Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)


Return to Contents»


David Roochnik. Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. ix + 159. Cloth, $35.00

<1> “Despite appearances to the contrary, especially passages from Book 8, the Republic actually offers a qualified and cautious defense, rather than a resounding condemnation, of democracy. This defense, however, is specifically dialectical” (2). Thus begins David Roochnik’s short but intriguing study of Plato’s Republic, a dialogue long regarded as evidence that Plato was an enemy of democracy. While Socrates adamantly condemns both democracy and the democratic man, Roochnik argues that the Republic as a work is dialectical in character, and only viewed as such can we come to truly grip Plato’s intention when composing it. The Republic, so construed, is a massive, living conversation (7), an instance of dialegesthai in which changes and revisions are not merely scrapped and forsaken but preserved in their partiality as a stage or moment in the development of the entire dialogue (5).

<2> Roochnik situates himself within a tradition sympathetic to the readings of Leo Strauss. Roochnik is sympathetic because while he is at pains to distinguish himself from Strauss (7n 4, 75), he nevertheless is indebted to Strauss for the hermeneutic approach—
which he argues is not strictly ironic (91)—that he employs in his approach to the Republic. The approach itself will inevitably be off-putting to some readers, specifically those who favor more Vlastosian-inspired attempts to analyze the Platonic corpus in terms of the logical consistency of the arguments therein and those who are less likely to be concerned with the narrative structure of the dialogue itself. Nevertheless, simply recalling that Plato wrote dialogues and not treatises ought to remind us that there is something important to understanding the complete dialogue in its entirety, and not merely as a conglomeration of isolated, individual arguments. While it is no doubt of great philosophical import to examine these individual arguments, given that we know how tediously Plato assembled his dialogues, it would be a mistake to dismiss Roochnik solely because he is concerned with understanding the character of, and thus Plato’s intention in constructing, the Republic. Beautiful City deserves a careful reading.

<3> Roochnik begins with, and throughout his book remains indebted to, Plato’s psychology of the soul, and is principally concerned with the tripartite structure of the soul as told in Book IV. This account, Roochnik argues, is an incomplete an inadequate account of the soul put forth as a mathematical model principally for ease of useful exposition (29). The static, tripartite soul cannot account for the whole of human experience, and thus Books 8 and 9 once again address the nature of the soul. However: “the fact that Socrates does say something different about the soul in Book 9 than he does in book 4 is the result of crucial developments in book 5, which force the tripartite psychology of book 4 to be negated and revised” (19). This model of the soul is appropriate for Books 2-4, in which the city has been constructed in which a static, mathematical model of the person obtains and in which the educational system is meant to maintain strict stability and unity. But just as mathematical axioms are to be treated “not [as] beginnings but [as] really hypotheses…in order to reach what is free from hypothesis at the beginning of the whole” (36), the mathematical account of the city and soul offered in books 2-4 is not to be taken as decisive, but as a moment in the dialectical progression of the Republic as a whole.

<4> The reason that the mathematical model of the soul will not hold, Roochnik claims, is the same reason that Glaucon calls Kallipolis a city fit only for pigs (372d4): it ignores the erôs of the human character. The noble lie, for instance, “has human beings falling naturally into three metallic types and is justified on the grounds that maintaining the tripartite structure of the city id of utmost importance. The lie assumes that Eros can be controlled” (44). Confronting the erôs of the soul in book 9, Socrates will there revise the previous psychology of book 4 and rename the parts: “wisdom-loving, victory-loving, gain-loving (581c) replace calculation, spirit, desire” (48). The next chapter, on books 5-7, is entitled, “Eros”.

<5> From the beginning of the Republic, Roochnik argues, erôs is present. Cephalus, for instance, claims that as an old man he has escaped the savage mastery of erôs (329c). not having the energy in his old age to pursue the question of justice, Cephalus turns over his part in the inquiry to his son, Polemarchus, who in his youth still retains his erotic zeal. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, requires this passionate drive. The problem with Kallipolis is essentially that it undermines erôs, the very force from which it was born (55). That is, “Kallipolis essentially depends on the repression of the erotic energy of both city and soul…If Eros is constrained in Kallipolis by its regulatory fetters, however, then the desire for wisdom, which is consistently described by Socrates in erotic terms, could not be nourished” (73).

<6> The discussion of book 1 of the Republic is almost entirely confined to the discussion of Cephalus’ lack of erôs. The reader wonders what the role of erôs is in the soul of Thrasymachus, the most spirited of all the characters in the Republic. While Glaucon and Adeimantus are the ones who force Socrates to address the communalization of erôs in terms of the community of women and children, it is Thrasymachus who originally derails Socrates in book 1. Could we construe Thrasymachus’ outburst as a desire for power that manifests itself in the claim that justice is nothing more than the advantage of the stronger? If so, then could regard books 2-10 as an attempt not to eliminate, but to regulate and control this tyrannical erôs? These are questions for which we are not given an answer.

<7> The ultimate failure of Kallipolis, Roochnik continues, results from the objection Glaucon levels against Socrates at 519d, where he objects to the injustice of forcing the prisoners that have escaped form the cave to return and help the others. Contra the reading offered by Myles Burnyeat—that the philosophers are persuaded by reasoned argument, for the sake of unifying the city, to rule—Roochnik claims that Glaucon’s objection is decisive in showing that it would be unjust to demand that the philosophers to return to the cave and thus inhibit their natural erôs for wisdom (74). Without the philosophers, Kallipolis could not come into being. Hence, the Republic ultimately demonstrates that Kallipolis should not be counted as a conceptual ideal, but rather as part of the dialectical character of the Republic, which ultimately demonstrates that what is needed is a regime which allows for the flourishing of erôs.

<8> Roochnik defends this claim further in the final chapter of his book, and argues, “Only in a free-speaking democracy can the philosopher become sufficiently aware of human diversity to comprehend the nature of justice and injustice. Only in democracy, Socrates suggests, would it be possible to ‘organize’ or ‘construct’ (kataskeuazein) a ‘beautiful’ city” (79). Democracy provides the grounds for the flourishing of freedom, and therefore the conditions for the release of erôs. As such, just as democracy is “probably” the necessary for a man wishing to organize a city, it is likewise the condition for the Republic itself (85). Plato’s ultimate judgment on democracy, albeit revealed through the dialectical structure of the dialogue itself, is that, while it is largely objectionable and wrought with tension, is that it is necessary for philosophy itself and that Kallipolis, were it to come into being, would enjoin conditions that would themselves be insufferable (93).

<9> Here some readers will desire a bit more. Is Kallipolis the ideal that we cannot achieve but desire or is democracy the ideal because of desire? While opting for the answer to the former might not necessarily exclude the latter, must we, solely because of the logical necessity that Kallipolis is born of the erôs that flourishes in democracy, conclude that Plato himself was a kind of reluctant democrat as opposed to a conspiring philosopher-king? While Roochnik gives attention to Burnyeat’s claim that the philosopher would in fact rule, persuaded by reasoned argument that it is for the best, some will not be convinced that Kallipolis is dialectically negated, broken apart because of its radical suppression of erôs.

<10> Books 8-10, with the emphasis on narrative psychology, reveal the final structure of the soul as revised from book 4. While many commentators have argued that the literary and mythological approach that Socrates employs is unphilosophical and hence not as worthy of consideration as accounts of the soul earlier in the Republic, Roochnik argues that precisely because they are literary that these accounts represent a valuable dimension of Plato’s psychological position. “A story”, Roochnik claims, “gives voice to [the] self-consciously temporal experience. A character moving through the sequence of events constituting a plot (muthos) exemplifies the inevitable changes, and hence, inevitable conflicts of human life. It is the mixture of the mathematical, tripartite model of the soul and the narrative account that offer a complete account of what it is to be a human being (109).

<11> Roochnik concludes his study by addressing the myth of Er, which concludes the Republic itself. The myth concludes when Odysseus chooses the life of a private man as opposed to the excessively communal life of the citizen of Kallipolis. This choice, Roochnik argues, results from the plurality of Odysseus’ experiences, and is the choice that the philosopher in the ‘real’ world of actual cities would make in the face of democracy and the impossibility of the philosophical ideal (128). The myth of Er, thus understood, is less a story of the moral structure of the universe but more like the Republic itself: a psychological narrative that expresses the human desire for stability and flexibility, for permanent intelligibility and experiential flux (131).

<12> Roochnik has accomplished much in his short book. His writing is extremely accessible, consistent in its message and clear in purpose; he makes no attempt to treat every issue in the Republic. Many readers, including those who agree with Roochnik, will still be left with questions and concerns—as perhaps will inevitably be the case when thinking thoroughly through any Platonic dialogue—a minimal number of which have been adumbrated throughout this review. Nevertheless, Roochnik’s book is a profound and provocative new attempt to think through Plato’s most famous work, and his conclusions, if accepted, will result in a new understanding of what has come to be known as one of the most anti-democratic works in the history of philosophy.

James Ambury
American University



ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.