Considering how to do the series of lectures, there are really two basic approaches to intellectual history.
One is that one considers the particular writers or authors just in their own context.
The view would be that writers of different historical periods have very different problems
from those of others, and we can't really find much in common between, say, what the
ancient Greeks were saying and what are problems today.
So what the intellectual historian has to do is to try to ask what was the background,
What were the underlying assumptions of each writer?
We would be considering things only in their own content.
The other approach, which is the one I'll be adopting, is a more pragmatic one, which
says there are certain arguments that we're interested in, and we want to have certain
questions that we want to answer, such as what is the best kind of society, or what
What rights do people have? And we want to look at the past and see possibly the figures
in the past had things of value to tell us today about the issues that concern us. And
it's hoped that doing so, we won't be distorting anything that the people said in the past.
We won't be, say, asking what did Plato say about left libertarianism, since unfortunately
he is unaware that there was such a thing, but we will still be able to find questions
of value, items of value that the people in the past have to say to us today.
Now, in doing so, in adopting this approach, I seem to be committing one of the big sins
according to a very influential essay, a short book that was written by Herbert Butterfield
called The Whig Interpretation of History.
What Butterfield claimed was that it's inaccurate to or misleading to have the idea that there's
There's a progression in history leading up to the present, so that we believe we have
the correct insights today, and then we view figures in the past as leading up to the insights
of today.
So the question then arises, am I going to be guilty of just this fallacy that Butterfield
called attention to?
First of all, he doesn't really argue this is a fallacy, just that this is the Whig interpretation,
it's no good, but even if it turns out that he's right that we shouldn't do that, I have
a defense that I'm not going to be doing that, I'm not contending that there's any gradual
or even sudden progression leading, say, from the ancient Greeks up to modern libertarianism,
I wish there was a series of insights that become more and more libertarian as we go on.
So it's not, I'm not going to be claiming that there's any kind of progressive trend in the history of political philosophy that leads to modern libertarianism.
So, although I'm sure I'll be guilty of many sins during these lectures, falling into the wig interpretation of history is, I hope, not one of them.
But this, we now have the question, though, why do we begin with the Greeks?
Why am I beginning with lectures on Plato and Aristotle?
Well, one reason is that this is, obviously, in a course, you have to begin at the beginning,
and these are the beginnings.
I don't want to be in the position of Disraeli's wife, who can never remember which came first,
the Greeks or the Romans.
So, the question, more seriously, why are the Greek philosophies considered the start of not only history of political philosophy, but history of philosophy in general?
And this is because the Greeks tried to answer just by reasoning the question, what is the best life or what is the best political system.
They weren't satisfied with just relying on tradition or following the religious beliefs of their time.
They wanted to ask, what, just by using reason, what, if anything, can we discover about the truth about these vital questions?
Now, as I said, the first, perhaps the most famous of all the political philosophers I'll be talking about, is Plato, who lived from 427 to 347 BC.
The famous remark that everyone always quotes, Alfred Whitehead said that the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.
Plato, they're not always agreeing footnotes, I should say. But Plato, we have to consider
what was the situation that Plato, when he wrote, was facing. Well, in Greece at the
time, as you probably know, Greece was organized in what is called city-states, the city-state
is called the polis. The term polis actually comes, it was originally the stronghold in
the city, but it was gradually extended to cover the territory of the whole city or the
people in the city. And these cities were independent. It wasn't that all the Greeks
were unified into one country, like we have the cities in the US today who are just part
of Larger Systems. But in Greece, these city-states were independent. I think they were about,
in the 5th century BC, there were about 750 of them. Some were much larger than others.
Athens was, for most of the 5th century, the largest of these. At one time, Athens had
had about 60,000 citizens, and then the total population, which would include non-resident
aliens, called medics, not to be confused with medics, it's M-E-T-I-C-S, were slaves,
and others would be about ten times that.
So now, during the period of Plato's youth, Athens was facing a very tough time, and Athens had been involved in the series of wars that are called the Peloponnesian War.
There were three major stages of the Peloponnesian War, but Athens was in a tremendous fight with another city-state, Sparta and its allies who were in the Peloponnesian League, and Sparta defeated Athens.
Athens lost a big naval battle near the end of the war, and the Athenian government, which was a democracy, was overthrown, somewhere around 403 BC.
Now, by democracy, we don't meet, in the Athenian sense, wasn't democracy as we have it today in the U.S. where you vote for your congressman or you vote for your president and then they run things without really consulting the voters until the next election.
On the contrary, in Athens, all the male citizens were part of the, participated in the assembly, they would debate all the main laws themselves and pass them.
Now there was a smaller group, council, which had 500 people, the assembly could have 6,000 at one time,
the smaller group could have 500 that would consider the laws and propose them to the assembly.
The members of that group were also selected democratically, they were just chosen by a lot.
So when Athens was called democracy, they really meant it was ruled by the people themselves, but one thing also I should mention just to get the background of how the city-states were, is that the city-states in general, not just Athens, had very little in the way of a government apparatus.
There wasn't much of a state, there wasn't much coercion involved. They could get, things could change when they had military campaigns and you'd have very much organized force.
But there wasn't really in the normal course of events in the city-state, there wasn't really much in the way of force.
For example, if you read in the Apology of the Count of Socrates' Last Days, it's pretty clear he could have escaped very easily.
He didn't have to take the hemlock. He could have gotten out. It would have been very easy for him to arrange an escape.
The City-State was quite different from the modern coercive state.
Because of the loss of the Peloponnesian War, the democratic government was for a while overthrown,
and another government called the Thirty Tyrants was for a while in power, and this was headed
by a man called Critias, who was Plato's uncle.
Plato himself is quite clear, had a very negative view of democracy, didn't like the Athenian
system at all.
And if you look at one of the dialogues of Gorgias, he has some very nasty comments on
Pericles, who was the leading Athenian statesman and proponent of democracy, so he doesn't
like him at all.
Now, an additional reason besides the fact that Plato's family was involved in the aristocratic party, that Plato didn't like democracy, was, remember, the great event of 399 B.C., that, I've already mentioned this in passing, is that Plato's teacher, Socrates, was killed by the Athenian Empire.
and Democracy. In Athens, a trial could be conducted just like a regular legislative proceeding.
People could vote a death sentence. The assembly would act as a jury, and they voted a death
sentence for Socrates. So this was something that affected Plato very deeply, that his
was killed. So now, as I say, the background then is that Plato didn't like democracy. But there was, besides Plato's personal distaste for democracy, there was a general skepticism at this time about the nature of morality or traditional practices.
practices, traditional ways of doing things. There were people at the time who were very skeptical about morality and there were some who said that really morality is all a sham, it's just a device that people have to gain power over others.
It isn't that there is some kind of moral truth or that we have some real standards of truth, say, based on what the gods have told us or what we get through the traditions of the city.
In fact, this is all made up by people for their own purposes.
And one of the principal tasks of Plato in his most famous dialogue, which I'll be concentrating on during this lecture, The Republic, is to combat this type of skepticism.
And he wants to say, no, there is some, there is an objective truth about morality.
What he's proposing to do is tell us something about that.
In the course of doing this, he really bounds political philosophy by coming up with his
notion of an ideal state.
What is the best society?
What is the society that's best organized in accordance with true morality?
So he's trying to answer, not only, say, skeptics are wrong, but he's trying to come say there
is a correct, there is a truth about morality, he's trying to tell us what is the ideal order,
what is the correct way of founding things.
things. Now, when I say, I referred to the Republic as a dialogue, but that isn't really technically correct, because the Republic comes to it, it's given as a report by Socrates of a conversation, so Socrates, that the whole thing is really related as Socrates' account of a conversation in which he is involved with various other people, such as Glaucon
Adi Montes, who were really in real life Plato's brothers. So it isn't that the
dialogue is the Republic is the actual dialogue, it's Socrates' account of this
dialogue. Whether that has, I don't know that that has any philosophical
significance, but there are people such as Leo Strauss and his followers who
and contend that every detail of the Platonic dialogue is somehow significant.
So if this lecture were given by a Straussian follower of Strauss, he would no doubt point out why that's important.
I just mentioned it just as a curiosity.
Alright, now, so the question then we have that Plato begins with is, as I say, involves the notion of whether there is the nature of truth, the nature of justice, I should say.
The term that Plato uses, the Greek term dikaiosone, justice, has a more extended sense than sometimes today when we talk of justice, we mean something kind of very limited like
John Rawls in The Theory of Justice distinguishes justice from other parts of morality.
Justice would just involve, say, political rights that people have, but there are other aspects in reality that aren't covered by justice.
Plato is using the term in a more extended sense, he's asking what is the right, so we should understand it in that way.
Now, the question, the dialogue begins where, in which Plato, I mean Socrates is raising
the question of the nature of justice.
I should say before, I should say this, the dialogues, except for the last dialogue, the
Laws, have Socrates as the figure who's giving the views of the dialogue, which is actually
some question.
I mean, when you have a dialogue, it's not presented as a general exposition, where as
you have, say, Aristotle's, you have one of Aristotle's words, you can say, well, this
This is what Aristotle thought, because he's expounding his own views.
A dialogue is just given by...
We have views that are ascribed to particular characters in the dialogue,
but it doesn't follow immediately that those views can be taken as Plato's own.
However, most scholars feel that, at least in the dialogues of the middle and later periods,
The Republic is usually dated from sort of considered middle dialogue, that when Plato
ascribes views to Socrates, he's really giving his own views.
There's a dissenting view that was held by two earlier, early late 19th, early 20th century
Philosophical Historians, John Burnett and A.E. Taylor, they said, no, no, when Plato
is talking in the Republic about Socrates, he's really reporting Socrates' own views.
This is what Socrates actually believed, but that's a very much a minority view that isn't
healthy.
I would say, just by the way, A.E. Taylor is one of the greatest of all philosophical book reviewers.
As you know, in my own work I do a great deal of book reviews, so I regard A.E. Taylor as perhaps the greatest of all book reviewers.
Reviewers.
He had enormous knowledge of nearly everything, and whenever he reviewed a book he could point
out, usually better than the author of whatever the work was, what were the mistakes of the
work.
I remember he once said, well, he spent his holiday reading something like 90 volumes
of collective works of Voltaire, and that was just in a few weeks.
But as I say, our subject is not A.E. Taylor, but Plato.
All right, so the question first comes up, what is justice?
Now he turns aside an answer that's proposed by an older man named Cephalus, who was not
not a citizen of Athens, and his son, Pauli Marcus, they suggest that justice, at least
in part, is giving back what you owe to people. What they very often find in Plato's dialogue,
someone will propose a definition and he'll just give an example of something. So this
This might be an example of something just, but it can't be justice.
You wouldn't say all justice involves giving back what you owe to people.
That's just possibly one case, but Socrates raised an objection to this.
This is kind of, it brushes this view aside, and he says, well, let's suppose someone had,
Suppose you borrowed a knife from somebody, and the person wanted it back, and then you
say that being just is to give him back the knife, but suppose you knew, say that he wanted
to use the knife to stab someone, would it still be the just thing to do, to give him
back the knife, and Plato seems to take, and Socrates takes for granted that no, it isn't
adjusting. Probably Walter Block would disagree with him on that point. So, then after the
Socrates dismissed that, then the main part of book one begins. Thrasymachus, who's another
character, there was a real life Thrasymachus, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, he was a teacher
rhetoric. He suggests, he's one of these skeptics about morality that I mentioned earlier. He says
morality is the interest of the stronger. What does he mean by this? Well, he's not proposing
this, I don't think, as a definition of morality, so that we could say, let's say somebody is very
Murray is very strong and acts in his own interest.
It wouldn't fall by definition that the person has acted morally, but what he means is rather
to take a kind of a nihilist view, he's denying there's really any such thing as objective
morality.
He says, really, we have, say, in various city-states, some would be organized on base of different classes, we would have, say, an oligarchy, the rich would be in power, in a democracy, we'd have the people in power.
So, the morals are really conventional, they're just set up so they're designed to protect the interests of a particular class or group, that you really, morality is, he says, the interest, justice is the interest of another, it's not, you could sometimes do, if you act justly, it might turn out, but it was also in your own interest,
But that wouldn't be why you would be acting justly.
It would just turn out that by you would be helping yourself
because you'd be conforming to the interests of the dominant group.
Socrates doesn't accept this view.
And what he says is, well, what he tries to do, and this is characteristic of Plato's
dialogue, is he tries to show that the views he proposes are the views that he at least
wishes to question, he tries to show by questioning that these views lead to problems or outright
and Contradiction. This is called the elencus. You're not presenting your own views right
away. Socrates isn't saying, look, you're all wrong. Here's what justice is. That comes
only later. What he's first trying to do is say, look, you say justice is the interest
Justice is the Injury of the Strong, but I can show you that this, if you hold that,
this leads to trouble. So, what is the trouble that this leads to? Well, he says, well, suppose
how does a group get to, if you say justice is the Injury of the Strong, how does a group
get to be strong? Well, the people in the group would have to cooperate with each other
The Theory of Money and Credit
The dominant group itself, that wouldn't be, it can't be that that's the correct account of justice.
Now, then Glaucon now proposes a different view, which is, it sounds like the reverse of Thrasymachus' view.
And he says, justice is really the interest of the weaker, it's that the weak people get to think that it would be very bad if the strong started bossing them and tyrannizing over them, so they get everyone somehow to accept a view that we shouldn't do various things, we shouldn't steal from each other, we shouldn't murder each other.
and so on.
These are the things that are important.
They get these views accepted because it makes them better off, and the weaker don't have
to worry about, or at least not worry as much about, being attacked by the strong.
They could just say, we have these rules of morality so the strong won't oppress them
because they'll be following these rules.
Now, the view that Glaucon proposes really is extremely influential in later philosophy.
In the form he gives it, it sounds rather like something Nietzsche suggested.
And there's another character in one of the other dialogues, Calacles, in Gorgias, who gives a similar view of morality.
But Glaucon's view is really, as I say, much more influential than that.
But it's part of a view that says that morality really rests on conventions that are accepted
in our self-interest.
Say, it wouldn't be in our interest, say, if we lived in a society where we thought
people might regularly attack us without warning.
Say, if you thought, say, while you're listening to this lecture, someone, if, say, you thought
So, if someone might come in the room and machine gun everybody, this would probably make you somewhat nervous.
I certainly wouldn't be very happy about it.
Although it would have its advantages, I suppose.
But, if you, if we, so it's because it's in our interest not to have, say, disruptions like that.
We all want to live in a society where people don't aggress against each other or don't steal the property we've acquired according to the rules of society.
Things will go much better for all of us in the sense of better in terms of enabling us to realize whatever it is we want.
So we don't, we won't, so that's why we have such rules. So this is the, as I say, this is extremely influential, extremely influential view, but Glaucon doesn't propose this as his own view, he just says, he asks Socrates, he says, well, can you refute this view, can you show us that
Justice is More Desirable in Itself. We have to ask, what does Glaucon mean by that? What is he asking Socrates to do?
And here, I think we should note a rather odd fact that the view that I mentioned through Simica's whole Rallies in the Interest of the Stronger
seems like it's the opposite of the one Glaucon said, morality, justice is in the interest of the weaker,
but everyone in the conversation takes them to be really variants of the same view.
It isn't that Glaucon said, oh no, they're similar because it's all wrong, he's got the reverse of the truth,
He just takes the view he suggested as really quite similar to Trisimachus, and he's asking Socrates to somehow come up with something different.
So the key question is, what is it that he's asking?
Well, what Glockner is suggesting is that if you view morality in this conventional way,
then you're saying morality or justice is good because of certain consequences that it has.
Say, I'm not going to kill anybody because if I know that, if I did that,
that bad things will happen to me because, say, the legal system will take care of me
in a way I don't like, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to do anything. But I wouldn't
be thinking, if I did that, I wouldn't be thinking there's anything intrinsically good
about Justice. And Glaucon makes the difference very vivid to us by some examples. He suggests
the first one is the famous Ring of Gyges example. It's actually called the Ring of
Gyges, although in the story it isn't Gyges who has the ring, but it's an ancestor of
This is a ring that, if you put it on, you would become invisible, so no one would be able to detect your presence.
Glaucon said, well, supposing we could somehow do whatever we wanted, but we were invisible, no one would know what we were doing.
doing that on the self-interest account, wouldn't we then just do, we wouldn't follow the rules
of morality, say if I saw something I wanted, I would just take it, I wouldn't say it's
unjust to steal property from others, I would just take it because it would have no bad
consequences for me.
And we could raise a question here, perhaps. Is this really a fair question? I mean, if we ask for, say, someone like a conventionalist economist, you could just perhaps say, well, morality is designed for the way people are actually, the conditions under which people actually exist, or conditions pretty close to that.
So maybe it isn't fair to say, well, how would people behave if things are radically different?
Say, why is that question? What would people do if they could become invisible?
Is that really a relevant question? But regardless of how you answer that,
the second challenge that Glaucon proposes is, I think, more telling to this conventionalist view.
He imagines a case in which someone who is conventionally, is a good person by these conventional standards.
However, everybody thinks he's a bad person, everybody thinks he's someone who's violating the laws of justice and treats him accordingly.
On the other hand, supposing somebody was actually very bad, he was always acting unjustly,
but no one knows this about him, they think he's a just person and they treat him very well.
So Glaucon said, well, which would we rather be?
Would we rather be the just person who was treated as if very badly, as if he were unjust?
or would it be rather, would we rather be an unjust person with a reputation of being
just and Glaucon says on the self-interest view, on the view that morality is really in
the interest, in our own interests or in the interests of the majority or the people, interests
of weak people, we would have to say the reputation is the more important thing. But if we said
that, then we wouldn't be really saying that morality, justice is intrinsically valuable.
We would just be saying it's something that we would do just because of certain consequences
that don't intrinsically attach to it, it's just worked out because of the social system
And we have that, it's on the whole better for us not to be justly, but it's, we can
see, it's like the slogan, the saying we have, honesty is the best policy.
While this is very often true, say if you go into a store and the storekeeper cheats,
you're not going to find out about this.
You're not going to go back to that store anymore, but that doesn't show, say, that the storekeeper
really values honesty, just thinks that because of the way we have our economic and political
system, it won't pay to be dishonest.
So what Glaucon is asking is, can you come up with something that shows that justice
is really valuable in a way that goes beyond convention.
Now I think in understanding this question, it's important to see that what Glaucon is
is asking is in a sense is not as far away from the view that says how his morality is in our interest as one could imagine.
There was a famous article that came out, I think, published in a magazine called Mind in 1912 by the Oxford philosopher H.A. Pritchard called
Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?
Certainly a good title for an article.
So what Pritchard said is there are various theories of morality,
saying morality is, say the utility theory and say morality,
what's the moral thing to promote, is what promotes greatest happiness,
or we have all sorts of other theories.
But he said all these theories have a common failing.
They ask the question, how is morality in our interest in some sense?
But this is the wrong thing.
If something is our moral duty, we have to do it just because it's our duty.
Even to ask the question, why is it in your interest to be moral, is to ask a question
And it puts us completely outside the moral standpoint.
So if I said, why, if I see a book here that I want,
why shouldn't I take it?
Of course, I wouldn't, in this case, take the book.
Since they're my books, I certainly don't want those.
But suppose I said, why shouldn't I take it?
So even if I ask, say, if I steal,
Even if I could show this would lead to a bad life for me in a way that doesn't depend
on what other people do to me, say it's just I'll find I'm ultimately unhappy if I engage
in theft or if I violate people's right.
According to Pritchard, this isn't really an answer that reflects the moral standpoint.
I have to say stealing is wrong. I shouldn't steal just because stealing is wrong. That's all there is to it. It's just there is, there it is. There's the moral rule. That's the whole thing. That's, there's nothing further to, there's no question on why be moral other than saying we ought to do our duty. That's, that's it.
Now that certainly was not what Socrates or Plato had in mind.
That would be a very un-Greek way of looking at things.
I don't think no Greek thinker would have thought that.
What Glaucon is asking and what Socrates tries to supply is to show that justice and reality
really will lead to a better life for us in some sense in which that's not dependent on
what, on legal or political consequences, something like when he's saying what is intrinsically
good about justice, it has to be, what he's asking for is what is it about behaving justly
that will enable us to lead a better life.
Why is this part of a better life to have justly?
How does Socrates propose to answer this question?
Well, what he does first, essentially to answer the question,
is he points out that the soul or the mind, the human mind really is not unified.
They're really three parts or three constituents of the soul.
And we have first reason, which is the most, which he thinks is the most valuable and most important one.
and we have desire, people have all sorts of passions we want, say, we have a like or want various things, say, we could have all sorts of things, whatever it is we want, food, also anything that attracts us, something we don't want, desires, and then there's an intermediate class that you call the spirited side, we get the word, spirited, spirited,
Fumos, the Greek word for spirit. That's where, remember, von Mises in Theory and History talks about phymology, which he means kind of a study of introspective psychology, really not something that's deductive like praxeology, but just based on people's experience.
Plato takes the word bymos, humos, from this Greek term, although it doesn't mean the same
thing in Mises as it does there, but the spirit inside would be really is, we could say it's
really, we have reason, desire, we have a question.
If say we decide to act on our desire, Plato thinks there's a third part of the mind that
Spirit that really puts this into practice. I could have all sorts of different desires,
but say I pick one, but how does that get me actually to do it? Plato thinks it's the
Spirit, sort of the executive part of the soul, and this is especially the feelings
Socrates of anger and honor and shame would be examples of the spirited part of the soul.
So this, as you'll see, is the key to Plato and Socrates' account of justice.
In trying to show that the soul is divided into parts, Socrates gives the example, he
says, well, suppose I can have a case where I want something, say I have a strong desire
Say, I really like to drink some water. I feel tremendously thirsty. I want to really drink a lot of water.
But say, I could also at the same time feel that I shouldn't drink the water.
Let me just, as my example, not the one in the Republic, I'm supposed to say I was undergoing some medical tests and they told me don't drink anything for the next few hours.
I feel tremendously thirsty, I really like to drink something, but at the same time, I don't want, I feel very nervous about, I don't want to upset this medical test, so I don't drink.
So, Sakshi said, well, how could you have a, if the mind were entirely unified, you would be, say, you have only, how could you have a desire at the same time, both for something, I want to drink at the same time, have a desire not to drink?
It can't be that if the mind is entirely unified, it would have contradictory or seemingly contradictory properties.
So that's a reason to think the mind isn't unified.
When Plato gives this argument, Fred Miller, I think, calls this the principle of non-opposition, that you can't describe contradictory properties to something at the same time.
This is, I think, one of the first uses of this basic logical principle in the history of philosophy.
So, although as you'll be seeing later, there are strong reasons to disagree with Plato on many things in his philosophy, he was quite a smart person, I mean, after all, really using the principle of non-crime prediction for the first time is really something that's worth noting, is one of the first uses of this principle.
So, all right, so we now have the mind have these three parts, reason, the spirited part, and desire.
So, what Socrates asked, well, if we want to know what is the nature of justice, so we can answer Glaucon's question,
Why should we be just? Plato socially said we should look at really the soul written in a larger and what he says is by that he means he said we should examine the nature of a city because the city in some way corresponds to the soul so we say he says just like supposing you had a text written in small in small letters
and you had trouble reading the text, one thing you could do is take a magnifying, look at it in a larger example, get a bigger example of this.
So he says, this is something we can do for the nature of justice, we could say, what is justice in the city, and this will help us see what is justice in the soul,
and we can see possibly why it's valuable. Now then what happens though if it turns out that
we don't think they're the same? Well then it actually suggests we can just keep going back
and forth and trying to adjust our views till we get a balance, a better fit between what's
What's true for the soul and what's true for the city.
So here that in pursuing this analogy is really where the Socrates really gives the basic political
doctrine that's propounded in the Republic.
What he says is, in an ideal city, we would have reason, we would be in control.
So what he has is that in the city, there are separate classes corresponding to each
Part of the Soul, there's the workers, the people who do all the menial work, keep things going, are in his, as Socrates suggests, are governed by desire.
These are people who are dominated by passion.
Then we have, there's the warriors, the people who were the military part of the city, who both defend the city from other cities and also sometimes will attack other cities because the ideal city sometimes will need to get more territory from other cities.
So these warriors will be the ones who, and they're the ones who are dominated by spirit.
And then the highest group is the guardians. These are the people who are, who are governed by reason, so they'll be in control.
And in the city, we have that it's desirable, according to Socrates, Socrates representing Plato, to have the city would be as unified as possible.
So it's particularly important for the guardian, the guardian class and also the warriors.
They want to have everyone having similar ideas as possible, and to have this, Plato proposes communism of property and marriage that, instead of say, we have now that you get married to a single person,
There's nothing like that. People don't form permanent attachments, but there's just a, it's decided by the periodic days that are calculated according to certain numerological, on a certain numerological basis where people are supposed to mate according to what's considered to be likely to produce the best offspring.
Spring, and that's how you get the new generation. It's not people can't decide this sort of
thing for themselves. Now, I must say at first sight, this doesn't sound like it's what the
system that reason dictates. So why is it that Plato thinks that what is supposed to
Why is it that Plato thought that the guardians would be in total control?
What is it that the guardians are supposed to know that gives them this power over everyone
else, that they're in charge, other people have to do what they say?
What is it that they're supposed to know?
Well here we have to make some reference to one of the most difficult and controversial
parts of Plato's philosophy, the doctrine of forms or ideas.
And what suggested is in the middle books, in the public, is that when we say, we ask,
we have various things we ask, what is the essence of anything?
I suppose I have a square, we say, what is the essence of a square?
I just had mentioned a square object.
In the essence, isn't the physical thing, say, that I'm looking for, say, this lectern is a rectangle.
So the real rectangle, its quality being rectangle, isn't this physical embodiment of the rectangle.
Because after all, it wouldn't be perfectly, it isn't perfectly rectangular.
that probably if you measure it, it would be slightly off, and even if we kept measuring
it more and more closely, we'd find imperfections in it.
The real rectangle is something that exists not in anything physical, but separate from
this.
It's somewhat of an abstraction, it's an abstract realm that's apart from the physical
in the different dialogs or different views of whether every object has such a form corresponding
to it.
But for the ones that do have forms corresponding to it, it's the abstract object, this abstract
form is the real quality of the real object, say it isn't, say we can imagine, say various
These beautiful people or beautiful houses, they're beautiful, beautiful, but that wouldn't
be beauty itself, so what's really beautiful is not any of these things, these are just
Beauty Imperfectly, but the beautiful itself, which would be somehow apart from the things
that are constantly changing in the world.
One reason Plato was attracted to this view is he thought that if we have knowledge, in
order to have knowledge, by knowledge he meant this in a very strong sense, something that
were absolutely certain, can't possibly be otherwise, we thought we could have knowledge only of what was unchanging, only what couldn't be different.
Say, if we look at various objects around us, they could be different, they change from time to time, people, say, view them from different perspectives.
Say if someone, I'm looking at this lecture, I'm looking down at it from a certain way, it looks one way, but somebody, a different part of the room was looking at it, would see it at a different angle, so it would be somehow slightly different.
So this wouldn't be real knowledge. Real knowledge has to be something that's absolutely unchanging, doesn't change at all.
To some extent, mathematics gives us knowledge, but even this isn't good enough according to Plato.
Plato. This is in the famous passage in the public called the divided line where the mathematicals
aren't at the absolute top. What was wrong with mathematics? I mean, it seems like there
don't you have this kind of necessary knowledge that Plato wants. Well, there are two problems
It goes with, first of all, that mathematicians, at least this was true in Plato's time, use diagrams in their arguments, but a diagram isn't, is something too concrete.
Say, if you use a geometric proof, you draw, say, a square or a triangle, it won't be a perfect square or triangle, since its physical will be slightly imperfect, so by using the diagram, you haven't really gotten to the highest true.
Plus, and perhaps even more important, mathematics uses certain premises that are insufficiently justified.
Plato thinks that by further investigation of the forms, we could come up with absolutely truth that in some way doesn't rest on any unjustified premises.
Now, then, when we have the forms, there's the highest form, which is called the form
of the good, and it's the philosophers, the guardians, because they've been very carefully
trained, they've seen the form of the good, and this is what enables them, this is why
They're in control because they've gotten the highest, they've been in contact, they know the highest form, so this enables them to rule everyone else.
They've known the highest form of the good nobody else does because it requires all these years of training to be able to advance that far.
To get to that part, you have to study mathematics first, because you can't just say, well, let's forget about math and all the other things, I want to go right to the highest, I want to get right to the form of the good so I can get in and become one of the rulers right away.
No, you can't do that. You have to go through this very careful program of mathematical training, then you get to know the form of the good.
Now, there's a big problem with all of this, is that Plato, nowhere, either in the Republic or in any other dialogue, tells us very much about what the form of the good is.
We know this is the highest form, but he doesn't say very much about what it is or why it is that knowing this is supposed to give you wisdom.
But he doesn't really suggest that he himself at any point really had grasped fully the form of the good.
There are various speculations on what he might have meant by the form of good.
which was given by the Oxford philosopher H.W.B. Joseph, I think gave a series of lectures on knowledge of the good in Plato's Republic.
He thought the form of the good was really not a particular separate form of just grasping,
you would grasp how all the various forms are fully unified systematically.
And theoretically that's an interesting suggestion, but there's been a great deal of debate on
what the form of the good is, but somehow if you know that, you would, this makes you
somehow more equipped to rule, equipped to, you would be, in short, because you would
be part of the reasonable, the only group that's grasped reasoning fully.
No one else would have done that, so they then have to do what the philosophers, what
the guardians say, because it's the guardians who know the truth, and in holding this view,
this is going to be a fundamental theme in the subsequent lectures, assuming there are
There are any subsequent lectures after this one. Does the notion of an objective morality, objective truth, lead to an authoritarian political system of the kind Plato favored?
Is it that if there's an objective truth, then people who know that truth are going to have the right to rule other people who don't.
This is an interesting book that was published a couple of years ago, a short book by the economist James Buchanan called Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative.
And he suggests that basic to classical liberalism, libertarianism, is to hold that there isn't an objective moral truth in that sense, because he thinks if you held there was such a thing, then you would be committed to some form of authoritarianism.
So we would have to ask, we'll be asking in lectures, is this a correct account of things?
But, regardless of how we answer that, there's a basic problem in the position that has been set out so far.
Remember, what the position was is that we want to find out what is the nature of justice.
Will being just, is that being part of the good life, part of the best life?
And to answer that question, it's actually supposed a parallel, an analogy between the city and the soul.
The city is the soul written large.
But the problem with this analogy is that in order to be just, according to the view being propounded here, reason has to be in control of the passions and the spirited part of the soul.
But in the city, in the ideal city, although the guardians represent reason, are in control of the warriors and the workers,
the warriors and the workers, by the hypothesis we're giving, are not controlled by reason.
they don't have wisdom that's just why they're not guardians they're not controlled by by by wisdom but
then we have if that's true then in the ideal city in the just city most people are not just
so we have the ideal city would be composed of people who aren't themselves rational or would
who would not be just.
And so the whole analogy really breaks down there.
There's a famous article by Bernard Williams pointing this out.
So there's really, the whole analogy really doesn't work because, again, you make the
Just City could be composed largely of people who aren't just.
Now, one reason Plato might have done this is at least at that point in his career, he
really didn't care much about non-philosophers.
He thought that people who weren't philosophers, who hadn't grasped wisdom, really weren't
fully human in the full sense, so he's really just concerned with the guardians, but even
if that's the case, the whole basic analogy of the Republic really breaks down in this
way.
Now there's a further problem with the basic argument of the Republic.
It was pointed out in another famous article which came out in 1963 in the Philosophical
by David Sachs, his essay, CHS, called A Fallacy in Plato's Republic. I should say David Sachs was a friend of mine. I rate him one of the three most sarcastic people I've ever met.
It would be easy to tell all sorts of David Sacks stories, but I'll refrain from doing
that right now.
But what David Sacks pointed out, and this has been his question, been much discussed
by later, by writers after that, like Gregory Blasto, Terence Irwin and others, is what
The question Thrasymachus and Glaucon were raising is, when they say, why should we be
just? What is justice? They mean, by justice, something like conventional morality, morality
in the ordinary sense. Why shouldn't I kill or assault people whenever I feel like it?
Why Shouldn't I Steal?
So the answer that's been given is that in the soul and in the ideal city, reason should
be in control of the passions.
But what Sachs pointed out is this really doesn't answer the question because supposing
reason is in control of the passions, then does it follow that a rational person wouldn't
do any of these bad things in the ordinary sense.
According to Sachs, Plato is guilty of what he called the fallacy of irrelevance.
He's just shifted.
He hasn't answered the question, but he shifted it to some other question, namely, how is
it that reason should control the passions and the spirited part of the soul.
He hasn't told us really why we should be just in the ordinary language sense.
Now, I think probably the best answer to this, Richard Kraut, who was another influential
student of ancient philosophy, suggested that Plato thought that the main reason people
would violate conventional moralities. They were overcome by passion. Say, somebody was very greedy and wanted to steal something because he felt very greedy, so he would just take what didn't belong to him. But a rational person wouldn't do this.
Now, so that would be really how I think probably the best reply to Sachs' point on the fallacy of irrelevance.
Now, I should say I concentrated mostly on the republic, but there's another dialogue, which was Plato's last dialogue, the laws,
Laws, in which he gives a different account, a different scheme for how a city should be
organized.
And this one is, again, not very libertarian, but it's different from the one given in the
Republic.
This is described, the laws is the dialogue in which Socrates doesn't figure the one who
The city who represents Plato's views is called the Athenian Stranger, and what the people are, what's suggested there is it's a dialogue where it's proposed to have a colony in part of Crete, a city, or when you establish it, a city in part of Crete is called Magnesia, the ideal city in the Republic is called Callipolis, the beautiful city, but this one is called Magnesia, the ideal city in the Republic is called Callipolis, the beautiful city, but this one is called Magnesia,
This one is called Magnesia. And in this one, it's called the second best city. Plato, in
the Republic, it said that this is described as politics in the heavens, where it's suggested
this couldn't really be put into practice. It's too good for actually put into practice.
And perhaps this one actually can be practiced. Now, there's a question that's been, an interesting question, raised by Christopher Babonich, a very good book on the laws called Plato's Utopia Recast.
And he said, well, everybody is assuming in the laws that when Plato talks about the second best city, he means that the best city is the one described in the Republic.
But this doesn't follow. He does say that the best city is one which you have communism of property and wives and women, but that doesn't follow that that means that the ideal city is the one in the Republic.
He just says, well, this we couldn't in practice realize communism of women and property.
But he doesn't say that he doesn't refer to the Republic. In fact, what he's talking about there would be, what he says can't be realized as universal communism of women and property.
But in the city describing the Republic, it's not that isn't the case. The workers do not have to have, can have private property and ordinary marriages.
So it's not clear, the first best city in the laws really is the Republic, but is the city described in the Republic, but in the laws, we have instead of a guardian class of philosophers, there's really a group, there's a legislative body, the city is divided into four classes based on property,
But these classes, the property differences really aren't all that much, but there's a legislative body and also a group of guardians who are really in charge, but these are not particularly philosophers, although they're supposed to be the older and wiser parts of the city, but they're not philosophers.
And in fact, laws that are set out are supposed to have preambles giving the purposes of the law so people can grasp what the laws are for.
So it's different from the republic in which wisdom is confined to the guardian class and the non-philosophers don't really matter.
Remember, one detail I'm sure you're familiar with, I didn't mention, is in the system describing the Republic, there's what is called the noble lie.
The people are told that when they're born, their souls have different metals in them.
and the gold, silver and bronze and iron and the reason the, say the workers, if say the
worker weren't asked why do I have to be in the lowest group, they would say because
your soul has the bronze or iron in it. So this isn't, this deception isn't practiced
in the laws, in the laws you have preambles telling the people what the laws are for.
However, as I say, by no means is the law a system, a libertarian system.
On the contrary, there's an institution called the Nocturnal Council,
And that this group can investigate people who don't subscribe to the official religion.
Now, the official religion of the society is sort of what is one of the, it's called a civil theology,
it's used the term of a, I think it was used by the writer Varo, one of the later classical authors,
of Civil Theology, which everyone in the city has to believe, and Plato uses the, gives a version of the cosmological argument that we know, we can establish that there's a first cause of the world, and that people will be punished or rewarded by what they do in their life.
will be punctually rewarded by what they do in their life, and people are required, they're
educated to accept this civil theology and they're required to believe it.
If they don't, the nocturnal council can imprison them and sort of subject them to what we could
call a period of brainwashing for, I think it was five years, and if they still didn't
The system is not exactly the one described in Ethics of Liberty, but at any rate, it does show that Plato had a somewhat higher opinion of the capabilities of people than they would be executed.
I know that perhaps in this last dialogue, Plato had a somewhat higher opinion of the capabilities of people than he did in the Republic.
Now, the last thing I will mention before I open it up for some questions is there is a particular strand in history political philosophy
that I'll be describing from time to time, which is called the Straussian School.
This is followers of the political theorists in history and philosophy, Leo Strauss, who
was, I think, 1899-1973, who taught at New School for Social Research and then University
of Chicago.
And he had, he wrote a number of very, he's a, I'm very, I tend not to accept the theories, his theories and views in his school,
but he was an extremely learned person who had very influential interpretations of all sorts of different political philosophers.
It was extremely hard to do this, but he did this. He's managed to revolutionize views
in a number of different areas. He had new interpretations of Plato, new interpretations
of Maimonides and Al-Farabi and medieval philosophy. He has new views of Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke.
All sorts of different fields he was able to come up with new interpretations.
What the Straussians say about Plato, you can find this, for example, in Strauss' book City and Man, is that when Plato described the system of the Republic,
what he was doing was he wasn't advocating that system. He didn't really say that this was, didn't really hold that this was the best possible system.
System.
On the contrary, he says by describing the conditions that would have to be put into
effect before we could have this city, for example, that everyone over the age of ten
would have to be expelled from the city before this city could be founded.
He was trying to show that this city could never be realized.
Plato was saying, if you really want, try to think of what would be involved in a system where the philosophies would rule, you could see this is not a desirable or possible thing at all.
So according to Strauss, Plato was really being satirical in the Republic. He was saying this is what you get if you try to come up with all these schemes of philosophers ruling.
The philosophers should really stay to their proper business, which is really just think about the nature of truth and philosophical problem,
and that some of the Straussian, some of Strauss's followers say what Plato really favored, contrary to what people think, Plato was really pretty sympathetic to democracy, really sympathetic to democracy, and that's what he was trying to do, and that's what he was trying to do, and that's what he was trying to do.
to Democracy, which doesn't account for all the awful things he says about it.
And the Republican says democracy is really a system where people are dominated by different passions and reason really isn't in control.
So they say, for example, one who uses a book by von Strauss called David Rutschnik, I think it's called The Beautiful City, Dialectic in Plato's Republic.
So what he says is, well, really the conversation that the Republic depicts could only have taken place in a democracy.
So what the message Plato is giving is really philosophy needs democracy, so Plato is really a good Democrat.
I don't think that this view can be accepted because one item against it is, well, if Plato wanted to say the philosophy shouldn't rule,
Why do you go to this very elaborate description of the best city?
Why do you have to go through all that to get to this conclusion that philosophy shouldn't
rule?
We have additionally Aristotle, who was after all Plato's student, takes when he criticizes
Plato in Book Two of the Politics, he takes very seriously the proposal that Plato gives.
certainly doesn't treat them as if they were satirical so I think that that view
ought to be rejected. But I say in conclusion I think the most important
thing to take away from this lecture is does the, if we think there is an
objective truth about justice, about morality, will this lead to an
and Authoritarian System, the kind depicted in the Republic.
I think in a little time remaining we'll have questions.
Dan?
Okay.
I have kind of a double question, but I think it would be a key question.
There's housing elements involved in the past few years.
Of course, there's been some changes in the program.
And I'd like to get your opinion first on the argument that can be made that what Plato is presenting is actually more of a political program
in the sky, when it is a philosophical program.
And in fact, for example, the public,
we've done most of the many of the sort of broad
technicalities of the Parkinson's disease,
and then perhaps later, as we run a concrete set of ideas
that he wants to, and he's probably going to do,
and propagate as both simply coming up
with a philosophical program.
For example, the reason why we get this apparent break
between the reasoning from the individual
for the City, that will actually, Plato isn't in the city at this point, he's actually in the city at the time of the fall of the city, and then put the city in the program, and then I guess left the sources perhaps back on Plato, and from the Strauskin side, there's also this other element of Strauskin, to get exactly the terms of the major thing, but they say that facsimile is really where Plato comes from, he really, Plato actually
is the idea that morality can be visibly distorted.
Here's the element of the construction of an extremely democracy-filled cover board
actually, is what I'm calling it.
But I would throw out some of these contracts.
Oh yes, well, I'm supposed to repeat the question.
And so you had a two-part, there's a two-part question.
The first was the historicist point about Plato, that some people think that what Plato
aim wasn't principally philosophical but that he had particular political goals in mind
that he wants to insinuate subtly in the republic, for example, he admired the Spartan state
and he wanted to perhaps suggest that that should be sort of Spartan measures should
be put into practice.
And then there was another part, the Straussian view, some Straussians hold that Thrasymachus
really reflects Plato's actual views and that he holds that, he really does hold that morality
is in the interest of the stronger and that he's really concerned to defend power politics
in the book.
Now on the first part of the question, I don't think that it could be said that Plato's entirely
in favor of Sparta, he makes some criticisms of Sparta, also, I mean, they would be ones
who would be really, the Spartan state in his view, would really be dominated by the
in the spirit of the elements, they wouldn't really be controlled by reason. Of course,
followers of this interpretation could just say, oh, that's just window dressing, it doesn't
really hold that. But then, I would want to say, what is the real evidence that people
favor this half for dismissing the philosophical parts of the book? Now here, when we ask a
This gets into the Straussian side of the question.
Probably the historians of the Straussians would say,
Well, the real reason we should dismiss the philosophical aspects of the dialogue
and favor either the historicist or the Straussian view
The view is that we see that there are contradictions in the philosophical doctrine, but then the view apparently is that if there are problems or contradictions in the book, that really the author has put them there deliberately.
I don't really see much reason to adopt that view, on the Straussian view. I would say if Trisimachus is the whole dialogue is to show us that Trisimachus was really right, he's certainly taken a long way around to do that.
I mean, generally, if you want to show a position is right, you don't write a long book defending the opposite position. I'm sure the Straussians would have a response to that, but I'm not convinced that it's the case. It may be, though, that I would say this position, that may have been Strauss's own position.
I mean, I think you could make a better case that Strauss himself said this. I mean, I think people who say that are mainly relying on Strauss's lectures called The City in Man, where he seems to suggest that, but I think it's more a better case you could make for Strauss, that's Strauss's own view, and for describing that period of Plato. Anybody else? Roderick?
Yes, I mean that's exactly the point that you say if there's a moral truth, then don't you have to put it into practice in an authoritarian way.
To give away what I think is the correct answer to this light is, well, what if the objective truth turns out to be that people should be, have a right to freedom, that they shouldn't do that? Why can't that be the objective truth, especially since it is so, so I mean, so it's not the case that if you hold there's an objective truth about morality that will lead to authoritarian politics. It just depends on what you hold.
is the truth, whether you're getting a authoritarian view or not.
and the concept of the city as this kind of ideal framework where there are these very
un-unperfect people, particularly in providing the classes like the warriors and the workers
who don't seem to have reasons, right?
So the Plato's Republic, Plato makes a big fuss about the virtues of a proper guardian or legislator
Well, the question is, to what extent is the political philosophy really close to how political philosophy is laid out?
Well, the question is, to what I said in Greek philosophy in Plato, is aesthetics related
to politics?
Well, I think in the Plato, when he talks about the good, I mean, you certainly remember
the name of the ideal city is Callipolis, you know, the beautiful city, and the Greek
The Greek word kalon, beautiful, is very much connected to justice, so there is a very definite connection that's sort of really the form of the beautiful is I think very closely connected with the form of the good.
So generally the Greeks would not view them as separately as we do today.
We don't have, as I mentioned earlier in the lecture, we don't have a sense of a moral obligation
as something just standing completely by itself so that people have to do certain things for
for just for no reason, these are what is, the moral and the good and the beautiful are all intrinsically related, but I think now fortunately the time saved me from having to go into how they're related.
Okay, thanks very much. That ends the first lecture.
Thank you very much.