This essay argues that the Republic is, among other things, a meditation by Plato on the proximity of philosophy and war and on the dangers of that proximity for philosophy and politics. It is also Plato's reflection on the conduct, execution, and impact of a particular war, the panHellenic Peloponnesian War, in whose aftermath the dialogue was written and against whose backdrop it is set. Destabilizing settled rules of engagement and categories of identification, that war made especially urgent the practice of independent judgment and its virtues, whose inculcation, I show, amount to the education to philosophy that is the dialogue as a whole.
I have used translations of Plato's Republic by Allan Bloom (New York : Basic Books, 1968); G.M.A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve in Plato's Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1997); and Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935); along with the Greek text and commentary by James Adam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902); and translations of Apology, Laws, Laches, Symposium, Charmides, Alcibiades, and Seventh Letter in Plato's Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1997). References to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics are from: H. Rackham, trans., Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1982) and David Ross, trans., Nicomachean Ethics, revised by J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1980); and H. Rackham, trans., Politics (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1977 ) and Benjamin Jowett and J. M. Moore (respectively), trans., The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). References to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War are to Richard Crawley's The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
2.
For this rule, the observation about the two aspects of pleonexia and their description as “apprehensive,” see Harry Berger, Jr., “ Facing Sophists,” in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 381-414, 397-8. For Thomas Hobbes, the logic of this rule justifies, in the name of security and self-preservation, the doctrine of pre-emptive strike: see Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 13.
3.
For a comprehensive treatment, see Ryan Balot's Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For an exploration of the eros at the heart of desire, see Anne Carson, Eros: the Bittersweet (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998).
4.
Balot, Greed, 160. For a discussion of continuing debates in Thucydides scholarship, see Daniel Mendelsohn, “Theatres of War: Why the battles over ancient Athens still rage,” The New Yorker, January 12, 2004, 79-84.
5.
For the argument that political theorists would do well to take Thucydides more seriously, see Gerald Mara, “The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato: Classical Greek Political Theory and the Limits of Democracy” (SUNY Press, forthcoming).
6.
Works that extend Aristotle's political theory to the domain of international relations include: Anthony F. Lang, ed., Political Theory and International Relations: Hans J. Morgenthau on Aristotle's The Politics (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004); Thomas Pangle “Justice Among Nations in Platonic and Aristotelian Political Philosophy” American Journal of Political Science42 (1998): 377-97; Thomas Pangle and Peter Ahresdorf, Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999); S.M. Stern, Aristotle on the World State (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970).
7.
See, for example, Stephen Halliwell, Republic 5 (Warminster : Aris & Phillips, 1993), 25ff.; Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 239. Plato's political philosophy is seen to offer few resources for interpolity relations because of its focus on the internal life of a polis and also because it is said to treat non-Greeks as essentially inferior to Greeks and hence to position these “barbarians” outside the demands of justice, rendering any justification of Greek domination, subordination, and conquest of non-Greeks unnecessary. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to subject this second claim to scrutiny, let me draw attention to some evidence that suggests otherwise: the Statesman rejects the barbarian as a “natural unit” (262c-d); the Republic regularly insists on an interplay between nature and nurture (395d, 396c, 424a-b, 431c, 453a) and treats human excellence as characteristic of both Greeks and foreigners (499c). It is to be noted that whether they read Book V's discussion of gender equality literally or ironically, many commentators agree that it complicates the conventional understanding of what is given by nature including: Adi Ophir, Plato's Invisible Cities: Discourse and Power in the Republic (Rowman & Littlefield, 1991); Halliwell, Republic 5, 149; Michael Kochin, “War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic” Review of Metaphysics53 (1999): 403-23; and Leon Craig, The War Lover: A Study of Plato's Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 26. Unlike these commentators who restrict Plato's criticism of essentialism to gender, I take it to apply to class and ethnicity as well.
8.
Stanley Rosen, Plato's Republic: A Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 82.
9.
See Kochin, “ War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic”; Craig, The War Lover; Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato's Republic ( Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), chap. 4; and Mara, “ The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato.” As Rosen, Plato's Republic, 95, notes, the educational curricula of Books II-III share features of Sparta's training, oriented to war. Malcolm Schofield, Plato: Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35-43, agrees but cautions against overemphasizing the similarities. For an appreciation of the importance of war for understanding the Gorgias, see Arlene Saxonhouse, “ An Unspoken Theme in Plato's Gorgias: War,” Interpretation11 (2) ( 1983): 139-69.
10.
See, especially, Craig, War Lover, 270-1, who argues that becoming a philosopher depends on the virtues characteristic of the warrior, although he locates the turn to philosophy in Books VI-VII, whose education allows the victory lover to become a lover of wisdom; and Kochin, “War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic,” 403, who argues that the educative qualities of exposure to warfare in Book V, though not the war educations of Books II-IV, inculcates the orientation to philosophy necessary to achieve a just polity.
11.
For an account of this sort of philosophy, driven by a pleonexia he calls an “imperialism of the mind,” which he attributes to Plato's figurations in his dialogues of such philosophers as Timaeus, Anaxagoras, and Parmenides, but not to Socrates, see Harry Berger Jr., “ Plato's Flying Philosopher,” Philosophical Forum13 (1982): 385-407, 400.
12.
When I speak of the philosophy of the Republic I do not refer to the so-called “theory of forms” of Books VI-VII that defines the philosophy of Kallipolis, but rather to the philosophy of the dialogue as a whole which remains not fully articulated until the dialogue's closing Books.
13.
As Debra Nails, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and other Socratics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 324-6, points out, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise dramatic date of the dialogue because evidence points to 424 or 421 as the date of the original composition of Book I, and to “after 411” as the date of the original composition of Books II-V. Dating the dialogue as a whole, “as we have it,” to 408/7, she concludes that the dialogue takes place “throughout the Peloponnesian War.”
14.
For the distinctiveness of the Peloponnesian War, see Victor Davis Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, revised ed. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998); Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York: Random House, 2005); and Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), chap. 5, 53-71 (“ The Rules of War in Classical Greece”).
15.
Aristotle, therefore, follows Plato when he sets up an analogical relationship between justice among those “who share a life together with a view to self-sufficiency” and justice among those who do not share such a life. The first he calls “political justice”; the second “something just by way of resemblance” (NE 1134a24-30). In “Justice Among Nations,” 380, Pangle asks what it is about political justice that makes “only” a resemblance possible among those who are not fellow-citizens, thus implying that Aristotle takes justice between cities to be distinctly other and also less than justice among citizens of a particular city. By using the language of resemblance to signal an analogical relation between these two modes of justice, Aristotle, in my view, suggests that he is concerned not only with the differences but also with the similarities between these modes of justice. Thus interpolity justice may look a lot more like political justice than Pangle allows. For a discussion of the force of analogy to signal both sameness and difference, see Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 156.
16.
There are important similarities between Plato and Aristotle on good judgment as the virtue of justice and as more than the application of pre-given rules. For my treatment of judgment in Aristotle, see Democracy of Distinction, 95-103. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 150-4.
17.
See Nails, People of Plato, 324-326. Other sources for dating and writing include: Bloom, Republic, 440; Eva Brann, The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry, 2004), 118; Edward Cohen, The Athenian Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21; Ophir, Plato's Invisible Cities, 48.
18.
See Cohen, Athenian Nation, 20, 20-2. Strauss, City and Man, 62. For details about the Piraeus, see Josiah Ober Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1998 ), 215, and references therein.
19.
Seventh Letter, 324d. Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 167-8 and S. Sara Monoson, Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 213 also note the range and diversity of the auditors.
20.
Blondell, Play of Character , 203ff., notes that the conversation depicted in Book I becomes in the later Books a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon and Adeimantus, two Athenian citizens, and that the mistrust and animosities of Book I become trust and cooperation in Socrates' exchanges with Glaucon and Adeimantus in what might be seen as the ready friendship among Athenian citizens. While it may be true that Socrates' style of engagement changes, the dialogue is punctuated throughout by temporary alliances forged among the diverse auditors and if, as I argue, one of the targets of the dialogue is Athens's imperialistic pleonexia, then it makes sense that Socrates' primary engagement over the course of the dialogue would be with Glaucon and Adeimantus, representing the Athenians most in need of restraint.
21.
They treat each other as friends and equals notwithstanding the important distinction that pervaded Greek culture between native Greeks and nonresident aliens. For discussion see G.R.F. Ferrari, City and Soul in Plato's Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11-5.
22.
See Nails, People of Plato, 251 and 289; and Stephen A. White, “ Thrasymachus the Diplomat,” Classical Philology90 (1995): 307-27.
23.
For this translation of Polemarchus' name, see Craig, War Lover, 3. Strauss, City and Man, 63, calls him “War Lord.” For Cephalus's business, see Nails, People of Plato, 84; and Brann , Music of the Republic, 130.
24.
Thumos is a complex and notoriously difficult motivator of action in classical ethics and politics. Plato treats thumos as the seat of a number of different emotions and positions it as the middle or third part of the soul. I cannot in this paper address the issues raised by thumos. For an excellent treatment, see Christina Tarnopolsky, “Power's Passionate Pathologies ,” presented to the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, and references therein.
25.
See Pangle, “ Justice Among Nations,” 382, who takes as his point of departure “the healthy society's insistence on the distinction between what is owed to citizens and what is owed to strangers,” and maps the citizen/stranger distinction onto the friends/enemies distinction. See also Rosen, Plato's Republic, 85 and 86, who, maintaining that “friendship intersects with familiarity,” claims that from the perspective of the dialogue, “every stranger is a potential enemy” or, more carefully, that “strangers or the unknown present a challenge and a warning of possible dangers.” That is certainly true. For Plato's Socrates (in the Republic and also in the Apology), however, fellow-citizens are not necessarily friends. Instead, citizens are potential enemies and strangers and potential enemies are also potential friends.
26.
Socrates' eventual conclusion with Polemarchus is that the just man harms no one (335e), the same conclusion he reaches in the Crito and the Gorgias. This does not make Socrates a pacifist (he was, after all, a courageous warrior) nor is it to depoliticize justice. Instead, it demonstrates that justice (along with just war, just punishment, etc.) is not an individual but a political practice.
27.
In “War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic,” Kochin helpfully distinguishes three separate accounts of war in the dialogue: wars for expansion (Book II); wars against cities riven by class conflict (Book IV); and the educative qualities of exposure to warfare itself (Book V). I draw on these distinctions in the account that follows.
28.
See, e.g., Brann, Music of the Republic, 153, 217; Blondell , Play of Character, 214-6; and Schofield, Plato, 40, who calls the early education “embryonically philosophical.”
29.
See also Harry Berger , Jr., “The Athenian Terrorist: Plato's Portrait of Critias” in Situated Utterances, 464-6. Kochin, “War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic,” argues that the curricula through Book IV fail as a preparation for philosophy but for different reasons from the ones I offer here.
30.
On the confluence of shame and the laws, see Plato, Laws, 647a-c, and Aristotle, NE III.8. Shame is a complex and difficult idea in Plato, operating simultaneously from without and from within. For detailed treatment, see Christina Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Politics of Shame ( Princeton University Press, forthcoming); and Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993).
31.
The phrase “reformed poetic education” comes from Kochin, “War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic,” 408-9.
32.
For “strictest obedience,” see Craig, War Lover, 8, 157.
33.
As Socrates notes in Book IV regarding legislation regulating public venues, such legislation is unnecessary because either people will be finely brought up and properly educated, in which case they will not need laws to govern these practices, or they will be so bad that no laws will constrain them (425d- 427a).
34.
Kochin, “War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic,” 418.
35.
Socrates' distinction between falsity in words and falsity in the soul does not attenuate the problematic nature of this deception: words, after all, are the logoi of the soul.
36.
For discussion see, Blondell, Play of Character, 170, 173, 188-9; and Peter Steinberger, “Who is Cephalus?” Political Theory24 (1996): 172-99.
37.
See Hans Georg Gadamer, “Plato and the Poets,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. and with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1980), 39-72, 56.
38.
The warrior must not seek justification or individual accountability for his actions for if he did, he might find himself unable to fight. For a moving account of this dilemma, see the WW I trilogy of the novelist Pat Barker: Regeneration (New York: Plume, 1991); The Eye in the Door (New York: Dutton, 1994 ); and The Ghost Road (New York: Dutton, 1995).
39.
For similar concerns about the practice of independent judgment, see the History, 1.20-22.
40.
The following draws primarily on Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece; Hanson, A War Like No Other; and Ober, The Athenian Revolution, chap. 5, who establish the existence of these norms of war from sources other than the writings of Plato. 41. For the applicability of these rules to wars between Greeks and non-Greeks, see Ober, “ The Rules of War in Classical Greece” in Athenian Revolution , 57, n.5.
41.
Ober, “ The Rules of War in Classical Greece” in Athenian Revolution , 70-1, links the strategy that changed the rules, practice, and personnel of war with Athenian democratization and argues that these changes undermined the polis form because on these fronts polities could not compete with empires.
42.
Advocates of the “two-world” view include among many others, Richard Kraut, “ Introduction to the Study of Plato,” Terry Penner, “Socrates and the Early Dialogues,” and Nicholas White, “Plato's Metaphysical Epistemology,” all in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); C. D.C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato's Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). It may also be found in Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books , 1968), 40.
43.
For excellent work on the epistemology of this dialogue that challenges the “two-world view” and to which my own is substantially indebted, see Gerald M. Mara, Socrates' Discursive Democracy: Logos and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). See also Craig, War Lover, 276-7, whose account of the divided line and the relation it depicts between intellect and sense is superb.
44.
On the philosophical potency and pervasiveness of eikasia, “the lowest of the doxastic powers,” see Brann , Music of the Republic, 100-1, 173-5, 267-8. On the notion of a “dianoetic eikasia,” see Brann , Music of the Republic, 178, 188-94, drawing on Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 115-25. For judgment as the activity of trust or pistis, the mode of knowing characteristic of the second segment beneath the divided line of Republic Book VI combining eikasia with thinking, see H.J. Paton, “ Plato's Theory of Eikasia,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 22 (1921 -1922): 69-104, 83-4.
45.
A flavor of this combination of detachment and engagement may be found in the shift in Socrates' mode of engagement with his interlocutors that Blondell, Play of Character, 194-6, 221-8, argues takes place after Book I. If the Republic begins with a Socrates focused on the personalities and characteristics of his individual interlocutors, in later Books, she maintains, he detaches his arguments from particular individuals to focus instead on general explanations. When particular views reemerge in the later Books they are attributed to imaginary persons or abstract interlocutors so as not to reactivate the animosities of the early encounter with Thrasymachus in particular, thus providing the distance required for the detached engagement constitutive of sound judgment. For an original treatment of the importance of this aspect of judgment in the work of Hannah Arendt, see Bryan Garsten, “The Elusiveness of Arendtian Judgment ,” Social Research74, no. 3, forthcoming, Fall 2007.
46.
My discussion of courage draws on Ryan Balot's “Platonic Revisions of Democratic Courage” (unpublished paper on file with author). For a penetrating treatment of the virtue of courage, see George Kateb, “Courage as a Virtue,” Social Research71 (2004): 39-72.
47.
Bloom, Republic of Plato, 470 n. 5; Grube, Plato's Republic, 227, n. 5; and Adam , Republic of Plato, note on 580b. For a discussion of the controversies around Socrates' request that Glaucon act like “a judge to make the final decision” which focus on Plato's use of “judge” in the singular and the adjective “final,” see Adam, Republic of Plato, Appendix II to Book IX, 373-6.
48.
Monoson, Democratic Entanglements, 206-26; quotations are from 222 n. 29, and 210.
49.
For discussion, see Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 112-4.
50.
For this phrase, see Julia Annas, “Plato's Myths of Judgment,” Phronesis27 (1982): 119-43.
51.
This is how Plato is usually read both by those who approve this insulation on the ground that the life of the mind is more choice-worthy than the life of action and those who are critical of the elevation of philosophy on the ground that it unjustly degrades the life of action.
52.
See Brann, Music of the Republic, 118-22, for a detailed elaboration of the force and pervasiveness of this metaphor throughout the dialogue.
53.
For the interdependence of politics and philosophy, see also Gerald Mara, “ Constitutions, Virtue, and Philosophy in Plato's Republic and Statesman,” Polity13 (1981): 355-82, esp. 380-2.
