The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2016a

75 The Oligarchic City
See 550c-552e. Of the five types of cities and souls that Socrates is discussing,
the oligarchic falls in the middle – two are more just (the aristocratic and the
timocratic) while two are more unjust (the democratic and the tyrannical). The
defining characteristic of the oligarchic city is that rich people rule. Because few
are ever really rich in a community – wealth being the curiously relative concept
that it is – it makes some sense to call such a government “oligarchy,” which
means, literally, government by the few. Money is not, for Socrates, the root of all
evil, but he does consider the love of it largely responsible for causing the
timocratic city to devolve into an oligarchic city. What begins in the timocratic
city as a private amassing of wealth by the rulers eventually comes into the open
as shameless money-making, and then as highly respected money-making.
Successful money-makers (business leaders) are praised, admired, and assigned so
often to leadership positions that wealth ends up a requirement for serving as a
ruler. Socrates identifies four problems with the oligarchic city: (1) people who
are primarily money-makers have only a partial understanding of the city’s good,
so their understanding of how to rule is incomplete, (2) the city “is not one, but
inevitably two, a city of the poor and one of the rich, living in the same place and
always plotting against one another,” (3) the rulers are not themselves soldiers,
and so they are torn between arming, and thereby empowering, the city’s poor, and
hiring mercenaries, and (4) – in Socrates’ opinion the greatest of these problems –
people are allowed to sell off all their possessions and go on living in the city.
Such persons become “drones” (useless persons), either “stingless” drones
(beggars) or drones “with stings” (criminals). For historical examples of oligarchic
societies, consider the Netherlands in the heyday of the Dutch East India
Company, or France before the democratic revolution of 1789.
What are some examples of oligarchic societies in the world today?
Is it unjust for people in a city to be unemployed?
Is it true that people who spend most of their time making money fail to
appreciate non-appetitive values such as honor and knowledge of the forms?