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2 0 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3will be made up of both sexes (451c–457b) and that private families will bedone away with, replaced by a public breeding program wherein maritalunions are short-lived and citizens do not know their natural children, butinstead become “fathers and mothers” to whole cohorts of younger citizens(457b–466d). And, finally, atop these arrangements stand a select few philosopherkings with ultimate authority (473c–541b). This city Socrates namesKallipolis—the beautiful city (see 527c).Although the reader gets the general impression that the brothers approveof the city Socrates has built with them, there are two occasions where oneof them accuses Socrates of organizing the city is such a way that membersof its ruling class—the guardians—are unfairly forced to sacrifice their ownhappiness for the sake of service to the city (419a–422a, 519b–521b). On bothoccasions, Socrates responds by saying that their goal in building the city isnot to make a particular class within the city exceptionally happy, but ratherto make the city “happy as a whole” (420b, 519e). 3 However, neither time doesSocrates go on to say what constitutes the happiness of the city as a whole—whether this means the happiness of all the citizens or rather some kind ofhappiness that pertains solely to the city and that is other than and perhapsindependent of the happiness of the citizenry.Within the scholarship, there have been two basic ways of interpretingSocrates’s statement that Kallipolis is happy as a whole. Some scholars, suchas George Grote and Karl Popper (and also, it seems, Aristotle), understandSocrates to be saying that the happiness of the city as a whole is somethingother than and independent of the happiness of the parts of the city or thecitizenry as a whole. 4 Following the standard scholarly nomenclature, I callthis the holistic interpretation of the Republic. At the other scholarly pole onefinds what I will call (following Rachana Kamtekar 5 ) the reductionist interpretation,which holds that the happiness of the city as a whole is ultimatelyreducible to the happiness the citizens who make up the city. Representativeof this position are Gregory Vlastos, C. D. C. Reeve, and Kamtekar herself. 63The happiness of the city as a whole is also mentioned a third time at 465e–466a. I will discuss thispassage as well as the two mentioned above.4George Grote, Plato, and the Other Companions of Sokrates (London: John Murray, 1865), 3:166;Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1962), 76, 79–81, 169; Aristotle, Politics 1264b15–25.5Rachana Kamtekar, “Social Justice and Happiness in the Republic: Plato’s Two Principles,” Historyof Political Thought 22, no. 2 (2001): 205.6Gregory Vlastos, “The Theory of Social Justice in the Polis in Plato’s Republic,” in Interpretationsof Plato: A Swarthmore Symposium, ed. Helen North (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 1–40; C. D. C. Reeve,