It seems to me that perhaps one of the better ways of making sure one’s students have read their Plato in the context of, say, a classroom discussion of classical utopia, is asking them how many utopian cities the
Republic contains. Those who excitedly venture forth “one: the Kallipolis” have probably not been burning the midnight lamp. But then again, their carelessness is interesting in itself, and for a couple of reasons: it is shared by a number of scholars, whose memory of the Republic proves equally unreliable; but also, and more importantly, by Socrates himself, who seems to forget all about the matter soon after he’s done describing this second candidate for utopian status, around line 374 of Book II. Yet it is also Socrates himself who describes it, soon after Glaukon fatefully interrupts him, as a city that is both “true” [alēthinē polis] and “healthy” [hūgiēs] (372e).[i] Certainly, some have not taken Socrates’ praise seriously, regarding it instead as another item in the long list of “Socratic ironies”. In this view, our forgotten utopia is a mere foil to the truly true city, or even a parody of the utopia Kallipolis properly embodies. But then again, some have read the Kallipolis in exactly the same way, and there were a few, like Popper, who read it, incredibly yet influentially, as a dystopia of totalitarian state control. There are then a number of ambiguities and enigmas around this forgotten city, including, quite centrally, the reasons why it has been given such bad press: “city of pigs”, hūon polin (372 d), Glaukon calls it, and this is the name scholars use to refer to it. Kallipolis, the good and virtuous city, sounds like a far more likely name for a city one would dare call “utopian”, to be sure. But Glaukon is not unambiguously the paradigm of goodness and virtue himself, and he is an overwhelmingly irascible fellow to boot.
Before we say more about the enigmas this city poses for literary and philosophical interpretation, it would probably be wise to briefly remind those who have read their Republic (but draw a symptomatic blank on the hūopolis) of the contextual circumstances surrounding its birth and ignominious death in the text. The Republic, or Of Justice as it is also known, begins with a chance encounter, during a religious festival, between Socrates and Polemarchus, son of Cephalus, who invites him and Glaukon to his father’s home for conversation and sociable company. Socrates accepts and soon finds himself chatting with the elderly Cephalus, who philosophizes somewhat laxly on his contentment with old age. Socrates proves rather difficult as audience for Cephalus’s self-indulgent wisdom, and the conversation quickly shifts from the question of what makes for a happy old age to the fateful question of what constitutes a just life, and therefore justice itself—the subject of the entire rest of the dialogue. Feeling rather ill at ease with Socrates’ inquiries, Cephalus leaves the scene to his son Polemarchus, who, together with Glaukon and his brother Adeimantus and the sophist Thrasymachus, who happens to be in Cephalus’s home at the time, constitute Socrates’ interlocutors for the remainder of the dialogue. The first book then consists in a spirited debate on the nature and comparative advantages of justice and injustice, first between Socrates and his sophist adversary, then, when this has ended in the sophists’ quick defeat, between Socrates and the two siblings, Glaukon and Adeimantus, who step into the fray by taking the role of the advocatus diavoli, and acting as skeptical naysayers to all merely conventional and tradition-bound praising of justice. The “city of pigs” is introduced at this juncture, when Socrates proposes a change of course from what he now proclaims an aporetic conversation, and toward an analogical model of thinking which will substitute justice in the individual with justice in the polis, thus rendering justice “larger” as an object of enquiry and easier to locate for “short-sighted men” (368 d). Hence it is that the “political” discussion of justice is inaugurated, though just what that might mean is a daunting problem in its own right: for defining it presupposes a definition of polis itself and that is a question which impels Socrates in the opposite direction of the metaphorical “magnification” he proposed: a microscopic vision that would dilute the city to its minimal possible components, so as to first procure a kind of pure, unadulterated version of the foundations of the political life wherein justice must now be sought.
At the same time, this enterprise of meiosis, trimming down, or world-reduction, as Jameson might call it, is rather sharply undermined by a kind of textual counter-energy, which consists in the well-nigh universal drive of pleonexia, of wanting more and/or better (the confusion between the quantitative and qualitative implications of “pleon” being an additional headache): so Cephalus, seen “sitting garlanded on some sort of an easy chair” (328c) professes to celebrate his release from the sensual and sexual appetites of a younger age (329 c-d), but is uncomfortably reminded that his enjoyment of old age might have something to do with his wealth (329e-330b); Thrasymachus is forced to admit at once that the unjust man “wants more than his share” (pleonektein, 349c) and that the just man does so as well toward those who are unjust (pleon ehein, pleonektei 349c-d); Glaucon professes his dissatisfaction with how easily Socrates has dispensed with Thrasymachus and requests a far more analytical and rigorous defense of justice (358a-d), while Adeimantus argues that the objections raised by his brother are nowhere near enough (362d); and even Socrates admits that in his conversation with Thrasymachus he let himself get carried away and has lost the proper argumentative track, acting “like a greedy guest who grabs a taste of the next course before he has properly finished the last” (354). A piggishness of sorts seems to prevail over everything in the preamble to the discussion of the “city of pigs”, whether in the form of the sensual and sexual appetite of tyrants and bad men or in the lust for words and for verbosity, this last becoming so unmanageable that a conversation which originally seems to conclude in one book takes ten to finish.
It is quite paradoxical then that the city of pigs itself is not merely introduced into the conversation as a kind of thought experiment in conceptual minimalism, but is also dispensed with far too quickly. And it is equally paradoxical that as to its substance, this city seems to be the very embodiment of the rational and consensual restraint of appetitive desire—in short, the very opposite of what modern western readers would be expected to imagine as a “city of pigs”. But the paradox is at least partly a superficial one: the name “city of pigs” is after all a misnomer, given the fact that this is no inverted anticipation of the porcine dystopia of Animal Farm, but a city of human beings that have only peremptorily and perhaps questionably been called pig-like. It is crucial to keep differences in cultural semantics in mind here: though pigs were not held in higher esteem in classical Greece than they are in western cultures today, they were objects of contempt for entirely different reasons. The vices they emblematized were not lustfulness, avarice, filth and greed, but dull imbecility, lack of “cultured” refinement, lack of ambition for more and/or better, and hence lack of that ethically ambiguous principle of excess the Greeks called pleonexia (Orwell, who wanted his pigs ingenious, ambitious and even diabolically smart is really at Plato’s antipodes in more ways than one, then).
But let us return to the substantive features of this city. Cities, Socrates argues, generally originate in lack, and more precisely in the lack of individual self-sufficiency. The minimal point of origin of political life is the banal fact that we cannot entirely supply for ourselves but need to collaborate with others to do so (369b). The city of bare necessity [anagkaiotatē polis, 369d; polis, not “state” as the Desmond Lee translation has it, for that obscures a very crucial dimension of what is going on in the Republic] would need only a handful of people, “four of five men” to provide food, shelter and clothing (369d). But, as it turns out, the principle of the division and specialization of labor, which a reading of the Republic as whole would reveal as virtually synonymous with the Socratic understanding of “justice” itself, would mean that these four or five would need to increase with the addition of others. These additional recruits of the “city of words” (369c) would help the four or five originally imagined do their work with better quantity and quality (370c) by supplying them with the best available tools for their skills and thus freeing up their time for what they are best fit for. Socrates adds, however, that the city will also require imports and hence introduces a number of merchants besides the farmers and other workers of the original group of the city of bare necessity (371a). It will also, he proposes, have to include a market for the exchange of goods, and hence retailers to staff it and some sort of currency to make trade possible (371 b-d). Finally, it will need “wage-earners” [misthōtoi, 371e], by which Socrates seems to designate a group of proto-proletarians to be distinguished from his original core of specialized craftsmen, people “who have no great powers of mind to contribute, but whose physical strength makes them suitable for manual labor” (371e). And that is where the additive process stops: Socrates asks Adeimantus if he does not now believe their imaginary city “full grown” (371e, telea, meaning literally “complete”, “perfect”) and Adeimantus provisionally agrees. What follows is Socrates’ intensely lyrical evocation of the contentment and happiness of such a city, and hence the core of its candidacy as the book’s forgotten utopia:
They will produce corn, wine, clothes, and shoes, and will build themselves houses. In the summer they will for the most part work unclothed and unshod, in the winter they will be clothed and shod suitably. For food they will prepare wheat-meal or barley-meal for baking or kneading. They will serve splendid cakes and loaves on rushes or fresh leaves, and will sit down to feast with their children on couches of myrtle and bryony; and they will have wine to drink too, and pray to the gods with garlands on their heads, and enjoy each other’s company. And fear of poverty and war will make them keep the numbers of their families within their means (372a-c).
Temperance, conviviality, peaceful demeanor, spontaneous social harmony, vegetarian ethos, avoidance of cruelty to animals, authentic piousness: a balanced life of the sort that we sorely miss today and of the sort that most twentieth-century communitarians, especially since the late sixties, have found far more compatible with their ideals than Kallipolis itself, with its strict and militaristic outlook, its infamous prohibition of poets, its ascetic guardians and philosopher-kings. But Glaukon, the living embodiment of what the
Republic will later identify as one of the three parts of the soul and as the feature specific to the guardian class—namely thūmos, spiritedness in all its implications, including anger and aggression—is already annoyed by the description. “You picture them enjoying dinner without relishes”[ii] [opson] he remarks (372c). It does not seem a substantial objection at first, and Socrates is happy to oblige, always in word only of course:
I had forgotten; they will have a few luxuries. Salt, of course, and olive oil and cheese, and different kinds of vegetables from which to make various country dishes. And we must give them some dessert, figs and peas and beans, and myrtle-berries and acorns to roast at the fire as they sip their wine. So they will lead a peaceful and healthy life and probably die at ripe age, bequeathing a similar way of life to their children (372d).
But this is already, however paradoxically, the last we will see of this city of peaceful contentment, for it is now that Glaukon makes his second, lethal intervention: “Really Socrates […] that’s just the fodder you would provide if you were founding a community of pigs!” (372d). Now, what is totally unexpected is that Socrates takes no offense at the insult addressed against the community he has drawn, though he quietly remarks that it seems to him to be “the true one, like a man in health” (372d). What he does instead is readily concede that perhaps the procedure for identifying the origins of justice and injustice in the polis should move on to a more complicated hypothetical state of affairs, one in which luxury plays a role; and the city of pigs quietly gives way to the truphōsan polin, the city of luxury, which, as Socrates warns, will be phlegmainousa polin: a “hot”, “feverish”, “swollen” city. It is there that all the sensual appetites contemporary, critically minded westerners associate with consumerist and greedy piggishness will be found: “a variety of delicacies, scents, perfumes, call-girls [hetairai] and confectionary”, and also the “fine arts of painting and embroidery” and materials like “gold and ivory” (373a). And it is there, in a delightful textual irony, that real pigs may be found, since the citizens of such a city will want pork rather than what Glaukon cholerically disdained as “pig fodder” for food (373c).
The vital and inevitable question is of course
why. Why does Socrates not insist on the virtue of the city of pigs before abandoning it for one he warns is a feverish and bloated one, a city of pigs in our own, contemporary western understanding of the term? Why does he nonetheless not denounce it either, but content himself to bid it farewell as “true” and “healthy”? And why does he entirely demur from confirming or denying the existence in it of what he said he wanted to find there, namely justice? This, as is to be imagined, is the cluster of questions implicated in the considerable amount of contemporary critical disagreement over the meaning of the “city of pigs” and its place in the larger ethical and philosophical context of the Republic. Roughly speaking, I think we can speak of six basic directions or positions: in the first, the city is simply insignificant to the argument, a mere foil or a “false” start like the abortive discussion of individual justice in Book I[iii]; in the second, the issue is rather that the city relies on a spontaneous harmonization of appetitive desires that is impossible given the peculiarities of human nature, as Glaukon proves in deed rather than simply argument.[iv] A third position is that such spontaneous harmonization is possible, but it is highly transient and unstable and therefore could not serve as the foundation for a viable society[v]; a fourth credits Glaukon’s point of view over Socrates’s by implicitly reading thūmos in light of the famous Aristotelian distinction between zein and eu zein, that equation of political life with a “living well” that is both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to bare, beastly life and hence the foundation of the possibility of justice.[vi] A fifth position radically inverts the negative consensus on hūopolis by arguing that the city of pigs is not merely as stable as the Kallipolis, but also more unified and better—indeed, it “is the Republic’s ultimate utopia, its best city”.[vii] The problem—and it is a considerable one—is that in order for it to be realizable it must also be “possible to have a city whose citizens are like Socrates”[viii]—an eventuality which by implication Socrates understands is unlikely, particularly after Glaukon’s intervention. Finally, a sixth direction foregrounds the idea that the ambiguities of pleonexia already inform the dynamic of “the city of pigs”; the distinction between need and desire is never stable or secure, and hence that the city is always already in the process of transforming itself into something that supersedes it, always already tending, however naively and unconsciously, toward the truphōsa polis which inevitably takes over it.[ix]
I find some of these readings, particularly those that dwell on the instability of hūopolis, strong and convincing. But they share a weakness avoided only by approaches that resort to the highly idealist, not to mention anachronistically Aristotelian and perhaps Arendtian, emphasis on the specifically human and specifically political nature of “living well”: they say nothing of substance concerning the core issue of the Republic—justice—and of its import for the rather inglorious fate of the “city of pigs”.
The hūopolis is evidently happy and peaceful as can be, but is it just? Or is it rather justifiably abandoned as a model for justice? And for what reason? This seems to me a vital hermeneutic question. But it cannot be answered in the abstract, without taking into account the particular meaning of justice in the Republic: justice is the principle of balance and harmonization between differentiated, specialized and potentially warring classes of the city population and parts of the soul. Let us pause for a minute here: in the Republic, justice is understood as a properly political affair, surely; it is found where there is political life proper. But this also means that it is not allowed to be a principle of pre-political life, though happiness and contentment and good health and piousness may well be. Is the polis of pigs a political city, then? Can it be considered a state, as the Desmond translation rather carelessly has it?
It most definitely does not possess either an army or a ruler, for it does not need either. And hence, it is without that principle of violent division that both occasions the emergence of the state and stamps the logic of its function as monopolist of legitimate violence. A standing army of specialized warriors is in fact a feature of the luxurious city, for its incessant and uncontrollable appetite soon makes it imperialistically aggressive and implicated in acts of war (373e-374a). The consensual acknowledgement of a need for an organized body responsible for both predatory and defensive war leads our company to a discussion of the role and necessary training of a class of soldier-guardians. And that discussion in turn brings us all the way to Kallipolis, which is precisely the city that will use rational, philosophical wisdom to restrain the thūmotic nature of this class against temptations that would be destructive for it and for the polis as well. Kallipolis is the city that needs true philosophers because it needs good soldiers, whom it needs because it needs to avoid the worst consequences of appetitive ambition. Platonic justice thus sublates, in the properly Hegelian sense, both the spontaneous self-restraint of hūopolis and the pleonexia of the trūphosa polis. It emerges in the text not as a spontaneous but as a mediated good, one that thought can gestate only after negating or purging the excess of the city that has forced the city of pigs from the argument. Christopher Rowe puts it with great acumen:
The ‘true’, ‘healthy’ city, which satisfied itself with necessities, would itself have been a good and just one; in Glaukon’s ‘fevered’ city, by contrast, with its requirement for all sorts of luxuries, justice will require additional measures to cure, or check, the ‘fever.’ […] Some mechanism is needed, not only to repel external enemies but to impose internal control if people are inclined to break the laws, and the auxiliaries will fulfill these roles—both of which, one might add, would apparently have been unnecessary if ‘fever’ hadn’t been let into the city in the first place.
[x]
And there you have it: for justice to be conceptualized as a
political virtue, one needs to imagine a polis proper, not a mere community for the consensual servicing of mutual needs; in order to obtain that, one needs to think the necessity of a principle of violent division that the mechanism of the state both embodies and reputedly regulates or contains; and in order to obtain that mechanism as philosophical prerequisite, one needs to accept not simply the angry, thūmotic denunciation of “cities of pigs”, but their philosophical forgetting as well. The Republic is the utopian romance between philosophy and the state, the state as institutional excess (as pleon ehein) that is necessary in order to control appetitive excesses. Philosophy must tolerate both appetitive and statist excesses if it wants to justify and legitimate its own necessity as their ultimate regulative principle. No wonder that a contemporary green anarchist like Michael Becker notes the “tragic force” of Plato’s text, where the “inherent” justice of the “simple, primitive” city of pigs is sacrificed for the “failed project” of civilization.[xi] “Civilization” marks a state of affairs where pigs tend to get sacrificed, not least by philosophers. But it seems to me a question of justice to keep this in memory, with and against philosophy; to remember why utopia was originally taken away from people thought too pig-like for it. Adorno and Horkheimer, in lieu of a conclusion:
Every animal suggests some crushing misfortune that took place in primeval times. […] In this world divested of illusion in which men, following the loss of reflection, have again become the cleverest of animals and are busy enslaving the rest of the universe (assuming always that they do not tear themselves to pieces), respect for animals is regarded no longer as sentimental but as a betrayal of progress. […] Dominant practice and its inescapable alternatives are not threatened by nature, which tends rather to coincide with them, but by the fact that nature is
remembered.[xii]
Notes
[i] Plato,
The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2003); For the original, I have used Platon, Politeia, trans. N.M. Skouteropoulos (Athens: Polis, 2002). [iii] Julia Annas,
An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). [iv] C.D.C Reeve,
Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006). [v] See Catherine McKeen, “Swillburg City Limits (The ‘City of Pigs’:
Republic 370c-372d), Polis 21: 1-2 (2004), 70-92. [vi] Leon Cass,
The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. [vii] Donald R. Morrison, “The Utopian Character of Plato’s Ideal City”, in
The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G.R.F. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 252. [ix] See Hannah Hintz, “Gluttony and Moderation in Plato’s
Republic”, Phd diss., University of Chicago, 2009, 33-34, 36-39, 44-46. [x] Christopher Rowe, “The Place of the
Republic in Plato’s Political Thought”, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, 43, 45. [xi] Michael Becker, “Anarcho-Primitivism: The Green Scare in Green Political Theory”, The Anarchist Library, 2012, 3,
[xii] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), 247, 253-255; emphasis mine.
