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

36 The City as a Whole
See 419a-423d. In reply to the objection that the guardians of the city will not be
very happy living under the monastical conditions described at the end of Book
III, Socrates says that “we are not looking to make any one group outstandingly
happy but to make the whole city so as far as possible.” What he means by a
happy city is an integrated, flourishing city: each citizen dedicated to the job for
which he (or she, more on this in Book V) is naturally suited, the work of each
coordinated with the work of the others for the mutual benefit of all. Most cities,
by contrast, are “a great many cities, but not a city,” the primary fracture being
between the rich and the poor. Wealth and poverty are evils for a city, and both
should be guarded against. Wealth makes for luxury and idleness by removing the
incentive to work. Poverty makes for slavishness and bad work by forcing people
to make do with inadequate resources. Wealth and poverty together provide the
conditions for revolution, the haves seeking to maintain what they have and the
have-nots seeking to get more of what they don’t. Wealth does enable a city to
fund a large military, but Socrates is convinced that a smaller, unified city can
defend itself against a larger, divided city, however wealthy it may be, in part
through excellence on the battlefield, but also through shrewd alliances, the richer,
divided city being vulnerable to internal subversions and external alliances.
Socrates warns that the city must not be allowed to grow beyond a certain point if
it is to maintain its unity and integrity. Perhaps his thought is that, if the city were
to get too large, the system of job placement would break down, work would cease
to be properly coordinated, and mutual assistance would end up taking a back seat
to private gain. Socrates does not specify the ideal size for their city, but he does
mention, in passing at 423a, that an army of “a thousand men” would be a fighting
force of adequate size. If he is serious about this number, then, assuming that the
auxiliaries, as full-time, professional soldiers, would be considerably fewer in
number than the farmers and craftsmen, and assuming that he means an army of
“men” and not “men and women” – the proposal regarding women serving in the
military not having been introduced yet – this city of theirs would, by ancient
standards, be no small town. It wouldn’t approach Athens, which at the start of