As the State, So the Man: Book VIII of Plato’s Republic
Socrates comes back to the communal life of the guardians to start Book VIII, though his friends remind him where he had left off with respect to governmental forms. On the one hand, there are as many political forms as there are souls, since civic life does not emerge from rock but from the character of persons.1 On the other hand, we can identify four “inferior types,” that is, underneath the aristocracy they have been constructing—though he calls it “the royal” due to the focus on the singular philosopher king. The inferior kinds he calls timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.2 He recounts Homer’s and Hesiod’s explanation of the origin of factions, but this is only useful insofar as it echoes what Socrates has already established about the dissolution inherent to this world.3 He must appeal to clear definitions and common experience. As each form is explained, they shift to what sort of man corresponds to each governmental form.
Excess and Dissolution
There is an expression that has its limitations, but also its truth: Your strength is your weakness. This is inevitable to any being less than God. Whereas for created beings, where what one is and what one has are not immutably one and the same, yet for God to be good—to use an example from Augustine—is just the same, in being, as for God to be. For anything less than God, there is composition and thus the intrinsic separability of predicate from subject, accidents from substance. Now Plato did not quite have this worked out as Augustine would. The upshot, however, is that for anything that comes into being, that which is most excellent in it is subject to change and must be held together by something else. It is not automatic.
As there is entropy in physics, so there is a cultural entropy: an intrinsic disordering of that which is composed, such that only a constant supply of “energy” conserves the integrity of its constituent parts. As we have already seen from previous books in the Republic, all constituent parts of ordered systems are hierarchical, inasmuch as there is always an essential and non-esssential, a substantial and accidental, a most excellent principle and the manifold applications. Requisite to ordered systems is maintenance of integrated composition by maintenance of the features of its excellence. All of this applies to the predicates of distinct constitutions—whether that word refer to a political constitution or a psychological constitution.
A particular political constitution has an essence. Each form has an excellence—perhaps even a set of excellencies—by which we need only mean that they have “things going for them,” or “selling points,” we might say in our popular language. Yet if the excellence is not properly ultimate, then it is unlikely to maintain balance with its unfolding parts. And since we are talking about human “parts,” there is the added dimension of sin and error in those most excellent. Hence, a pattern of dissolution emerges from exactly those who one might least expect it—the “excellent ones” (aristoi), or, as we might call them today, “the professionals” or “the experts.” Socrates lays down a rule at this point:
Or is this the simple and unwavering rule, that in every form of government revolution takes its start from the ruling class itself, when dissension arises in that, but so long as it is at one with itself, however small it be, innovation is impossible?4
How this takes place in the first form is subtle. The word timocracy comes from the word for “honor” (τῑμή), so that this form is rooted in the love of honor. It may be thought of as a perversion of aristocracy, and therein lies the reason that it comes first of the inferior forms. There is also a recall to the place of education in this whole work of Plato’s. In the phrase, “This is the character … of the timocratic youth, resembling the city that bears his name,”5 we are prompted to trace the corresponding psychology especially in the youthful copy. This becomes a side inquiry into how to prevent such dissolution in the soul as well. It is only realistic to prevent the soul’s dissolution when it is early.
The vices of oligarchy are plain enough. Socrates identifies the love of money, leading to the majority being disenfranchised and merit being out of the question, and not to mention the lack of hierarchy and order leading to all being a jack-of-all-trades. But the greatest evil, he says, is the buying and selling, of those city-dwellers who never become part of the nation.6
In setting forth the vices of the oligarchical man, Socrates draws out that truth which Alan Bloom commented upon in The Closing of the American Mind. As Socrates put it, “that which men at any time honor they practice, and what is not honored is neglected.”7 Further, one can say that what is honored is sought for in the next elite, and cultivated in their schools. Thus Bloom’s point about the education system being rooted in what kind of a human being the political regime is seeking—for us, the “democratic man” with his all-encompassing virtue of openness.8
What is the common principle to dissolution of each form? In a word, it is excess, because “any excess is wont to bring about a corresponding reaction to the opposite in the seasons, in plants, in animal bodies, and most especially in political societies.”9
The Lowest of the Lows: Democracy and Tyranny
As he describes the transition from oligarchy to democracy so meticulously, one must wonder whether or not mass society would reveal something very different. Is Socrates not guilty of some “shadow-chasing” of his own in attributing to the symptoms of more historically, smaller-scale, circumstances the essence of the disease? If so, the disease’s roots run far deeper and would manifest in far different kinds of distortion in modern forms of the same.
At any rate, we can hardly disagree about his main points on the transitions of democracy and tyranny.
And a democracy … comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices—and for the most part these offices are assigned by lot.10
In dissolution, the democratic youth mirrors the revolution of the democratic state: “just as the revolution in the city was brought about by the aid of an alliance from outside, coming to the support of the similar and corresponding party in the state, so the youth is revolutionized when a like and kindred group of appetites from outside comes to the aid of one of the parties in his soul.”11 Even after resistance by the “fathers," in which some democracies take longer to topple than others, and factions begin to form, whether in the state or the soul, it comes to the end, where, “they seize the citadel of the young man's soul, finding it empty and unoccupied by studies and honorable pursuits and true discourses, which are the best watchmen and guardians in the minds of men who are dear to the gods."12
Plato paints a most unflattering picture of the democratic man, likening him to the baser impulses of women and children, in his trance at the shiny features of egalitarian pluralism. We might think of Piers Morgan’s infamous Esau-like preference for a bowl of curry over his countrymen.
And perhaps many would judge it to be the most beautiful, like boys and women when they see bright-colored things … I certainly think, said I, that he is a manifold man stuffed with most excellent differences, and that like that city he is the fair and many-colored one whom many and man and woman would count fortunate in this life, as containing within himself the greatest number of patterns of constitutions and qualities.13
Yet, the democratic soul, like the democratic state (which produce each other), is too void of permanent things to mount a resistance to the influx of beastly power.
just as the revolution in the city was brought about by the aid of an alliance from outside, coming to the support of the similar and corresponding party in the state, so the youth is revolutionized when a like and kindred group of appetites from outside comes to the aid of one of the parties in his soul … they seize the citadel of the young man's soul, finding it empty and unoccupied by studies and honorable pursuits and true discourses, which are the best watchmen and guardians in the minds of men who are dear to the gods.14
How does his principle of excess manifest itself here? “And so,” he continues, “the probable outcome of too much freedom is only too much slavery in the individual and the state.” Perhaps we might make sense of this by remembering the wisdom taught by Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, namely, in that order is the first need of all. If ordered liberty does not constrain the self, then, as nature abhors a vacuum, the mob will swing from the demand for liberation to the demand to restore order, and thus the “man on horseback” has a ready-made audience for his propaganda.15
Socrates calls the three classes of a democratic state, the dominating class, the capitalistic class, and “the people,” or that majority class.16 Very well, we might say, then if the majority holds the assembly, what could go wrong? His answer lies in an interesting parenthetical point is made about the majority class: “This is the largest and most potent group in a democracy when it meets in assembly … but it will not often do that, unless it gets a share of the honey.”17 Socrates replies to this remark by fixing only on how the ruling class will ensure that the majority only gets the scraps, while the rules take the lion’s share.
Missing from the analysis is how such a thing is the rule. How could they get away with this? Is it at all conceivable that when the majority sees the assembly as a mere frenzy for material distribution, that they have willingly been reduced to pigs fighting at a trough? At long last, Socrates, speaks of a point where “the charge is brought against [the elite: or one party perceived to represent them] by the other party … that they are plotting against the people.”18 In the modern world, we would recognize this as the populist turn of “late-stage democracy.”
Concluding Thoughts About the Last Step into Tyranny
In one of the more prophetic sections of the Republic, on the shift from democracy to tyranny, which we might recognize as the “populist turn,” or as I called it, “late-stage democracy,” Socrates speaks of its most visible expression, including in these words:
And is it not always the way of a demos to put forward one man as its special champion and protector and cherish and magnify him? … May it not happen that he is driven into exile and, being restored in defiance of his enemies, returns a finished tyrant? … And if they are unable to expel him or bring about his death by calumniating him to the people, they plot to assassinate him by stealth … And thereupon those who have reached this stage devise that famous petition of the tyrant—to ask from the people a bodyguard to make their city safe for the friend of democracy … And the people grant it, I suppose, fearing for him but unconcerned for themselves.19
In other words, such is the populist champion that so embodies the mob’s passions, that they become (the reverse of the original point) his vicarious bodyguard: they become so enthralled with his furtherance, they forget the original point of being protected or what they were to be protected against. They become, in short, a cult of personality now bereft of any tools of self-analysis or of the original urge to self-defense. They are simply entertained by the champion’s cause and lash out at anyone who reminds them of the enemies advancing now inside the gate.
Surely, though, even large portions of the mob will catch on and the tyrant will lose his popularity, right? Socrates acknowledges the fact. The tyrant has a remedy for this as well. He will only create a larger bodyguard class: “By taking their slaves from the citizens, emancipating them and enlisting them in his bodyguard.”20
Obviously, those who would reflect in approval on the Confederate States’ cause will say that this is essentially what Lincoln did—or was compelled to do, and which Reconstruction certainly achieved. More applicable to our day, it is the gamble that the managerial elite are making now. They gamble, that is, that they can simultaneously disenfranchise the only population with sufficient civic virtue to restrain their power (i.e., a self-consciously Christian population of European stock) and quell the excesses of a third-world mob and Islamic rule. The motive, for those slow enough to remain skeptical, is to create a series of global economic zones merely peopled by humanoid and trans-humanoid laborers. Toward this end, a militarized police must be employed by the elites to eliminate the slightest stirrings of physical resistance by the native population. This makes the rootless police and military forces a slave class—the largest force ever assembled to be sure, but these function as bodyguards for Satan-worshipping war-mongers and pedophiles. That was certainly beyond the lens of this ancient sage, but perhaps not too far off.
In the end, “The demos … will learn to its cost what it is and what a creature it begot and cherished and bred to greatness, and that in its weakness it tries to expel the stronger … [But] Will the tyrant dare to use force against his father, and, if he does not yield, to strike him? Yes, he said, after he has once taken from him his arms … Well, then, said I, shall we not be fairly justified in saying that we have sufficiently described the transformation of a democracy into a tyranny.”21
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1. Republic, VIII:544d-e
2. Republic, VIII:545c
3. Republic, VIII:546a-547a
4. Republic, VIII:545d
5. Republic, VIII:549b. (VIII:551a)
6. Republic, VIII:552a-b
7. Republic, VIII:551a
8. Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 26-27.
9. Republic, VIII:563e-564a
10. Republic, VIII:557a
11. Republic, VIII:559e
12. Republic, VIII:550b-c
13. Republic, VIII:557c, 561e
14. Republic, VIII:559e, 560b-c
15. Republic, VIII:564a
16. Republic, VIII:564d-565a
17. Republic, VIII:565a
18. Republic, VIII:565b
19. Republic, VIII:565c-566b
20. Republic, VIII:567e
21. Republic, VIII:569b, c
