3.10: Rulers

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See 412b-414b. It has been evident for some time that this city will require rulers, if only to steer people toward the right jobs and oversee the education of the soldiers. A moment’s thought makes it clear that the soldiers also have to be led, that foreign policy has to be managed, that public works have to be planned, funded, and executed in a timely and orderly manner, and so on. How many rulers the city requires is unclear, but Socrates recommends that they be selected from among the best of the guardians: those who have the conviction that their own interests are inseparable from the city’s interests, and who are most successful at maintaining this conviction in the face of distractions, deceptions, seductions, and threats. More will be said about the selection and training of the rulers in Book VII. Henceforth, ordinary soldiers – those not serving as rulers – will be called “auxiliaries.”

“We must watch them right from childhood, and set them tasks in which a person would be most likely to forget such a conviction or be deceived out of it. . . . we must subject our young people to fears and then plunge them once again into pleasures, so as to test them more thoroughly than people test gold in a fire.” Can you imagine how such tests might run?
Is there a good reason to select the rulers from among the best of the soldiers? Why not from among the best of the farmers, the best of the teachers, the best of the builders, or the best of the doctors? (What is a city more like – a farm, a school, a building project, a medical patient, or an army?)