The Story of Utopias

old city-region is overpopulated⁠—and it is only by an exercise of ingenuity that a labor problem could be invented. A man might become a slave by military capture; he did not become a slave by being compelled, under threat of starvation, to tend a machine. The problem of getting a living was answered by nature as long as men were willing to put up with nature’s conditions; and the groundwork of Plato’s utopia, accordingly, is the simple agricultural life, the growing of wheat, barley, olives, and grapes, which had been fairly well mastered before he arrived on the scene. As long as the soil was not washed away and devitalized, the problem was not a hard one; and in order to solve it, Plato had only to provide that there should be enough territory to grow food on, and that the inhabitants must not let their wants exceed the bounties of nature.

Plato describes the foundations of his community with a few simple and masterly touches. Those who feel that there is something a little inhuman in his conception of the good life, when he is discussing the education and duties of the ruling classes, may well consider the picture that he paints for us here.

Plato’s society arises out of the needs of mankind; because none of us is self-sufficing and all have many wants; and since there are many wants, many kinds of people must supply them. When all these helpers and partners and cooperators are gathered together in a city the body of inhabitants is termed a state; and so its members work and exchange goods with one another for their mutual advantage⁠—the herdsman gets barley for his cheese and so on down to the complicated interchanges that occur in the city. What sort of physical life will arise out of this in the region that Plato describes?

Well, the people will “produce corn and wine and clothes and shoes and build houses for themselves.⁠ ⁠… They will work in summer commonly stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley and wheat, baking the wheat and kneading the flour, making noble puddings and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or clean leaves; themselves reclining the while upon beds of yew or myrtle boughs. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and having the praises of the gods on their lips, living in sweet society, and having a care that their families do not exceed their means; for they will have an eye to poverty or war.”

So Socrates, in this dialogue on The Republic, describes to his hearers the essential physical elements of the good life. One of his hearers, Glaucon, asks him to elaborate it a little, for Socrates has limited himself to bare essentials. It is the same sort of objection, by the way, that M. Poincaré, the physicist, made to the philosophy of Tolstoy. Socrates answers that a good state would have the healthy constitution which he has just described; but that he has no objection to looking at an “inflamed constitution.” What Socrates describes as an inflamed constitution is a mode of life which all the people of Western Europe and America at the present day⁠—no matter what their religion, economic status, or political creed may be⁠—believe in with almost a single mind; and so, although it is the opposite of Plato’s ideal state, I go on to present it, for the light it throws on our own institutions and habits.

The unjust state comes into existence, says Plato through the mouth of Socrates, by the multiplication of wants and superfluities. As a result of increasing wants, we must enlarge our borders, for the original healthy state is too small. Now the city will fill up with a multitude of callings which go beyond those required by any natural want; there will be a host of parasites and “supers”; and our country, which was big enough to support the original inhabitants, will want a slice of our neighbor’s land for pasture and tillage; and they will want a slice of ours if, like ourselves, they exceed the limits of necessity and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth. “And then we shall go to war⁠—that will be the next thing.”

The sum of this criticism is that Plato saw clearly that an ideal community must have a common physical standard of living; and that boundless wealth or unlimited desires and gratifications had nothing to do with a good standard. The good was what was necessary; and what was necessary was not, essentially, many goods.

Like Aristotle, Plato wanted a mode of life which was neither impoverished nor luxurious: those who have read a little in Greek history will see that this Athenian ideal of the good life fell symbolically enough between Sparta and Corinth, between the cities which we associate respectively with a hard, military life and with a soft, super-sensuous aestheticism.

Should we moderate our wants or should we increase production? Plato had no difficulty in answering this question. He held that a reasonable man would moderate his wants; and that if he wished to live like a good farmer or a good philosopher he would not attempt to copy the expenditures of a vulgar gambler who has just made a corner in wheat, or a vulgar courtesan who has just made a conquest of the vulgar gambler who has made a corner in wheat. Wealth and poverty, said Plato, are the two causes of deterioration in the arts: both the workman and his works are likely to degenerate under the influence of either poverty or wealth, “for one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.”

Nor does Plato have one standard of living for his ruling classes and another for the common people. To each person he would give all the