According to Plato, individuals are born with different natural capacities, aptitudes and talents that subsequently need to be developed and perfected through training. They are also naturally suited to perform one type of activity rather than many. Since ‘no two people are born exactly alike’, this permits them to be funnelled into specific types of job. Society and the individuals that compose it are thereby better off by restricting themselves to one trade or vocation: a farmer should remain a farmer, a craftsman a craftsman, etc. This specialisation of tasks and roles, given by nature, leads to greater efficiency and excellence: ‘more things will be produced and the work be more easily and better done, when every man is set free from all other occupations to do, at the right time, the one thing for which he is naturally fitted’ (Plato, 1945: II.370). Justice at the level of a city-state is thereby grounded in a such a mutually beneficial, co-operative division of labour based on differing natural aptitudes in which each individual follows just one task. When individuals follow their naturally given endowments and assume their allotted role in a complex interdependent division of labour, a just and harmonious social order ensues.
Plato’s definition of political justice in the city-state is, prima facie, rather odd. It does not refer to behavioural criteria or individual actions. Instead, it is grounded on each individual assuming a specialised place in a structural allocation of roles based on their natural aptitude. It is based on a specific hierarchical configuration of social relations drawing on the principle of individual differentiation, of remaining in one’s function and effectively ‘minding one’s own business’ and not interfering in others – ‘a man should possess and concern himself with what properly belongs to him’ (Plato, 1945: IV.433). Justice, dikaiosyne, the state of the man who follows dikē, is no more than minding your own business or following the way that is properly your own, and not mixing yourself up in the ways of other people.
Embellishing this conception, Plato argues for the establishment in the Ideal state of a tripartite class-system of philosopher rulers, warrior–soldiers, and producers and merchants. Justice then is when each individual is allocated to a position within an interdependent socio-economic class order consisting of producers, auxiliaries and guardians in which each individual and class keeps ‘to its own proper business in the commonwealth and does its own work’ (Plato, 1945: IV.434). Some men are naturally suited to philosophising, others to fighting, and others to producing and trading things. By remaining in these fixed roles the cumulative effect is to produce the best overall outcome for society – a harmonious social order ruled by the best.
Criticism
Given The Republic’s influence and centrality to the Western canon and its revolutionary ideas it is no surprise to know that it has been subjected to a vast amount of criticism. The most infamous critical attack was probably that of Karl Popper, who in The Open Society and its Enemies (2012 [1945]), written shortly after the Second World War and the Nazi atrocities, accuses Plato of attempting to establish a totalitarian system of rule and justify its existence. Such criticism has itself been questioned as overstated, unhistorical and anachronistic for judging a work from the standpoint of modern liberal democratic societies (Voegelin, 2000; Klosko, 2012: 109). The concept of the individual as such, as a unique bounded entity, did not exist in early forms of society. Nevertheless, Popper’s criticism does contain a kernel of truth to the extent that the individual’s worthiness was measured in terms of how they served the city-state as a whole. Plato’s belief in the benevolence of the Guardians and their ability to rule, and produce or determine who is wise and who will become a future Guardian, has also been questioned.
Aristotle also makes a number of criticisms of Plato’s proposals concerning the abolition of private property. These, he argued, were unworkable since:
the greater the number of owners, the less the respect for common property. People are much more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally; they exercise care over communal property insofar as they are personally affected. Other reasons apart, the thought that someone else is looking after it tends to make them careless of it. (1261b32)
Aristotle also questioned Plato’s Theory of Forms, which assumed the existence of a hypothetical realm of Forms that existed independently of the real world. Reversing Plato’s argument, Aristotle argued, rather than the general explaining the particular, it is the particular that gives us access to what is universal. The reality of things can be seen in the world around us, and is inherent in everyday objects, and it is from our experience of these particular things that we derive our universal concepts. Aristotle therefore criticises Plato for ignoring the role of experience in assessing knowledge and for being too preoccupied with rationalism and reasoning based on mathematics and geometry.
Aristotle
Life and Intellectual Context
The historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix has described Aristotle as ‘the greatest of ancient sociologists and political thinkers’ (1981: 4). Ste. Croix continues:
It is natural to begin with Aristotle, who was in a class by himself among the political theorists and sociologists of antiquity: he studied the politics and sociology of the Greek city more closely than anyone else; he thought more profoundly about these subjects and he wrote more about them than anyone. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that because Aristotle was primarily a philosopher he was, like most modern philosophers, either incapable of, or uninterested in, extensive and accurate empirical investigation. (1981: 69)
[Republished with permission of Cornell University Press from The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, G. E. M. de Ste Croix, 1981]
Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Chaldice in northern Greece in 384 bce. His father Nicomachus was the physician of King Amyntas (393–70 bce) of Macedon, himself father of Philip II (382–36 bce). Macedonia at the time was an oligarchy composed of kingdoms and with a huge army and population of about 800,000. As the son of a physician Aristotle was probably taught dissection and this background may have contributed to his lifelong interest in biological studies and his belief in biology as the paradigm for the sciences. Both his parents died before Aristotle reached 17. At the age of 18 he attended Plato’s Academy, remaining there until he was 37. Although it is not known why he left the Academy, it may have been because of increasing anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens following the rise to power of Philip of Macedon, who opposed democracy. Aristotle moved to the court of Hermias of Atarneus located in Assus, before going to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, with his assistant Theophrastus, in order to carry out research in zoology and botany. After marrying Pythias, Hermias’s niece and adopted daughter, he was invited in 343 bce by Philip II of Macedon to tutor his 13-year-old son Alexander, who became Alexander the Great, and to head the Royal Academy in Macedon. Returning to Athens in 335 bce together with Theophrastus, he founded his own school, the Lyceum, where he taught for a dozen years or so and gathered a number of research students around him – peripatetics. Since he was a metic (foreigner) in Athens he was unable to own property, including land. Living in a rented house, he collected many books, which later became part of the library of the Lyceum. It was here that Aristotle composed most of his major works, many of which have been destroyed, while others remain only as fragments or in the form of sketches or lectures for his students. Anti-Macedonian resentments re-emerged after Alexander the Great’s death in 322 bce, forcing Aristotle to leave Athens for a second time and move to Chalcis. He died later the same year in Euboea from a stomach disorder.
The relation between Plato and Aristotle, his foremost pupil at the Academy, is a matter of some controversy, with some seeing him as diametrically opposed to Plato (Nisbet, 1976), while others see him as completing the project that Plato had begun (MacIntyre, 1998). There is no doubt, however, that both continuities and discontinuities exist between their writings. Some of the major differences in their understanding of the social