(Strauss, 1978: 52), Socrates1 argues that governing is a specialised art or craft that, like other useful crafts (medicine, shoemaking, building, navigation), requires certain skills and knowledge that has definite ends. Governing is a practice, a sense of ‘know-how’, or specialised knowledge, containing excellence and virtue or what the Greeks termed arete. Like other crafts, the art of ruling embodies specific capacities and skills and uses them to do the best work possible to serve the interest of subjects in much the same way that a shepherd tends and cares for his sheep, or a doctor heals his or her patients. Like these crafts, it is generally done for others and not for one’s own ends. Moreover, objects and individuals not only have specific functions, but also possess a peculiar excellence or virtue that enables them to work well. This applies equally to living, which is the function of the soul. Since the virtue of the soul is justice, only the just man, according to Socrates, can be happy since when the soul does not have virtue it cannot work well.
For Socrates, as for Plato, unless something is grounded in nature; it cannot serve as an objective standard and a sound basis of knowledge and action. The notion of what is ‘Good’, or right, is not a subjective interpretation as democratically inclined Sophists may argue, but rather an objective fact. In addition, Plato believed, some would argue naively, that if we know the Good we will automatically act according to its principles. The idea of the Good represents the most important of the Forms, and it is the theory of the Forms that underpins all Plato’s thinking. The Theory of Forms constitutes his attempt to deal with the relation between universals and particulars. The tangible objects we see are debased inferior copies of unseen ideas. In this sense Plato was an idealist. Similar, though by no means identical, conceptions were later used by Weber in his notion of ideal types, Hegel in his notion of the concept, and Schutz in his notion of typifications.
The Ideal State and the Division of Labour
For Socrates humans have a multiplicity of needs and a state comes into existence in order to meet these mutual needs ‘because no individual is self-sufficing; we all have many needs’ (Plato, 1945: II.368). When people coalesce in a certain location to meet one another’s needs, this forms a state. It is also on this basis that the division of labour develops. Although discussion of the division of labour is often attributed to Adam Smith and Émile Durkheim, it has its first systematic, though condensed, discussion, in Plato’s work.
According to Plato, individuals are born with different natural capacities, aptitudes and talents that subsequently need to be developed and perfected through training. They are also naturally suited to perform one type of activity rather than many. Since ‘no two people are born exactly alike’, this permits them to be funnelled into specific types of job. Society and the individuals that compose it are thereby better off by restricting themselves to one trade or vocation: a farmer should remain a farmer, a craftsman a craftsman, etc. This specialisation of tasks and roles, given by nature, leads to greater efficiency and excellence: ‘more things will be produced and the work be more easily and better done, when every man is set free from all other occupations to do, at the right time, the one thing for which he is naturally fitted’ (Plato, 1945: II.370). Justice at the level of a city-state is thereby grounded in a such a mutually beneficial, co-operative division of labour based on differing natural aptitudes in which each individual follows just one task. When individuals follow their naturally given endowments and assume their allotted role in a complex interdependent division of labour, a just and harmonious social order ensues.
Plato’s definition of political justice in the city-state is, prima facie, rather odd. It does not refer to behavioural criteria or individual actions. Instead, it is grounded on each individual assuming a specialised place in a structural allocation of roles based on their natural aptitude. It is based on a specific hierarchical configuration of social relations drawing on the principle of individual differentiation, of remaining in one’s function and effectively ‘minding one’s own business’ and not interfering in others – ‘a man should possess and concern himself with what properly belongs to him’ (Plato, 1945: IV.433). Justice, dikaiosyne, the state of the man who follows dikē, is no more than minding your own business or following the way that is properly your own, and not mixing yourself up in the ways of other people.
Embellishing this conception, Plato argues for the establishment in the Ideal state of a tripartite class-system of philosopher rulers, warrior–soldiers, and producers and merchants. Justice then is when each individual is allocated to a position within an interdependent socio-economic class order consisting of producers, auxiliaries and guardians in which each individual and class keeps ‘to its own proper business in the commonwealth and does its own work’ (Plato, 1945: IV.434). Some men are naturally suited to philosophising, others to fighting, and others to producing and trading things. By remaining in these fixed roles the cumulative effect is to produce the best overall outcome for society – a harmonious social order ruled by the best.
Criticism
Given The Republic’s influence and centrality to the Western canon and its revolutionary ideas it is no surprise to know that it has been subjected to a vast amount of criticism. The most infamous critical attack was probably that of Karl Popper, who in The Open Society and its Enemies (2012 [1945]), written shortly after the Second World War and the Nazi atrocities, accuses Plato of attempting to establish a totalitarian system of rule and justify its existence. Such criticism has itself been questioned as overstated, unhistorical and anachronistic for judging a work from the standpoint of modern liberal democratic societies (Voegelin, 2000; Klosko, 2012: 109). The concept of the individual as such, as a unique bounded entity, did not exist in early forms of society. Nevertheless, Popper’s criticism does contain a kernel of truth to the extent that the individual’s worthiness was measured in terms of how they served the city-state as a whole. Plato’s belief in the benevolence of the Guardians and their ability to rule, and produce or determine who is wise and who will become a future Guardian, has also been questioned.
Aristotle also makes a number of criticisms of Plato’s proposals concerning the abolition of private property. These, he argued, were unworkable since:
the greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over communal property insofar as they are personally affected. Other reasons apart, the thought that someone else is looking after it tends to make them careless of it. (1261b32)
Aristotle also questioned Plato’s Theory of Forms, which assumed the existence of a hypothetical realm of Forms that existed independently of the real world. Reversing Plato’s argument, Aristotle argued, rather than the general explaining the particular, it is the particular that gives us access to what is universal. The reality of things can be seen in the world around us, and is inherent in everyday objects, and it is from our experience of these particular things that we derive our universal concepts. Aristotle therefore criticises Plato for ignoring the role of experience in assessing knowledge and for being too preoccupied with rationalism and reasoning based on mathematics and geometry.
Aristotle
Life and Intellectual Context
The historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix has described Aristotle as ‘the greatest of ancient sociologists and political thinkers’ (1981: 4). Ste. Croix continues:
It is natural to begin with Aristotle, who was in a class by himself among the political theorists and sociologists of antiquity: he studied the politics and sociology of the Greek city more closely than anyone else; he thought more profoundly about these subjects and he wrote more about them than anyone. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that because Aristotle was primarily a philosopher he was, like most modern
