1G0xxeB

Happy City, Happy Citizens? The Common Good and the Private Good in Plato’s Republic2 2 3statement that the purpose of the law is to harmonize the citizens by persuadingand compelling them to be useful to one another (519e–520a). The twostatements about the purpose of the law could be harmonized only if we wereable to conclude that being formed so as to be useful to the city (as in Kallipolis)also serves to foster genuine psychic justice and (therefore) happiness(provided, again, that this psychic order is genuinely best for nonphilosophers).But that is exactly what the text does not allow us to conclude. Theambiguity remains to the end.If I am correct, we are forced to conclude that Socrates and, therefore,Plato do not want to resolve the question for us. Plato does not want thethinking reader to be able to conclude that, in Kallipolis, everyone is happy,or that Kallipolis is simply indifferent to the happiness of its citizens. Butwhat purpose does it serve to lay out such a radical city in such detail, only torefuse to resolve one of the most important questions about it?There are several hypotheses that could address this question. It could bethat everyone in Kallipolis is indeed happy, but that Plato wants the reader todo the reasoning it would take to figure out why. Or it could be that many ormost citizens are not particularly happy in Kallipolis, but (again) Plato wantsus to be the ones to figure out why. Or it could be that no one but philosophersare capable of a condition truly meriting the name happiness, and thatPlato is ultimately not concerned with the happiness of nonphilosophers. Orit could be that Kallipolis is not a serious proposal and that the problematicstatus of the citizens’ happiness is one indicator of this intention. It would bebeyond the scope of this essay to test these (and other) hypotheses againstthe text. Nonetheless, two conclusions (at least) follow from the analysis asit stands.First, the primary reason we cannot conclude with any degree of certaintywhether the citizens of Kallipolis are happy is that Socrates refuses togive Glaucon and Adeimantus an account of the good, and thus of the humangood, that would be sufficient to determine the issue. 48 Until we have a robustaccount of the human good—especially the good of nonphilosophers—wecannot know the extent to which life in Kallipolis is or is not conducive tohappiness. A second, more tentative conclusion, is that Plato wishes thereader to be skeptical of the notion that everyone in Kallipolis is happy. Asalready noted, the text resists the reductionist reading much more than itdoes a holistic one, even if the holistic reading has its own problems. Were48See 435c–d, 504b, 505a, 506d–e, 611b–612a.