THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies; and the
hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at
hand (416-17).
This arrangement will make it unprofitable, as well as dangerous, for
the guardians to rule as a clique seeking the good of their class rather
than that of the community as a whole. For they will be protected from
want; the necessities and modest luxuries of a noble life will be theirs
in regular provision, without the searing and wrinkling care of economic
worry. But by the same token they will be precluded from cupidity and
sordid ambitions; they will always have just so much of the world's goods,
and no more; they will be like physicians establishing, and themselves
accepting, a dietary for a nation. They will eat together, like consecrated
men; they will sleep together in single barracks, like soldiers sworn to
simplicity. "Friends should have all things in common," as Pythagoras
used to say (Laws 807). So the authority of the guardians will be sterilized,
and their power made poisonless; their sole reward will be honor
and the sense of service to the group. And they will be such men as from
the beginning have deliberately consented to so materially limited a
career; and such men as at the end of their stern training will have
learned to value the high repute of the statesman above the crass emoluments
of the office-seeking politicians or the "economic man." At their
coming the battles of party politics will be no more.
But what will their wives say to all this? Will they be content to forego
the luxuries of life and the conspicuous consumption of goods? The
will have no wives. Their communism is to be of women as
guardians
well as of goods. They are to be freed not only from the egoism of self,
but from the egoism of family; they are not to be narrowed to the anxious
acquisitiveness of the prodded husband; they are to be devoted not to a
woman but to the community. Even their children shall not be specifically
or distinguishably theirs; all children of guardians shall be taken from
their mothers at birth and brought up in common; their particular
parentage will be lost in the scuffle (460). All the guardian-mothers
will care for all the guardian-children; the brotherhood of man, within
these limits, will graduate from phrase to fact; every boy will be a brother
to every other boy,
woman a mother.
every girl a sister, every man a father, and every
But whence will these women come? Some, no doubt, the guardians
will woo out of the industrial or military classes; others will have become,
by their own right, members of the guardian class. For there is to be no
sex barrier of any kind in this community; least of all in education the
girl shall have the same intellectual opportunities as the boy, the same
chance to rise to the highest positions in the state. When Glaucon objects
(453 *) that this admission of woman to any office, provided she has