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

77 The Democratic City
See 555b-558c. The upper class in an oligarchic city is generally “not willing to
enact laws to prevent young people who have become intemperate from spending
and wasting their wealth.” On the contrary, they encourage debt among the
young, “so that by buying and making loans on the property of such people, they
“themselves can become even richer and more honored.” (Think of the credit card
applications hanging from the walls of college campuses nowadays alongside ads
for Spring Break bacchanals in the tropics.) As more and more people are reduced
to poverty and “drone” status, resentment builds, until it eventually occurs to the
lower class that it would be easy enough to overthrow their bourgeois oppressors
and seize control of the government. The oligarchic city falls in a democratic
revolution. (“Democratic” means, literally, ruled by the people.) Socrates’
description of the city that results is especially interesting, for Athens was at the
time one of the most democratic in the world. He describes a city “full of freedom
and freedom of speech.” Everyone has “license . . . to do whatever one wants,”
and to “arrange his own life in whatever way pleases him.” (That Socrates intends
this claim to include slaves, women, aliens, and children becomes clear a few
pages later, at 562e-563b. Of course, he may be exaggerating a bit.) The
democratic city, like a “cloak embroidered with every kind of ornament,” has in it
“every sort of character,” and so, of cities, it “would appear to be the most
beautiful.” Everyone belongs. Are you a timocratic sort of person? You can join
the hawks in the public assembly and argue for an expansionist foreign policy. Is
money-making what you love? There is a faction in the assembly that cares for
little else but the state of the economy. Are you an aristocratic person with a thirst
for wisdom? The philosophers meet every morning under the colonnade off to the
side of the agora. Do you just want to attend religious festivals, dinner parties,
trials in the law courts, and get drunk? You will find plenty of companions.
Liberty! Égalité! Tolerance! These principles characterize life in the democratic
city. “Isn’t that a heavenly and pleasant way to pass the time, while it lasts?”
Socrates asks. “It probably is,” Adeimantus replies, “while it lasts.”