Once more on Socrates and Thrasymachus

Do you think that a city, an army, or bandits, or thieves, or any other group that attempted any action in common, could accomplish anything if they wronged one another?”  “Certainly not,” said he. “But if they didn't, wouldn't they be more likely to?” “Assuredly.” “For factions, Thrasymachus, are the outcome of injustice, and hatreds and internecine conflicts, but justice brings oneness of mind and love. Is it not so?” “So be it,” he replied, “not to differ from you.” “That is good of you, my friend; but tell me this: if it is the business of injustice to engender hatred wherever it is found, will it not, when it springs up either among freemen or slaves, cause them to hate and be at strife with one another, and make them incapable of effective action in common?” “By all means.” “Suppose, then, it springs up between two, will they not be at outs with and hate each other and be enemies both to one a another and to the just?” “They will,” he said. “And then will you tell me that if injustice arises in one it will lose its force and function or will it none the less keep it?” “Have it that it keeps it,” he said. “And is it not apparent that its force is such that wherever it is found in city, family, camp, or in anything else it first renders the thing incapable of cooperation with itself owing to faction and difference, and secondly an enemy to itself and to its opposite in every case, the just? Isn't that so?” “By all means.” “Then in the individual too, I presume, its presence will operate all these effects which it is its nature to produce. It will in the first place make him incapable of accomplishing anything because of inner faction and lack of self-agreement, and then an enemy to himself and to the just. Is it not so?” “Yes.” “But, my friend, the gods too are just.” “Have it that they are,” he said. “So to the gods also, it seems, the unjust man will be hateful, but the just man dear.” “Revel in your discourse,” he said, “without fear, for I shall not oppose you, so as not to offend your partisans here.” “Fill up the measure of my feast, then, and complete it for me,” I said, “by continuing to answer as you have been doing. Now that the just appear to be wiser and better and more capable of action and the unjust incapable of any common action, and that if we ever say that any men who are unjust have vigorously combined to put something over, our statement is not altogether true, for they would not have kept their hands from one another if they had been thoroughly unjust, but it is obvious that there was in them some justice which prevented them from wronging at the same time one another too as well as those whom they attacked; and by dint of this they accomplished whatever they did and set out to do injustice only half corrupted by injustice, since utter rascals completely unjust are completely incapable of effective action—all this I understand to be the truth, and not what you originally laid down.--Plato, Republic 1, 351d-352d, translated Paul Shorey

When I wrote (recall) about this passage before I treated Socrates' argument as a consequentialist one that gained its rhetorical effectiveness from Athenian (recent) experience of civil war.* But I also noted that the history of imperial/mercantile nationalism shows that gross acts of out-group injustice may well be constitutive of, or facilitate, in-group 'justice.' In a zero-sum environment, hurting 'others' may well be, alas, beneficial to 'us' if 'we' can understand ourselves so. As I noted (here and here) Socrates seems to rely on this very point at Republic 470ff when he thinks through the international relations of Kallipolis.

But it occurred to me that the argument with Thrasymachus can also be differently. Socrates can be taken to be saying that collective agency (and individual agency) presupposes justice because justice is was creates the minimal unity for there to be a self to act. I think Socrates is pretty explicit about this very point. And, if one allows, as I would (but certainly everybody) that agency comes in degrees, then partial or imperfect justice creates conditions for partial agency (etc.) With perfect justice one has a perfect unity or harmonious whole, capable of autonomous action. The last point is anachronistic, although I think the Athenian Stranger makes the point in the puppet image in Plato's Laws (ca 644).

Be that as it may, and now we get to more speculative part. First, Socrates is explicitly committed to the idea that injustice is a cause or source of dis-functionality, that is, civil strife (and mutual anger) or antipathy. (Just as a harmonious, just city has mutual sympathy.) And as the rest of the Republic reveals, he is also committed, I think, second, to the idea that in many way the character of the polity takes its character or trickles down from its rulers. (Obviously it's possible I am reading Al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd (recall) into the Republic here.) To be sure that can't be the whole story because Socrates' causal analysis of how one kind of polity devolves into another isn't reducible to that.

Anyway, what Socrates' argument against Thrasymachus licenses is the following inference: political disunity or social strife is itself a signal of lack of justice and so evidence of bad governance. This is a view I associate with Mencius (recall here and here), and others inspired more by Machiavelli). I think the argument is also worth taking serious for those of a realist bent. Political rule that generates conditions of dangerous civil strife or an inability to engage in powerful collective action is self-defeating even by the lights of the powerful who wish to benefit from their rule. But this requires, I suspect, a distinction between self-interest and self-interest properly understood.

 

*I am treating the rule of the 30 not just as foreign occupation, but also as civil war.

Comments

[Matt]

"political disunity or social strife is itself a signal of lack of justice and so evidence of bad governance."

Hmmm, surely it's, at best, a pretty imperfect signal of a lack of justice, or evidence of bad government, unless you want to suggest that no just government or well-governed society could be disrupted by people with bad intentions (witting or not) who sow strife. Maybe Socrates would accept that (I don't know), but it seems like a pretty implausible view to me.

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Matt,
I take it that a well-governed society is precisely one where people with potentially bad intentions are re-directed to projects that are either harmless or rebound to the common good. I don't think that's implausible at all, but rather it's at the very core of statecraft.

[Matt]

Hmm, I don't know - that sounds like too much of an operational definition to me - "We know X wasn't well governed (even though it otherwise seemed to be by the normal standards we have?) because some bad people were around and caused trouble" sounds like an irrefutable, and so not very helpful, sort of claim. It also seems to deny the impact of unpredictable contingencies. I don't see the plausibility of the claim at all, I must admit. (Certainly, it seems highly a priori, and an a priori theory of good government already sounds pretty doubtful to me - but I'm just saying the same basic thing in different ways now.)

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Matt,

The normal standards you (tacitly) appeal to are what are being contested.

I agree that there is an important question about how to think about contingency.

[Matt]

Well, to buy this approach, we'd have to have more faith in it than we would in the "normal standards" - but those are just normal social science, empirical generalization, things that have worked and been tested, etc. Does it seem likely that an a priori theory of government would be more convincing han those? I don't want to rule it out completely, but it seems pretty unlikely. Certainly we don't get anything approaching that in Plato or the others mentioned. (If anything, when we look at their own actions, we get good reason to doubt it...)

[Eric Schliesser]

I don't mean to be sarcastic; but I find faith in normal standards touching in light of the current President.
I don't think it is correct to treat this as an a priori theory of government. It is an empirical theory through which data and political phenomena are interpreted. (The linked passages to Mencius suggests it may also have beneficial effect to avoid victim blaming.) The passage makes this transparent by calling attention to shared experience.