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Happy City, Happy Citizens? The Common Good and the Private Good in Plato’s Republic2 0 3In between these two extremes, but ultimately leaning towards reductionism,is the semireductionist interpretation offered by Donald Morrison. 7 Thisposition argues that the happiness of the city is something other than thehappiness of the citizens and is not simply reducible to it, but is nonethelessultimately dependent upon it, both conceptually and causally.The purpose of the following essay is to show that both reductionismand semireductionism are untenable interpretations of the Republic, and thatholism is problematic as well. I will also argue that, once one sees the failureof the reductionist interpretation, it becomes clear that the Republic revealsa persistent and unresolved gap between the private good and the commongood, even in Kallipolis. Finally, I will argue that Socrates’s ambiguity and (attimes) dissembling regarding this gap reveal in a particularly clear way thatone cannot understand the message of the Republic if one attempts to read itas the reductionists do: namely, as a philosophical treatise rendered in dramaticform, where the drama and characterization are only accidental to thesubstance of the argument. Rather, one must read the Republic as a dramaticdialogue if one hopes to understand what Socrates—and Plato—are attemptingto communicate. 8 Only when the book is read in this way do Socrates’sambiguity and reticence become intelligible.I will proceed in the following way. The proponents of reductionism tendto build their case by assembling claims from various places in the Republic,or by looking to the meaning of a few particular sentences. None devote significantattention to all three passages that have the greatest bearing on thequestion of the city’s happiness and interpret them in light of each other andtheir context. Thus, I will begin by presenting, in sections II–IV, an analysisof each of the three passages, showing that all of them, taken on their ownand in relation to each other, are ambiguous at best regarding the relationshipbetween the happiness of the city and that of the citizenry; and, overall, theylean toward a holistic interpretation. In the process I will also show that thePhilosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s “Republic” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988);Kamtekar, “Social Justice.”7Donald Morrison, “The Happiness of the City and the Happiness of the Individual in Plato’s Republic,”Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001): 1–25.8This is hardly a new approach, of course. It is shared by those who have been influenced by Strauss.See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 50–62, for an explication.In a manner somewhat different from Strauss, this approach has also been adopted by Ferrari andBlössner. See G. R. F. Ferrari, City and Soul in Plato’s “Republic” (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2005) and Norbert Blössner, “The City-Soul Analogy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s“Republic,” ed. G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 345–85.