'The most delightful of regimes' | Plato's Republic, Book VIII
Timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny
Today, we continue our read-along of Plato’s Republic, the latest installment in our philosophical read-alongs. Here’s the schedule:
March 31: Book I
April 7: Book II
April 14: Book III
April 21: Reading Week
April 28: Book IV
May 5: Book V
May 8: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern
May 12: Book VI
May 18: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern
May 19: Book VII
May 26: Reading Week
June 2: Book VIII
June 9: Book IX
June 16: Book X
June 22: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern
All main posts are free, but Zoom calls and supplementary posts are available only to paid subscribers. If you’d like to join those calls or read everything that I write, please consider supporting my work.
Since we have just taken a week off from reading The Republic, it is helpful that Socrates provides us with a summary of their findings at the beginning of Book VIII:
The agreed characteristics of the city which is to reach the peak of political organization are the community of women, community of children and the whole system of education, community like-wise of everyday life, both in wartime and peacetime, and the kingship of those among them who have developed into the best philosophers, and the best when it comes to war.
The whole of The Republic thus far, including the digression into the value of philosophy, was leading to this characterization of the just city (which Socrates calls an aristocracy, and the just person resembles this aristocratic orientation). And, since we are really trying to answer the question of the just person by way of analogy with the just city, perhaps we are close to achieving our goal.
But remember that in Book V, a question was raised: what are the forms of deviant governments? We still have not answered that question, but today we will begin.
Here, the analogy to the soul is made explicit once again (544a-b). Socrates claims that:
For individuals also there must necessarily be as many kinds of characters as there are kinds of regime? Or do you think that regimes somehow come into being “from oak or stone”? Isn’t it rather from the characters of people in the city, which tip the scale, as it were, taking the rest with them?
This is, however, a strange argument. Let’s take a closer look at it before we move on to our taxonomy of deviant regimes.
Socrates makes a few claims – or suggests those claims via questions – and we should break them apart.
There are necessarily as many kinds of characters as there are kinds of regimes
The character of people in the city determines the character of the city.
If (2) were false, there would be no explanation for the character of the city. (I take this to be what he means when he asks the ‘oak and stone’ question.)
Glaucon seems to be agreeing with Socrates, at least enough for the purpose of the discussion, when he says that ‘it’s entirely the character of the inhabitants.’ The character of the citizenry fully determines the character of the city.
Unfortunately, this argument is not given much time at this stage of the Republic. (Perhaps it is revisited later; I am unsure.) This is especially unfortunate because it seems to be straightforwardly an instance of the fallacy of composition. This is the error of assuming that what is true of the parts is thus true of the whole. If the character of the citizenry is of type A, then the city will be of type A.
Yet, consider the famous insight due to Mandeville: that the allowance of private vices (self-interest) may lead to public benefits (mutual flourishing). There, it is not (necessarily) true that a selfish citizenry breeds a selfish city, because it may be that the best way for each selfish citizen to flourish is to mutually agree to certain restrictions, rules, norms, and so on.
Or consider an example I used to think about quite a bit: you may want scientists to be (relatively) close-minded, meaning they are resistant to changing their beliefs, because it leads to a more open-minded scientific community that produces more interesting scientific results. The struggle of getting past one another’s close-mindedness may in fact be good for science, and it may lead to a more pluralistic view of research programs.
But let’s set this aside for now. (We can take it up in the comments later, if you’d like.) We still have to discuss the rest of Book VIII.
Our first kind of regime is timarchy, also called timocracy. This is an honor-loving regime. This arises due to the errors of the ruling class — Socrates gives a prolonged digression on the numbers which govern births, saying that eventually a guardian will not understand these rules, will make injudicious unions, and the children ‘will not have the right nature’ (546d). In other words, the eugenics program will fail, producing subpar rulers.
They will like powers of discernment and discrimination between the classes of the city. These classes are gold, silver, bronze, and iron — which we did not discuss earlier in our read-along, so let’s put this here:
Gold designates those who are fit to be rulers
Silver is used for the auxillaries
Iron and bronze is used for farmers and skilled workers
This is originally described in Book 3. There, Socrates says (as part of the myth the guardians are told):
Most of the time you will father children of the same type as yourselves, but because you are all related, occasionally a silver child may be born from a golden parent, or a golden child from a silver parent, and likewise any type from any other type. (415b)
The guardians are supposed to have no pity for their children and to place them in the proper class. But if a subpar guardian makes his way in, the program will collapse. A failure of the aristocracy produces a new kind of regime. The one that most naturalyl arises is timarchy. The land and housing is to be privatized, and the previously free will be enslaved. The ruling class will thus be wealthy, become mean with money, and be less likely to be skilled and wise.
Is it fair to say that timarchy is aristocracy without philosophy?
The timocratic individual is one who loves victory and honor, and Adeimantus says that this resembles Glaucon, though Socrates believes there are important differences:
He’d have to be more self-willed, and with less education in the arts, though still a lover of them. Interested in listening to speeches, but no speaker. He’ll be one of those people who are hard on his slaves, a man like this, since he doesn’t feel the superiority the truly educated man feels towards his slaves. He’ll be courteous towards free men, and his love of power and success will make him extremely deferential to those in authority. He is an avid hunter and loves physical exercise, and he feels entitled to rule not because of what he says, or anything like that, but because of his warlike deeds and achievements in war. (549)
A son becomes timocratic, Socrates says, by being the son of a good father who lives in a badly governed state. The father is, in blunt American terms, a sucker. People know he is a sucker. He feeds the rational element of his soul, but he keeps losing at the worldly status games. His son sees this and becomes timocratic rather than aristocratic. He is torn between two extremes but finds himself in the middle, timocratic.
Our second kind of regime is oligarchy. This is a regime where the rich rule: there are ‘property qualifications’ for ruling in this city. A timocracy may naturally devolve into an oligarchy as the powerful amass more wealth (550d-e). ‘The higher value they put on [money], the lower value they would put on virtue,’ Socrates says. The ruling class is not ambitious or competitive, but rather money-loving. The problems of oligarchy should be obvious: wealth is at best a highly imperfect proxy for wisdom, at worst a contraindicator. So, the wise will not rule the city.
And another failing of this city, Socrates says, is:
That a city of this kind is bound to be two cities, not one: a city of the poor and a city of the rich, living in the same place, but constantly scheming against one another. (552d)
(Sounds familiar!)
The oligarchic regime also introduces further ills: ordinary citizens are tasked also with war, and some men may sell all their property and become ‘men without mens,’ the truly poor. Crime flourishes here, too.
While the timocratic regime was still a functioning city, at least along some lines, the oligarchic regime is barely a city at all.
The oligarchic man is money-loving, mean, selfish, with a disregard for truth and virtue. He comes into being by seeing that his father suffers in the world, such as a general who is dragged into court and put to death. The son reasons that he must amass power in the form of wealth to flourish; in other words, he lives in fear of sharing his father’s fate. He ‘enthrones the desiring and avarcicious element.’ The king of his soul is greed. The rational and spirited parts of the soul are subordinated.
The city further degenerates into a democracy. This is motivated by a sense that ‘[The ruling class] are ours for the plucking,’ Socrates says (556e). When the poor are victorious, kill their opponents and exile them, and then divide the city into equal shares, they have established a democracy.
Socrates does not believe that democracies are truly free. He knows that there is a widespread perception that they are free or made up of free men, and that they are thus the most attractive of the regimes. ‘Like a coat of many colours, with an infinite variety of floral decoration, this regime will catch the eye with its infinite variety of moral decoration.’ (557c)
In fact, Socrates thinks many of the attractive features of a democracy obscure the reality of the situation:
Then there’s the tolerance of this city. No pedantic insistence on detail, but an utter contempt for the things we showed such respect for when we were founding our city — our claim that only someone with an understanding of nature could ever turn out to be a good man, and only if from earliest childhood he played in the best company and the right surroundings, and did all the right kinds of things. How magnificently the city tramples all of this underfoot, paying no attention to what kind of life someone led before he entered political life! All anyone has to do to win favour is say he is a friend of the people. (558b)
Glaucon sardonically remarks: ‘Ah, yes, that’s true nobility!’
The democratic individual is raised by oligarchic parents, but he rebels. He gets the taste of the honey the drones enjoy (559d) and finds that he likes to pursue pleasure. He sheds inhibitions. But there is eventually warfare within himself. The democratic individual is internally anarchic.
And that leaves us with tyranny. This is ‘the most delightful of regimes,’ Socrates says. The insatiable desire for freedom eventually destroys a democracy, just as an insatiable desire for wealth destroys an oligarchy. Democracy destroys the idea of rule altogether: magistrates are denounced, rule-followers are mocked, and sons no longer feel as if they must obey their fathers. The likely reaction to excessive freedom, he says, is excessive slavery. And thus we have tyranny.
At the head of a tyranny is a tyrant. The people turn to a single individual, a champion, and from this tendency, a tyrant emerges. A champion of the people, once he wins, has no inhibitions. He can pacify the masses with promises (cancellation of debt, redistribution of land) while also exiling his enemies, giving into his own desires, and the like. The tyrant naturally opposes all others with power, attempting to be solely in control of the city. He must be a wolf or be destroyed.
The tyrant will begin with a smile on his lips, appearing friendly to all, but he will have to hunt down the good and the wise, because they too prove a threat to his rule. The tyrant cannot really be happy, I would say, because he is constantly under threat.
But we will turn to the matter of the tyrannical man at the beginning of Book IX.
I didn't highlight comments from the last post for a simple reason: I was approaching the email word limit! And I hate when my posts get cut off in your email.
I feel like Plato had Alcibiades in mind when he was describing the timocratic man.