Socrates on the Nature of the City-State

In Plato's Republic, Socrates investigates the nature of the city-state and what the ideal city-state should be. The primary subject of The Republic is justice, examined in broad terms. Socrates discusses a variety of views on justice and types of justice, one of which is offered by Thrasymachus. Justice is a concept we believe we understand even if we have difficulty putting the concept into words. Justice is defined by the relationship that exists between the individual and the state, and justice means that the state treats every person equally and seeks to resolve disputes on the basis of the facts and compared to objective criteria rather than a subjective determination. Justice in the broadest sense is fairness. Justice cannot assure that every dispute comes out "correctly" or that no mistakes are made, but it should be such as to assure that the process by which decisions are made and goods allocated is fair and produces an acceptable result in the aggregate, even if an individual case justice might fail. Justice occurs when the distribution of political power and economic opportunity is as uniform as possible or when the social and political system is such that they tend toward a just distribution even if it is not achieved. Thrasymachus is led to state that the life of the unjust person is better than the life of a just one, specifically because being unjust is more profitable, but Socrates guides the discussion to a different conclusion:

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wn needs. The nature of the individual and the nature of the state are parallel. Socrates speaks of the relationship between the individual human soul and the society of which the individual is a part, intending to make a moral statement about the nature of the state and its relationship to the individual. Socrates says at the outset that it is necessary to admit that the elements that make up the state have to exist in the individuals who compose that state, for they have to come from somewhere, and the human population is the only possible source. Socrates has already noted that the state has three natural constituents, wisdom, courage, and self-discipline, and he then shows that these same three forces are to be found in the human soul. Thus the three parts of the mind identified by Socrates are shown to correspond exactly to the three classes of the state: Then it is also different from the rational part, or is it some form of it, so that there are two parts of the soul--the rational and the appetitive--instead of three? Or rather, just as there were three classes in the city that held it together, the money-making, the auxiliary, and the deliberative, is the spirited part a third thing in the soul that is by nature the

Category: Philosophy - S