Corruption and Self-Constitution in Plato’s Republic

Kevin CrottyChildress Professor of Foreign Languages

Washington and Lee University

When I was a lad of ten, in Buffalo, New York, my

father, Peter Crotty, ran for the office of State Attorney

General in New York State. The New Yorker took notice of the

campaign, and in its “Talk of the Town” feature reported on

a visit to my father’s campaign office. The combination of

the New Yorker’s urbane cool, and my father’s Irish-American

exuberance made for a memorable piece.

The reporter found the candidate in an office “full of

the traditional cigar smoke and milling minions,” dominated

by my father—described as “a pink-faced man of forty-eight,

with wavy graying hair, bespectacled brown eyes, and a

penchant for sonorous sentences.” He seemed, the reporter

noted, to be enjoying the commotion of a political campaign.

“’This happens to be a very gratifying and significant

day to me,’ he said, quickly shaking and no less quickly

relinquishing our hand,” the New Yorker wrote. My father

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explained that he was that day celebrating the fourth year

anniversary of his election as Democratic County Chairman in

Buffalo. He pointed with pride to the fact that in his first

year as Chair he had helped an African American woman get

elected to the City Council-- “from a district,” he pointed

out, “that had never before elected anyone but a white male

Republican.’”

When asked what he thought about the practice of

assembling a ticket that balanced the demographics of the

electorate, he responded in that oddly mellifluous,

pontificating way he favored when he was kidding, but,

really, not kidding. He said, in a tone instantly

recognizable to anyone who knew him: “I consider it a

practice consonant with the society in which we live..My

nomination is a profound challenge to educate the people to

comprehend that the Attorney General is the Governor’s

counsel, and, as such, must be philosophically equipped to

provide him with legal implementation suitable to each

problem.” Yes, he really talked like that sometimes.

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Tonight, I wish to salute Mr. J. Donald Childress for

his extraordinary contributions to Washington and Lee, and,

in particular, for his support of the arts and foreign

languages in the university curriculum in an era that can

sometimes be inhospitable to the humanities. I thank the

university, too, for the honor it has done me in naming me

the Childress Professor of Foreign Languages. This is, as

my father might have put it, “a very gratifying and

significant day for me.” I hope my remarks tonight might

serve to show what my father meant, way back in 1958, when

he spoke of the “profound challenge” he felt as a political

leader to “educate the people to better comprehend” the

democratically elected offices essential to the state’s

operations. I want to illuminate his comment that the

holder of high office needs to be “philosophically equipped” in

order to discharge the duties of government.

In the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, disguised as an

itinerant beggar, reflects on royal power, and the king who

upholds righteousness: for such a king, Odysseus says, “the

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dark earth yields wheat and barley, the trees are heavy with

fruit, … and the sea offers its fish. Thanks to his good

government, the people thrive.” i

I had long known these lines, but only recently I

learned that there are now empirical facts to back up

Odysseus’ claims. In his recent book Quality of Government, for

example, political scientist Bo Rothstein makes the case

that quality of government has pervasive effects throughout

society that extend even, as Odysseus claimed, to the

environment. Citing a 2008 report by Transparency

International, Rothstein writes that corruption in

government is a major cause of people’s lack of access to

safe water, which accounts for a staggering percentage of

the world’s health problems. He cites studies estimating

that some 80 percent of all illnesses in the developing

world result from waterborne diseases, claiming the lives of

1.8 million children each year. The problem is not the lack

of technical solutions, nor even a shortage of clean water.

“Instead,” Rothstein writes, “the problem seems to be

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related to dysfunction in the structure of the legal and administrative

institutions.”ii

So, there is a premium on the quality of governance, which

is a separate, if not quite independent, question from the

kind of government a people has. [[Alexander Pope made the

point with epigrammatic clarity:

For forms of government let fools contest,

Whatever is best administered is best.iii

Alexander Hamilton took issue with that in the

Federalist Papers, but he, too, thought that “the true test

of a government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a

good administration.iv

Quality of government refers to a government’s ability

to provide basic services on an equitable basis—without

bribe-taking, favoritism, or influence-peddling. Quality

governance is a government that is not corrupt, and in which

officials discharge their duties in an impartial way.

While problems of corruption seem to be particularly

acute in developing countries, they are by no means confined

to them. For example, the 2012 Transparency International

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report addresses corruption in European states. And here in

the United States, law professor Lawrence Lessig, in his

recent book Republic Lost, shows how money corrodes trust in

legislators and public institutions. Critics of the recent

Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, point to the court’s

unduly narrow understanding of the ways that money can

distort political campaigns.v

How to address this problem? Well, there is certainly

a need for laws, regulations and codes of professional

conduct—that is to say, rules to help ensure that rule by

law actually happens. Still, as the latest Transparency

International report observes, “institutional reforms may be

insufficient.” “Ultimately,“ the authors of the report

suggest, “change may come about only through a cultural shift

that creates a strong sense of professional ethics to help officials

understand and adhere to the law.”vi

The Transparency International report does not expand

on ways to cultivate this strong sense of professional

ethics. It is not clear how to inculcate even something as

basic as “understanding” the law. For example, Rothstein

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argues that a key feature in the quality of government is

impartiality in exercising public authority.vii More

specifically, acting impartially requires that an official

“be unmoved by certain sorts of considerations—such as

special relationships and personal preferences. It is to

treat people alike irrespective of personal relationships

and personal likes and dislikes.”viii

Such is Rothstein’s account of good governance, but

there are several problems with it. Notice, first, that it

might be difficult for a simple mortal discharging public

office to dance back and forth across the line dividing

private from public: how is an individual, selected for

political office, suddenly to take on a whole new set of

attitudes and ethical imperatives? In the other spheres of

the official’s life, showing preference—for his or her

children, family, friends—might be exactly the kind of

behavior we endorse. But when undertaking the duties of

public office, a person suddenly needs to embrace a very

different sort of ethical code. This is not something we

should expect to come easily.

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Also, to say that the official must be “unmoved” and

indifferent to some very familiar kinds of considerations is

to put it very negatively. Impartiality—negatively

understood as remaining unmoved—seems a not very attractive

ideal. Hume once called justice the “cautious, jealous

virtue.”ix And being impartial (saying no to friends, in

order to obey the behests of an impersonal law) may seem to

evince justice at its least appealing—cautious, jealous,

somewhat inhuman. Being cautious and jealous may seem to

defeat the obvious point of acquiring and holding power—to

live more fully yourself, and to help out your friends.

In the Republic—to turn now to the main burden of my

talk this evening—Plato presents one of his most memorable

and outspoken characters, Thrasymachus, who boldly claims

precisely this: that the holder of political power should

use the power and privileges of office to aggrandize

himself. Justice, he states, is the advantage of the

stronger. By that, he means that those in power enact laws

that work to their own private advantage; others in society

obey the laws, naively thinking that it is “just” to do so.

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But in behaving (as they think) “justly”, citizens are in

fact serving the narrow interests of the ruling elite.

Their justice is a kind of pure-hearted simple-mindedness: a

sense of goodness that in fact serves the advantage of the

more powerful and more clever. Meanwhile, the really canny,

courageous and resourceful person will not quail before the

usual moral cant about justice and the need for everyone to

behave justly. Instead, he will defiantly use political

power to gratify himself and his friends and family.

Of course, Thrasymachus’ blast hardly amounts to a

serious theory of statecraft. His account of justice and the

proper role of the ruler could not withstand 10 seconds of

concentrated thought. Basically, he describes what you might

call a “kleptocracy”—a government dedicated to stealing from

its people.x But if government were nothing more than a way

to take unfair advantage of people—and everyone knew that

government was nothing more than that—there would be no

reason to consider it just to obey the law. In fact,

obedience to the law would seem to be nothing but craven

submission to another’s commands. Thrasymachus’ account

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would absolutely extinguish any sense of authority or

legitimacy in a civil society, and would quickly render life

together in a city-state impossible.

Thrasymachus, then, does not offer a respectable

philosophical account of governance. But I think he does

articulate a compelling, sub-philosophical idea of the allure

of power. His thoughts seem to launch from an intuitive,

uncritical idea of ourselves as free agents: the best of us—

the strongest, the most resourceful and the most courageous—

use our freedom to amass power, in hopes of becoming even

more free: better able to do whatever we please.

I imagine that there is a little bit of Thrasymachus in

many an official in new democracies, who not unnaturally

regard access to political office as a means of becoming

more free, more powerful, more autonomous. That, in fact,

may seem the point of having a democracy in the first place—

to give individuals more power over their lives. Far from

seeming to be an abuse of political power, using elected

office to increase one’s autonomy might well seem to be

carrying out the basic mission and message of democracy!

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Can such a person—an individual who holds elective

office in a new democracy--really be expected to understand

the importance of impartiality, or to regard it as anything

more than an irksome constraint? As Thrasymachus points

out, the person who faithfully discharges the duties of

office not only loses a chance to enrich himself, but he

also loses friends and associates when he is unwilling to

help them out.xi Much better to be unjust—that is, to use

one’s power for the obvious purpose that power serves.

[[To develop this line of thinking, we can look at

another of Plato’s most famous characters, Callicles, in the

dialogue Gorgias. Callicles, like Thrasymachus, is an

immoralist, who defies the usual claims about the goodness

of justice. Callicles emphasizes the desire for freedom

that drives the ideal life—freedom, along with luxury and

self-indulgence, is virtue and happiness, he says.xii To

realize this value in one’s life requires considerable

intelligence and real courage. One of the most powerful

passages in his speech describes the person who finally

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rises up against the social conventions that have shackled

him and seizes freedom for himself:

But if a man comes along who has a nature sufficient

[to resist a society’s traditional moral teachings],

shaking off all these restraints, breaking free and

escaping them, trampling our documents, tricks and

charms, and all the laws that violate nature, the one

who had been a slave stands up and is revealed now as

our master, and the justice that belongs to nature

glances forth.

Gorgias 484a2-b1.

The person Callicles describes may be said to have

discovered a sense of self-respect. No longer a slave, he

achieves a deep and unshakeable conviction that his own life

is important. He locates his own genuine worth despite the

stifling and despotic system of entrenched values that have

hidden him from himself. Those who are sufficiently

intelligent can see that the moral values a society seeks to

cultivate in fact aim at taming and subjugating him. The

person courageous enough to reject a society’s sedative

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influences, might be said to insist on leading an authentic

life—that is, one that bears his own personal stamp.

Callicles claims that this is “natural justice”—which finds

its warrant in the lives of animals, and nations: those who

are courageous and smart enough should reject the pious cant

intended to squelch them, and should then seize power for

themselves.

I am not suggesting that Callicles actually had modern

values like self-respect and authenticity in mind. Nor am I

saying that corrupt officials hold beliefs like those

espoused by Callicles and Thrasymachus. I do want to

suggest, however, that what these gentlemen had to say can

be elaborated into a serious argument about the best kind of

life, and that this view of life inevitably tends to make

justice—and its commands of impartiality in the exercise of

political power—seem burdensome and unpleasant. Worse,

justice seems to exact a serious loss: it comes at the

expense of the individual’s own best interests. Any effort

to create a strong sense of professional ethics will need to

address what looks like a rift between the person’s own

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individual best interests and his or her professional

duties.

I cite Thrasymachus and Callicles for another reason as

well. Their bold claim that self-empowerment is a positive

good cautions us that we might hobble our ability fully to

grasp the failures in governance by speaking of them in

terms of “corruption.” Neither Thrasymachus nor Callicles

thinks of himself as corrupt. To the contrary, they think

that they are letting in some fresh air, and being honest

about a subject smothered in traditional pieties.]]

I have spoken of political “corruption,” since that is

the word we use to describe the problem I’ve been

addressing. But “corruption” may be one of those “metaphors

we live by” that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote about:

metaphors that shape our thinking without our quite

realizing it.xiii Political corruption suggests something

degenerate about it—as though there were a time, before our

own benighted era, when officials grasped the rules and

loyally adhered to them. But as the examples of

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Thrasymachus and Callicles suggest, it is very difficult to

understand a principle like impartiality, or even to

understand law, which requires political officials to

administer it impartially, with an even hand. What we call

“corruption” in developing nations might be better

understood as a quite understandable failure to grasp the

difficulties of governance, and the distinctive human

abilities and ethics it requires.xiv

In the Republic,--which I see as one of the earliest

investigations of the quality of governance-- Plato undertook to

educate people like Thrasymachus, showing them why just

government ought to inspire them and engage their affections

—why justice was not simply a tiresome duty, but a genuinely

inspiring value in human life. Some of the Republic’s most

notorious ideas fall into place once you read it as

addressing the problems of governance.

For example, Plato calls for the abolition of private

property for anyone exercising political power in the city-

state. He goes even further and suggests that rulers ought

not even to have families of their own. These utopian

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suggestions might strike us as unrealistic and poorly

conceived (they certainly struck Plato’s own student

Aristotle that way). They do, however, dramatically

underscore the way wealth detracts from governance. Plato

thought that money and political power were simply and

irreparably inconsistent. We may disagree with the remedy,

but we should at least credit Plato with having seen the

problem and formulated in a crisp, challenging way.

Other of Plato’s utopian ideas, too, seem to be best

understood as identifying real problems posed by governance.

Plato argues that sovereign power should be reserved solely

for those who had the talent and the special training

necessary for it. He argues, too, that this class of

leaders ought to be above the law —not answerable in law to

anyone outside the ruling elite. As a utopian prescription,

this seems arrogant, as well as unrealistic. Plato

dispensed with a century’s worth of Athenian safeguards

against official overreaching or malfeasance.xv

Again, this will strike you as an implausible design

for a government. But I am not sure how seriously Plato

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intended these utopian reforms to be taken. The famous

“Socratic irony” was a way Plato had of kidding around,

except that he was not, really, kidding. I suggest Plato

offers a highly useful thought experiment concerning the demands of

governance. The serious core of what he had in mind was this:

Plato was challenging himself to articulate a conception of

justice sufficiently compelling all by itself to inspire and

animate the politically ambitious. He wants to identify a

conception of justice that, by itself—even without the

protection or undergirding of law—would suffice to inspire

rulers. For that reason, the Republic might be a useful text

in thinking through ways of instilling a sense of

professional ethics and a deeper respect for law amongst the

officials of fledgling democracies.

To understand what that conception of justice was, we

need to look first at people’s self-understanding--the way

we naturally tend to think of ourselves. Plato believed that

high quality governance would be impossible unless people

examined and changed their intuitive, uncritical sense of

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themselves—that sense to which Thrasymachus gives such

lively expression.

From Socrates’ point of view in the Republic, the

problem with Thrasymachus is that he has sold himself short:

he sees himself basically as a bundle of needs and appetites

seeking satisfaction. His idea of the good life consists in

the power to gratify these appetites without constraint or

fear of reprisal. If Thrasymachus has failed to offer a

credible account of governance, it is because he has failed

to achieve a sufficient idea of what his own humanity

entails. Governance requires a new, more mature view of

ourselves and our potential.

Part of the interest of Plato’s Republic, and of his

philosophy in general was that he offered a new account of

what it meant to be a human being. The classicist Bruno

Snell spoke of the “discovery of the mind,” and, while for

various reasons that seems out of fashion, it seems about

right to me.

You see, I think of Plato as the first great expositor

of reason—the one who put reason, so to speak, on the

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spiritual map of what it means to be human. Plato was not

the first person to think about reason, of course; but he

thought of it very differently from just about anyone before

him. Odysseus, in the Odyssey, for example, thought that

reason could do little more than reflect one’s

circumstances: he tells one of the suitors, “the mind reflects

whatever Zeus brings on for the day.” Odysseus did not have high

hopes for human reason.

Plato, in stark contrast, entertained very high hopes

indeed: he thought that, in the most favorable cases at

least, reason was able to transcend not only its immediate

circumstances, but also local prejudices, historical mores,

and finally to attain an objective understanding of reality

itself. The philosopher was Plato’s hero: he or she was the

one who had left behind a merely subjective point of view,

and had fully assimilated “the view from nowhere”—a wholly

objective and true vision of the world.

There is no question of my adequately addressing Plato

on reason this evening. But let me pick out just two

features of it, or rather, correct two possible

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misunderstandings of Plato. It might seem, for example, that

reason isolates us from our fellows, since, after all, reason

reaches its fulfillment in the rapt contemplation of the

eternal verities— among them, the Pure Form of Justice. It

might seem, too, that reason squelches the physical

appetites, in order to clear out space for itself.

To understand Plato’s view of reason, we need to see

that neither of these ideas is exactly right.

In the first place, reason for Plato was not isolating

because it was dialogal; that is, reason was what enabled

people to converse with one another, and what gave the

conversations most point. For example, as Plato points out,

justice is precisely the sort of thing calculated to rouse

the liveliest debate. He thought, however, that reason

committed us to thrashing out these disagreements—with the

ultimate goal of finally encompassing and contemplating the

real nature of justice.

“The ultimate goal,” I say. But a conversation—a

dialogue-- that did not arrive at a conclusion was by no

means a failure. It had not even really fallen short of its

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objective. [[The earlier, so-called “aporetic” dialogues—in

which no conclusion is reached, and the parties wind up more

perplexed than they had been before—are not examples of

botched philosophy.]] To the contrary, the participants’

perplexity is the beginning of philosophy.

In short, Plato understood reason not as isolating us

from our fellows, but challenging us to engage them at a

higher level. Philosophical dialogue was an ideal version

of that fellowship that was to be found as well in the city.

The parties’ mutual engagement while thrashing out the

nature of justice seems already, in and of itself, to be

cultivating justice in the participants.

To turn now to my second point about reason: Plato did

not think reason was an ascetic, appetite-denying force. He

went so far as to speak of the eros—the passionate love--

that reason had for its objects. Plato viewed philosophy as

providing the culmination of eros—of revealing finally what

human beings most desire, the highest object of their

yearning.

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One important feature of this eros is that Plato

thought it ought to be fruitful: the person truly in love with

justice ought to spawn imitations or embodiments of it—and

to do so, above all, in constitutions and laws. [[Shelley

once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of

reality. Plato almost exactly anticipated and inverted

Shelley: he regarded legislators (at least, ideal ones) as

the genuine poets, the ones who really made the world.]] The

point, as before, is that reason plunges its disciples more

deeply into communal life.

Here is a third point about reason: we can’t understand

it apart from its situation in the larger economy of the

human being. I refer here to Plato’s idea of the “tri-

partite” soul—the idea that the soul has three “parts”:

reason, the physical appetites, and an intermediary division

that Plato calls the “spirited” part: think of it as the

aspect of us that invests values (like honor) with ardent

emotions.

To speak of these as three “parts,” however, without

more, is to miss what is most provocative and revealing

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about Plato’s model of the human being. For the really

significant thing about these three parts is that they are

wildly disparate, an odd amalgam of random pieces, a “mere

heap,” to quote Aristotle. They do not readily coalesce

into a well-formed entity, a healthy soul: in fact, a truly

integrated soul is a rare occurrence, indeed.

To see why, consider an amazing passage at the opening

of Republic 9. There, Plato has Socrates point out that

everyone—even perfectly nice people—have buried deep within

themselves appetites of a terribly dark and repellent

character. “These are the desires,” Socrates says, “that

wake up when the rest of the soul sleeps.” Socrates has in

mind incestuous sexual desires, or cannibalistic feasts.

Such desires are revealed in dreams, and the person is

fortunate if he remains otherwise unconscious of them. Once

admitted to consciousness, they have the power to commandeer

the person, and make him do their bidding. That is

essentially the plight, Plato thinks, of the tyrant—the

person that Thrasymachus admired above all. In fact, the

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tyrant is an addict in thrall to his most depraved

inclinations.

From the perspective of these illicit desires, we can

appreciate the importance of Plato’s sublime, other-worldly

account of the reason and its most characteristic activity

of contemplating the Ideal Forms. Plato took care to make

that account as ravishing and compelling as he could. The

famous myth of the philosopher’s ascent from the cave into

the light, for example, and the otherworldly beauty of what

the philosopher finds after leaving the darkness are

necessary offsets to the criminal, malicious desires that

are also part of our human contents. Only because the

quasi-erotic satisfactions of the reason and its quest for

true knowledge are so intense can the philosopher hope to

exercise sovereignty over the appetitive—and, in some cases,

nightmarish and hideous-- aspects of her soul.

If Plato speaks of the human soul, rather than of human

“nature,” that’s partly because the soul stands for that part

of the human that tends to elude the individual person, both

at the top (where it resembles the Ideal Forms), and at the

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bottom (where it shades off into the unconscious). The soul,

so conceived, means that it is very difficult for the person to

encompass all that the person is.

Toward the end of Republic 9, Socrates imagines himself

to be a sculptor producing an image of the soul. The figure

he describes stresses the human soul’s oddness and

incoherence. First, he says, imagine one of the mythological

monsters—the Chimaera, or Scylla or Cerberus—that combine

different bodies; the monster can produce from itself many

heads, some of which are gentle, and others fierce.xvi Next,

imagine a lion, and third, a man. Then, enclose this

absurdly diverse menagerie within an outer envelope or

covering, so that it gives the specious impression of being

a single creature. That, in Plato’s view, is the human

being.

Plato’s model of humans’ “centrifugal” soul is

exceptionally vivid: he tethers an unprecedentedly intense

and lofty vision of intellectual life to a concomitantly

disturbing account of appetites that conspire to make us

deeply unhappy. For Socrates, the human touches both on the

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divine and the bestial. It is difficult to keep these

different capacities in mind at once: to the extent that we

live in a post-Freudian era, Socrates’ account of repressed

desires will strike us as prescient and persuasive, while,

on the other hand, his account of the intellectual life will

seem implausibly ethereal. But these two parts—the rational

and the appetitive—exist in a dynamic tension with one

another; neither can be understood apart from the other.

[[Socrates can afford to offer a yet more troubling account

of human desires than Thrasymachus only because he has as an

offset an exalted, and rhetorically powerful account of

reason. His high idealism makes possible a frank admission

of humans’ darkest instincts. Conversely, the power of

humans’ illicit drives shows why Plato regards philosophy as

crucially important: it alone explores and strengthens the

rational faculty, and thus makes it possible for the reason

to exercise its sway over even the most hidden appetites.]]

The extreme diversity of the soul’s parts, and even

within its parts, means that the soul threatens to break

down into an aggregation—a “mere heap” xvii-- of the most

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diverse and divergent pieces. In this way, the multipartite

soul challenges the familiar sense of oneself as simply

having desires and seeking their gratification. It

complicates the sense of who “I” am, since it now entails

dimensions of myself that “I”—whatever that is-- must

struggle even to encompass, let alone to marshal into a

single entity. Put it this way: I—whatever that might be at

the intuitive, pre-critical stage-- am trying to become “I”—

an integrated, coherent being. I am attempting, in effect,

to constitute myself; to make a polity—a city-state-- of my own soul.

Plato is so much not interested in questions of

personal identity, however; he is interested in justice. His

account of the soul, and the surprisingly difficult task of

integrating it, amounts to a theory of justice. For justice,

in Plato’s view, is above all a creative force. We tend to

think of justice as a relation amongst already fully formed

individuals: justice consists in honoring the claims that

other mature adults have on us. For example, it is just to

respect the rights that others possess by virtue of being

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fully formed individuals, with the dignity and inviolate

rights that implies.

Plato, in contrast, presents justice as creative: it is

the quality by virtue of which an individual entity (for

example, a soul, or, as we might put it, an “I”) emerges

from a diverse welter of different parts to become a fully

formed and integrated entity—a coherent soul. Because this

is so, justice is the virtue most closely associated with

being. That is the source of its philosophical stature:

thanks to it, or by virtue of it, diverse assortments are

marshaled into complex wholes, “more perfect unions.” What

could have been an assortment of random parts emerges,

instead, as a stable entity, with its own internal

character.

This means, politically speaking, that rules requiring

straight dealings and impartiality of public officials are

not constraints that prevent them from thriving. These rules

are better understood as facilitating the creation of a

larger and more complex whole. They are rather like the

rules of a skilled practice. The rules for stringing a

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lyre, for example, hardly impede or constrain the musician: to

the contrary, the rules make it possible for musicians to do

what they most want to do—to make music. In the same way, a

city’s laws should be understood less as constraints, and

more as rules that make it possible for people to accomplish

what they most want—the greater autonomy and life-

satisfaction that comes from living together in civil

society.

Justice plays a role in the individual’s life, very

similar to the role it plays in the city as a whole. The

basic shape of the moral life, in Plato’s view, is self-

constitution. That is, one’s moral task in life is to

transform an odd assortment of soul-parts into a

functioning, coherent, well-ordered whole. It would be

wrong to think of humans in terms of some monolithic and

immutable “nature.” Plato’s account stresses the plasticity of

human beings, their openness to influence, both for good and

for ill. Justice is the name for the proper organization of

these diverse soul-parts, so that they constitute a well-

integrated whole.

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So long as we think of ourselves simply as centers of

needs and wants, we can at most acknowledge that justice is

necessary and right, but the feeling that it is an irksome

necessity continues unabated. On such a view of the self,

reason may show the importance of living a just life, but it

is fated to be in permanent conflict with passion.

Plato proposes, instead, that we should think of the

self as composed of parts that do not easily harmonize with

one another, and that need to be constituted into a whole.

Justice, on this view, is not a bothersome constraint

imposed from outside. It is the ideal of becoming who I am,

of stepping up into the full dimensions of human being.

This moral ideal requires governance—some organizing

principle to marshal the disparate parts into a whole. This

principle, in Plato’s view, is reason. But reason’s role is

not the censorious one of policing the appetites, and

repressing them. Rather, reason alone can see the best way

to make the appetites contribute to the healthy functioning

of the whole. Only in this way does the person become really

a person, and genuinely free.

30

This work of self-constitution does not take place

independently of the city. One of the most important ways

individual people constitute their souls is by entering into

cooperative arrangements with others, and by elaborating

these arrangements to a stage—the city-state-- where they

require canny, resourceful, dedicated governance.

Plato’s answer to the official’s question “what’s in it for

me,” is that you yourself are in it for you: Any human must

necessarily organize his or her soul’s disparate parts, into

a more or less integrated whole. This can be done well or

poorly. To do it well, Plato claims, is to constitute

oneself in such a way that reason governs the overall polity

of the soul. The official needs to have constituted herself

properly before undertaking the responsibilities of office.

But these responsibilities, taxing and burdensome though

they can be, are also a royal road to the fullest

development of one’s talents. Contributing to the greater

organization and integrity of the city is, at one and the

same time, a privileged way to achieve a greater

organization and integrity of one’s own humanity.

31

To conclude, quality governance requires people to

expand their conception of what it means to be human, and to

re-assess what the most genuine goal of a human life may be.

This goal is not the gratification of our appetites, but the

constitution of ourselves as fully integrated beings. Plato

is enormously optimistic about government in the Republic; he

would become markedly less so in his later works. But, at

least when he composed the Republic, he seemed to think that

governance had the unique power to reveal the best of which

human beings are capable. Governance required humans to

think of themselves more complexly, and to step up to the

core challenges of their own humanity.

For that reason, he paid government the supreme

compliment of saying that only wisdom-lovers (philosophers)

could really be political leaders, since he thought that

only philosophers were in a position to appreciate the full

scope and possibilities of being human.

Does all of this strike you as implausible? It may be.

But I can’t help thinking back to 1958, when a certain

candidate for office in New York State spoke of the need

32

for state officials to be philosophically equipped in order

to carry out the duties of office. My father did not, after

all, succeed in getting elected to high office. But he did

succeed, it seems to me, in getting to the heart of Plato’s

political philosophy.

33

i Odyssey 19.109-114ii Bo Rothstein, The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust, and Inequality in International Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), ad loc. 96 in the Kindle Edition. See also Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector, available on line at http://archive.transparency.org/publications/gcr/gcr_2008#dnld (accessed December 29, 2012). iii Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle Three, section vi. iv Federalist Papers, No. 68.v One of the problems with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) was the majority’s far too narrow understanding of the corrosive effect of money on politics. Short of overt bribery, the Court indicated, there was no legitimate problem for Congress to address in regulating campaign contributions. See Citizens United (invalidating 18 U.S.C. 608(e)’s ban on corporate expenditures because it “failed to served any substantial governmental interest in stemming the reality or appearance of corruption in the electoral process,” 558 U.S. at 47-48. Justice Kennedy, in his opinion for the majority, flatly claimed that “[t]he appearance of influence or access….will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” Citizens United,558 U.S. at XXX.

As Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent, “Corruption can take many forms. Bribery may be the paradigm case. But the difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind. And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf. Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority’s apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences doesnot accord with the theory or reality of politics.” J. Stevens, dissenting, Citizens United, 558 U.S. at XXX.

vi Transparency International Report on Corruption in Europe 2012 (italics are mine). vii See Rothstein, ad loc. 144. viii See Cupit 2000 , quoted by Rothstein, ad loc. 240ix Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section III, part I.x On kleptocracy, see Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 114-121, and Michael Johnston, Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 155-185.xi Republic 1. Rep. 1.343e1-7.xii Gorgias 492c4-6: τρυφὴ καὶ ἀκολασία καὶ ἐλευθερία, ἐὰν ἐπικουρίαν ἔχῃ, τοῦτ’ ἐστὶν ἀρετή τε καὶ εὐδαιμονία.xiii George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

xiv For criticism of the unhistorical way that “corruption” is often conceptualized,see Peter Bratsis, “Corrupt Compared to What? Greece, Capital Interests, and the Specular Purity of the State,” August 2003, available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/5696/1/Corrupt_compared_to_what.pdf . See also Mark Philp, “Defining Political Corruption,” in Paul Heywood, editor, Political Corruption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. XXX. On the importance of gift-giving in ancient Athenian society, see Barry S. Strauss, “The Cultural Significance of Bribery and Embezzlement in Athenian Politics: the Evidence of the Period 403-386 B.C.,” The Ancient World XI(1985), 67-76.xv See D.M. MacDowell, “Athenian Laws About Bribery,” RIDA 30 (1983):57-78. See also F.D. Harvey, “Dona ferentes: Some Aspects of Bribery in Greek Politics,” In Paul Cartledge, F.D. Harvey (editors), Crux. Essays in Greek History presented to G.E.M. de Sainte Croix, pp. 76-117.xvi The gentleness and the fierceness of the desires seem to reflect the various tempers of the different kinds of desires. “Necessary” desires are important for maintaining the on-going health of the person; illicit desires, in contrast, are simply destructive. xvii Aristotle, Metaphysics 8.6.1045a10.