: if society teaches us to value justice, it is only because it offers rewards, such as a good reputation or a better life after death. Get rid of the rewards, and we get rid of justice.
Glaucon paints a grim picture of human nature: someone acts well only because she fears punishment.
In reply, Socrates enlarges the scope of the matter. Suppose we considered justice at the level of the city, he says. What then? He starts sketching a simple settlement, where basic needs such as food, shelter and clothing are met. His conversation partners, finding this too (as it were) spartan, want more: leisure and luxuries, wars, power. And so the city swells from a peaceful, modest sort of place to something altogether closer to home: a place of strife, division, and, in the end, where there is a need for leadership. Justice, we come to see, is, for Socrates, bound up with the peace of the community.
So the justice with which Plato is concerned in Book II is not a personal virtue, but that quality which springs from order and harmony in a group. Thus, it enters the soul of the individual. It is not a rough, self-interested thing, as Glaucon or Thrasymachus suggest; it is the product of social balance. Plato’s Socrates views justice, then, as an emergent property, which arises when each part of the city fulfils its function independently and lets others do the same. This division of labour, if you like, is the root of stability. To be just is to play our proper part in that and so maintain that stability. Plato briefly outlines the role of the famous philosopher-king here: this is the ascetic, trained leader who rules wisely on behalf of the common good.
His Socrates views justice as growing from each part of the city’s independent fulfilment of its function.
Plato’s argument is reminiscent of that which Roger Scruton makes in his The Meaning of Conservatism. The British, he says, have historically been free not because of the raising-up of freedom as a principle, but because each institution, such as the common law and the monarchy, has operated in harmony with all the others, so allowing for the formation of a settled community in which people can do more or less what they please without upsetting the social order. British conservatives may esteem freedom, Scruton says, but the root of that freedom is the country’s institutions, and those are what they should defend. For only when the ship is on an even keel, as it were, can its passengers act freely. Thus the British tradition of freedom differs from that of its counterpart in America, where the right to freedom is set down explicitly and at length in the Constitution.
Part of the beauty of reading the Republic is that its traces are visible in much (perhaps all) modern political philosophy. But it is also a pleasure because its famous question-and-answer format lets ideas form in step-by-step fashion, with counterpoints addressed and qualifications made along the way. The pace is slow. Plato’s Socrates can meander. He prods, he pushes. He calls on both our reason and imagination. And we are, by and large, left satisfied with where we end up. By the end of Book X, of course, we will have the ideal city-state; Book II only helps to lay the foundation. But it is a critical part of the construction, for here the dialogue moves from mere theorising to the establishment of an organised way of thinking. We will now consider matters such as justice at the levels of both the person and the society.
