8.6: The Democratic City

See 555b-558c. The upper class in an oligarchic city is generally “not willing to enact laws to prevent young people who have become intemperate from spending and wasting their wealth.” On the contrary, they encourage debt among the young, “so that by buying and making loans on the property of such people, they “themselves can become even richer and more honored.” (Think of the credit card applications hanging from the walls of college campuses nowadays alongside ads for Spring Break bacchanals in the tropics.) As more and more people are reduced to poverty and “drone” status, resentment builds, until it eventually occurs to the lower class that it would be easy enough to overthrow their bourgeois oppressors and seize control of the government. The oligarchic city falls in a democratic revolution. (“Democratic” means, literally, ruled by the people.) Socrates’ description of the city that results is especially interesting, for Athens was at the time one of the most democratic in the world. He describes a city “full of freedom and freedom of speech.” Everyone has “license . . . to do whatever one wants,” and to “arrange his own life in whatever way pleases him.” (That Socrates intends this claim to include slaves, women, aliens, and children becomes clear a few pages later, at 562e-563b. Of course, he may be exaggerating a bit.) The democratic city, like a “cloak embroidered with every kind of ornament,” has in it “every sort of character,” and so, of cities, it “would appear to be the most beautiful.” Everyone belongs. Are you a timocratic sort of person? You can join the hawks in the public assembly and argue for an expansionist foreign policy. Is money-making what you love? There is a faction in the assembly that cares for little else but the state of the economy. Are you an aristocratic person with a thirst for wisdom? The philosophers meet every morning under the colonnade off to the side of the agora. Do you just want to attend religious festivals, dinner parties, trials in the law courts, and get drunk? You will find plenty of companions. Liberty! Égalité! Tolerance! These principles characterize life in the democratic city. “Isn’t that a heavenly and pleasant way to pass the time, while it lasts?” Socrates asks. “It probably is,” Adeimantus replies, “while it lasts.”

• Freedom of speech, freedom to arrange one’s life as one pleases, freedom from the censure of one’s neighbors – this passage strikes a chord with contemporary Americans. We have as national symbols a Statue of Liberty and a Liberty Bell. We put “Liberty” on all our coins. “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” rings through our nation’s history. What is Socrates’ problem? How can this be unjust? Who doesn’t appreciate freedom?

• To be free is to be unbound or unblocked with respect to something one cares about. Is there a kind of freedom that Socrates has in mind in his characterization of the aristocratic city and soul? If so, how might he characterize it?

• What is it to be a good leader in a democracy? Compare your answer with what Socrates says back at 426c.