X
What is the business of the Guardian? How does Plato’s ideal statesman differ from Julius Caesar or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt?
The business of the Guardian is to manufacture liberty. The petty laws, regulations, and reforms with which the ordinary statesman occupies himself had nothing to do, in Plato’s mind, with the essential business of the ruler. So Plato expressly foregoes making laws to regulate marketing, the affairs of industry, graft, bribery, theft, and so forth; and he leaves these matters with the curt indication that men can be left to themselves to devise on a voluntary basis the rules of the game for the different occupations; and that it is not the business of the Guardian to meddle in such matters. In a well-founded state, a great number of minor maladjustments would simply fall out of existence; whilst in any other state, all the tinkering and reforming in the world is quite powerless to amend its organic defects. Those make-believe statesmen who try their hand at legislation and “are always fancying that by reforming they will make an end of the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind,” do not know that in reality they are trying to cut away the heads of a hydra.
The real concern of the Guardians is with the essential constitution of the state. The means that they employ to perfect this constitution are breeding, vocational selection, and education. “If once a republic is set a-going, it proceeds happily, increasing as a circle. And whilst good education and nurture are preserved, they produce good geniuses; and good geniuses, partaking of such education, produce still better than the former, as well in other respects, as with reference to propagation, as in the case of other animals.” All the activities of the Republic are to be patterned after the utopia which the Guardians see with their inward eye. So gradually the community becomes a living unity; and it exhibits the health of that which is organically sound.
XI
What do we miss when we look around this utopia of Plato’s? Contacts with the outside world? We may take them for granted. Downy beds, Corinthian girls, luxurious furniture? We can well spare them. The opportunity for a satisfactory intellectual and physical life? No: both of these are here.
What Plato has left out are the poets, dramatists, and painters. Literature and music, in order to contribute to the noble education of the Guardians, are both severely restricted in theme and in treatment. Plato has his limitations; and here is the principal one: Plato distrusted the emotional life, and whilst he was prepared to do full homage to man’s obvious sensualities, he feared the emotions as a tightrope walker fears the wind; for they threatened his balance. In one significant passage he classifies “love” with disease and drunkenness, as a vulgar misfortune; and though he was ready to permit the active expression of the emotions, as in the dance or the sexual act, he treated the mere play upon the feelings, without active participation, as a form of intemperance. Hence a great deal of music and dramatic mimicry was taboo. Foreign as this doctrine sounds to the modern reader, there is perhaps more than a grain of sense in it: William James used to teach that no one should passively experience an emotion at a concert or a play without trying to express that emotion actively as soon as he could make the opportunity. At any rate, let us leave this problem which Plato opens up with a free mind; and note here in passing that in the utopia of William Morris novels drop naturally out of existence because life is too active an ecstasy to be fed with the pathetic, the maudlin, and the diseased.
XII
As we leave this little city of Plato’s, nestling in the hills, and as the thin, didactic voice of Plato, who has been perpetually at our elbows, dies away from our ears—what impression do we finally carry away?
In the fields, men are perhaps plowing the land for the autumn sowing; on the terraces, a band of men, women, and children are plucking the olives carefully from the trees, one by one; in the gymnasium on the top of the Acropolis, men and youths are exercising, and as they practice with the javelin now and then it catches the sun and glints into our eye; apart from these groups, in a shaded walk that overlooks the city, a Guardian is pacing back and forth, talking in quick, earnest tones with his pupils.
These are occupations which, crudely or elaborately, men have always engaged in; and here in the Republic they engage in them still. What has changed? What has profoundly changed is not the things that men do, but the relations they bear to one another in doing them. In Plato’s community, servitude and compulsion and avarice
