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2 2 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3of the citizens consists in each of them doing his or her particular job. 42 Butthe justice of the individual consists in each part of the soul doing its properwork (441d–442b, 443b–444e). But, as I have argued elsewhere, the Republiccontains no compelling evidence that civic justice implies psychic justice—or, more broadly, that civic virtue entails psychic virtue. 43 But it is psychicvirtue, not civic virtue, that leads to happiness. 44 Thus, although a happy citycertainly requires that its citizens be civically virtuous, this fact does notestablish that the city requires (and therefore attempts to bring about) thatits citizens are psychically virtuous; therefore, we cannot conclude that thehappiness of the city is causally dependent on the happiness of its citizens.VII.The results of the foregoing analysis can be briefly summarized as follows.Three times Socrates declares that the founders and rulers of Kallipolis willbe concerned with making the city happy as a whole rather than with makingany particular part of the city exceptionally happy. The text itself is ambiguousconcerning whether the happiness of the whole city ought to be identifiedwith the happiness of the entire citizenry (the reductionist interpretation) orit ought to be understood to be something other than and independent of thehappiness of the citizenry (the holistic interpretation). Attempts to constructa reductionist interpretation from the passages in question and other passagesin the Republic have proved to be unsupported by the text. We are,therefore, left with ambiguity, albeit an ambiguity leaning toward the holisticinterpretation. That is to say, the Republic resists a reductionist interpretationmuch more than it does a holistic reading.Nonetheless, we should have grave reservations about adopting astraightforwardly holistic approach to the city’s happiness. If we are to saythat happiness of a nonmetaphorical sort can be attributed to the city, thisrequires that the city itself exist somehow in its own right, and not merelyas a set of institutional relations. (Institutional relations cannot, I think, be“happy” in a nonmetaphorical way.) The city must be some kind of “super-42This is Vlastos’s understanding of Plato’s conception of social justice; see Gregory Vlastos, “Justiceand Happiness in the Republic,” in Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Vlastos (NotreDame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1978), 2:79–80.43Jonathan Culp, “Who’s Happy in Plato’s Republic?,” Polis 31, no. 2 (2014): 288–312.44The three proofs for the superiority of justice concern justice in the soul; see 576b–588a.