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.
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