4.1: The City as a Whole

See 419a-423d. In reply to the objection that the guardians of the city will not be very happy living under the monastical conditions described at the end of Book III, Socrates says that “we are not looking to make any one group outstandingly happy but to make the whole city so as far as possible.” What he means by a happy city is an integrated, flourishing city: each citizen dedicated to the job for which he (or she, more on this in Book V) is naturally suited, the work of each coordinated with the work of the others for the mutual benefit of all. Most cities, by contrast, are “a great many cities, but not a city,” the primary fracture being between the rich and the poor. Wealth and poverty are evils for a city, and both should be guarded against. Wealth makes for luxury and idleness by removing the incentive to work. Poverty makes for slavishness and bad work by forcing people to make do with inadequate resources. Wealth and poverty together provide the conditions for revolution, the haves seeking to maintain what they have and the have-nots seeking to get more of what they don’t. Wealth does enable a city to fund a large military, but Socrates is convinced that a smaller, unified city can defend itself against a larger, divided city, however wealthy it may be, in part through excellence on the battlefield, but also through shrewd alliances, the richer, divided city being vulnerable to internal subversions and external alliances. Socrates warns that the city must not be allowed to grow beyond a certain point if it is to maintain its unity and integrity. Perhaps his thought is that, if the city were to get too large, the system of job placement would break down, work would cease to be properly coordinated, and mutual assistance would end up taking a back seat to private gain. Socrates does not specify the ideal size for their city, but he does mention, in passing at 423a, that an army of “a thousand men” would be a fighting force of adequate size. If he is serious about this number, then, assuming that the auxiliaries, as full-time, professional soldiers, would be considerably fewer in number than the farmers and craftsmen, and assuming that he means an army of “men” and not “men and women” – the proposal regarding women serving in the military not having been introduced yet – this city of theirs would, by ancient standards, be no small town. It wouldn’t approach Athens, which at the start of the Peloponnesian War had a total population that has been estimated at a quarter of a million, but it might very well compare with the more typical Greek city of the day, which had something more in the range of twenty to fifty thousand inhabitants (including men, women, and children; free and slave).

• What makes a group of people a community? Is there anything more to it than living in close proximity and selling one another goods andservices?

• How bad is it to be wealthy? Should wealth be better controllednowadays?

• What are the advantages of living in a small town? What are the advantages of living in a large city? Is there an ideal size for a human community?

• Would you enjoy belonging to a community like the one Socrates is describing?