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Happy City, Happy Citizens? The Common Good and the Private Good in Plato’s Republic2 1 1Since, however, Socrates asserts that the guardians are happiest, and since itwas specifically their happiness that had been in question before, this passagedoes not rule out a possible reductionist interpretation (so long as we couldbe assured that the producers were also happy).Nonetheless, the actual discussion of the auxiliary guardians’ happinessdoes little to establish in any plausible way that they truly are happy. Recallthat the previous discussion had begun with the surmise that they are happiestin the city and had ended with the statement that the founders would leaveit up to nature to distribute happiness. One might have expected, then, thatwhen Socrates returned to the topic of the guardians’ happiness, he wouldexplain why nature would distribute great shares of happiness to the guardians—buthe does not do this. Rather, he makes use of a dubious comparisonto the Olympic victors. But why should we believe that the victors are happy,and that the auxiliaries will be even happier because of the benefits theyreceive? Socrates does not prove, for example, that public service and honorare natural goods necessary for great happiness. (In fact, one could argue thatboth are fairly conventional goods.) Indeed, Socrates does not actually addmuch here to the portrait of guardian life already known when Adeimantusmade his objection. The material conditions in which the guardians liveprovoked Adeimantus’s objection, and he apparently did not believe honorsfrom the city (much less the paltry “support” they receive) were sufficient tomake up for their deprivations. Why should these same goods now be thebasis for declaring their way of life the best? We are not told. We should alsonote that, although the “banqueter” conception of happiness is mocked hereby Socrates as “foolish” and “adolescent,” it is hardly proved false. We do notknow that a life of civic duty that eschews luxury is, in fact, better.In sum, the same problems recur in this passage that occurred in the previousone. Because we lack a full picture of the human good, we cannot knowwhether the life of the guardians (or of the producers) makes them happierin Kallipolis than such people could be in any other potential order, and thuswe do not know whether the happiness of the city is something other thanthat of the citizenry or identical to it. Overall, the happiness of the city wouldseem to be something other than that of the citizenry, but there is still a slighttextual basis for the reductionist position.