“Wait up!”—The first words spoken in Plato’s Republic, which in its entirety is a report of words spoken, come from a slave child, asking Socrates to remain where he is so that Polemarchos can catch up with him and ask him to dinner.
But after this very prominent beginning, slaves disappear from the Republic. Plato doesn’t even mention them until Books VIII and IX, where they come up briefly four times in the discussion of other subjects. What happens to them? Are they perhaps present. but under another name?
I think Plato want us to look for them.
Some who have done so think that the lowest denizens of Plato’s tri-level state, οἱ πολλοί for whom Plato has such contempt, are his rethinking of ancient slavery, but that cannot be. The lowest, business-oriented layer of the Platonic state is presented, not as a kind of slavery, but as a laissez-faire society, in which people are free to live as they wish—on the one condition that they not seek or exercise political power. It’s an ancient version of a libertarian dream, a sort of Mediterranean Dallas where everyone lives trying to get rich (or richer, like Polemarchos’ father Cephalos) and to have fun (until, like Cephalus, they realize they have to die).
So let us look further. Who, in Plato’s city, lives like a slave?
How does a slave live?
We all know the basics. A slave’s entire life is in the service of their master. Slaves do not choose what to do with their lives; they spend them working at assigned tasks. They own no property and are allowed no legal marriages; even their children may be taken from them if the master decides.
And who lives this way in the Platonic city? Its rulers, the “guardians.” They spend their lives working for the state, their communal master (communal ownership of slaves was the rule in Sparta, which was the model for many aspects of Plato’s ideal state). They beget children, as arranged by the state, but are not allowed to raise them. They have no private property—aren’t their dwellings without front doors, so anyone can look in and see what they possess? Even their meals are taken in a common mess hall.
Plato, in sum, is making the argument that social stratification is justifiable—if the people at the top live like those at the bottom.
What if we tried that here? According to Nicholas Lemann in his The Big Test, we did. Sort of. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard from i933 to 1953, believed that Harvard’s job should no longer be educating the scions of fine old families, but the forming of a moral and intellectual elite, who would selflessly manage the country that, after World War II, would manage the world.
Conant’s idea was that just as the leaders in Plato’s city examined young people throughout their early education to see who was worthy to become a guardian, so American educators should test the young to see who was worthy of American society’s most important jobs.
In accordance with what I call Cold War philosophy, “worthiness,” aka “intelligence,” was defined as the ability to make choices quickly and correctly, so the scrutiny came importantly in the form of multiple choice tests. Thus originated the SAT’s, whose influence on American life is hard to overstate. (If you know that someone scored over 700’s on their SAT’s, you can be pretty sure they are living a comfortable and pleasant life; if you know that someone got a 400 or so, you know they are much less privileged.)
But Conant had not read Plato well or thoroughly enough, for there was one big difference between his plan and Plato’s: Conant did not realize that he was asking the young people whom he educated to live like slaves, sacrificing any chance at wealth and family life for the austere pleasure of benefiting their country.
Plato, by contrast, understood quite well that turning young people into guardians requires that they be molded, lied to, and finally forced into it. The education they receive has (like Spartan education) a strong component of indoctrination, inculcating the view that the only worthwhile life is one lived in the service of the state. Like all young people in the Platonic state, the future guardians are also told that human souls are either iron, brass, silver or gold—and they themselves have souls with a lot of gold. They are designed by nature itself, in other words, to be guardians, and so can be nothing else. Even then, they will accept guardianship only under compulsion—the strongest compulsion a truly noble soul can accept, which is that of a good argument: if you don’t become a ruler yourself, you will be ruled by your inferiors.
All this, to say the least, was incompatible with American ideas of freedom, which are more akin to the live-as-you-please mentality Plato assigns to οἱ πολλοί. Plato’s systematic indoctrination, lying, and intellectual compulsion were out of the question; and Harvard graduates, living as they pleased, flocked to the big money and golden life of Wall Street.[1]
It’s all a case of Plato gone wrong, and with a moral for us all: if you are going to take cues from the history of philosophy, you’d better get it right.
We’ll see more of this.
[1] In 2007, 58% of male Harvard graduates, and 43% of the women, took jobs on Wall Street; in 2014, 70% of Harvard seniors sent résumés to Wall Street and consulting firms: Amy J. Binder, “Why Are Harvard Grads Still Flocking to Wall Street? Washington Monthly September/October 2014, accessed August 5, 2020