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

49 Families and the Saying of “Mine” and “Not Mine”
See 461c-466c. Socrates recommends arranging things so that no guardian knows
any child as his or her own, but rather as a child of this generation or that
generation, with the child looking to the older generations, collectively, as his or
her parents or grandparents according to their age. Socrates figures that, by
breaking up the nuclear families in this way and integrating the guardians into a
single family, they will be less likely to have interests in competition with one
another. They will “feel more or less the same joy or pain at the same gains or
losses.” The greatest good for a city, he thinks, is to be unified. To this end, the
guardians should be a single, unified family, and “apply ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ to
the same things on the basis of the same principle.”
Suppose someone were to object, as Aristotle did in the Politics, that
Socrates’ proposal to break up nuclear families “results in each citizen's
having a thousand sons, and these do not belong to them as individuals but
any child is equally the son of anyone, so that all alike will regard them with
indifference” (II.3.1261b-1262a). How might Socrates reply?
How important for the happiness of a child is it to grow up in a two parent
family?
It is remarkable how much love and attention parents direct toward their
own children and how little they really seem to care about children living
just a few doors down the street. Socrates’ proposal recognizes this as a
problem and attempts to address it. Is it a problem? If so, can you think of
a better way to address it? Consider the idea of sending one’s own child off
to live for a year with another set of parents in one’s community, while
taking a child from the other family into one’s care. Would this sort of
thing be beneficial?
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