8.1: The Fall of the Aristocratic City

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See 543a-547a. The passage beginning at 545d is one of the weirdest in the dialogue. “How, then, Glaucon, will our city be changed? . . . Something like this. . . .” Most of what follows concerning perfect numbers, rational diameters, and the achievement of procreative harmonies is presumably tongue in cheek – spoken as it is by the Muses “in tragic tones, playing and jesting with us, as if we were children and they were speaking in earnest.” The basic problem Socrates draws attention to, however, is serious enough. The philosopher-rulers will make mistakes, and to begin with, the city’s eugenics program (459d-461e), which depends for its administration on “rational calculation combined with sense perception,” will fail to breed the right sort of people to serve as rulers. (Behavioral genetics, as it’s called nowadays, is still a very poorly understood branch of natural science.) When the wrong people come to serve as rulers, they “won’t be able to guard well the testing” of the youth. The career counseling program of the city – assigning each person the job for which he or she is best suited – will therefore fail, cooperation will break down, and the interpersonal struggling and oppression characteristic of injustice will begin.

Socrates draws attention to a fundamental problem for any institution: matching people to jobs. Getting the right people to serve as leaders is especially important when institutions are highly structured and centrally controlled. Because it is fully expected that sooner or later the wrong people will come to power, the Constitution of the United States requires a division of power and frequent elections. A certain degree of what Socrates would call injustice is accepted in the U.S. without anxiety because it is felt that there is a lawful way to counter it in its worst occurrences. But is this all that should be done? Is there no way the law can be modified to see that more of the right people get into office in the first place?
Would raising the salary of politicians – perhaps to something in the neighborhood of what some of the better professional athletes make – be helpful in attracting the right people to serve in positions of political authority, or would it be harmful?
Would a rigorous civil service exam be a good idea?