Republic Book 8

Book 8 returns us to the main argument of the Republic as it stood at the end of Book 4.  To recap: after a prelude where he problematizes some common definitions of justice, Socrates companions insist that he come up with one of his one.  To do this, he suggests imagining a just city.  Once we understand justice in a city, we can characterize justice in an individual by analogy.  At first, Socrates describes a truly just city as a small simple place where everyone makes a spartan living doing the one thing they are best suited for.   It appears to be a sort of anarcho-capitalist paradise where some invisible hand makes a ruling class unnecessary.  The description, however, is a bit too theoretical for Socrates' companions, and they insist he describe justice in a more realistic, more luxurious, city.  It's at this point that he launches into his description of the different classes that would compose this larger city, and begins to describe the education and upbringing of a guardian class.  The role of the guardians is to organize and purify the different classes needed to run a complex city so that it most closely approximates the theoretical city he described earlier, where everyone does exactly and only what their nature suits them to.  The whole description climaxes in the myth of the metals towards the end of Book 3.   This same definition of justice serves by analogy for the individual, whose soul has the same three part class structure -- appetitive craftsman, spirited warrior, and rational guardian.  So by the end of Book 4, Socrates has completely answered the original question of the dialog: "what is justice?"

Then, isn't to produce justice to establish the parts of the soul in a natural relation of control, one by another, while to produce injustice is to establish a relation of ruling and being ruled contrary to nature? (444d)

After that he proposes to go and and classify the main forms of injustice into 4 categories that will correspond to 4 increasingly unjust city constitutions.  Book 8 returns to this point and describes the 4 types of constitution (and corresponding types of individuals) he had in mind -- timocray, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.

Since it was actually the most interesting part, let's pause for a moment to remember how we got onto the tangent in Books 5, 6, and 7, the one which culminated in the cave allegory in Book 7.  At the beginning of Book 5 Socrates companions insist that he explain a remark he made in passing while he was describing the type of life the guardians lead.  He claimed the ruling guardians would share all possessions in common, including wives and children.  This was obviously pretty surprising and scandalous, and Socrates has to go back and defend the fact that there even are female guardians in the city, as well as these shocking communal relations.  As a result, it becomes clear just how far his just city is from the current one, and how different its practices are from common moral opinion.  This brings up the question of how in practice we would ever build such a city.  Midway through Book 5, Socrates drops his final shocking conclusion; to actually create a just city, we have to put the philosophers in charge.  Books 6 and 7 then get into why philosophers are so important to the city, why they are so often misunderstood or corrupted, and how they can be trained to be the best citizen rulers -- the most just individuals in a just city.  Overall, we might characterize these books as answering the question: "who is a philosopher?"  Basically, it's someone who crawls out of the cave to see the light of the sun Good, but goes back to help his troglodytic mates.

With Book 8 we return to what we would these days call political philosophy.  Of course, since Socrates sees a strict analogy between the constitution of a city and that of an individual, he probably wouldn't characterize it quite that way.  Indeed, his assumption of a connection between the political and the moral turns out to be even a little stronger than the word analogy may suggest.  Not only are there 5 types of soul to correspond to the 5 types of constitution, but cities will tend to take on a political  constitution that matches souls of the majority of their rulers, and of course the soul of the rulers will be influenced by the constitution of the city they grew up in (544d).  As a result, he organizes his examination of the constitutions as the story of a fall from the most perfect aristocratic one he described before -- the just city and the philosopher king.  At each step of decay, Socrates describes an internal civil war within the polis as well as within the corresponding soul. This civil war corrupts the higher constitution and gives rise to the next in line.  So the chapter is broken into 4 sections that each have the same structure.  First, Socrates explains how each lesser political constitution emerges from its better -- timocracy from aristocracy, oligarchy from timocracy, democracy from oligarchy, and tyranny from democracy.  Then he describes the character of the resulting constitution and the matching individual soul.  Finally he observes what effect the new political constitution will have on the upbringing of the offspring of the old rulers, creating within each soul a corrosive civil war that reproduces on the individual moral level the same mechanism of decay he described at the political level.  

Socrates' final 3 transitions in this series straightforwardly and insightfully describe both the political and psychological changes that can happen in a city/soul.  But the first transition -- from the perfect aristocratic constitution with its class hierarchy based strictly on 'virtue' to the timocratic constitution defined by its love of victory and honor -- poses a special problem.  If the philosopher kings' paradise is really so perfectly harmonious and virtuous, why isn't it also perfectly stable?  So Socrates is forced to come up with a pretty weird numerological explanation of why even a philosopher king can sometimes misculated the correct population distribution and accidentally create some intermixing of the metals (546).  His explanation of the birth and education of the timocratic soul is equally odd -- basically, it's all mom's fault (549d).   Aside from the peculiarity of the transition though, his description of the timocratic constitution is carefully aimed.  He's describing Sparta.  The timocratic constitution is obsessed with honor and victory in battle as a stand in for the true virtue which defined the aristocratic.  The result is an overly spirited, less rational polis and person.

The degeneration progresses when love of honor starts to be replaced by the love of wealth that defines an oligarchy.  At this point the caste hierarchy of the true Republic becomes the economic class hierarchy we are all too familiar with.  And this division of society is mirrored in the unbalanced olgarchic soul who establishes a love of money as its reigning appetite to enslave its spirited and rational parts (553d).  Oligarchy introduces another element that seems a bit random here but which Socrates will make use of later; drones are formerly wealthy individuals whose dissolute ways have landed them in the poor house (552c).  These come in two classes, 'stingless' and with a string, beggars and thieves.  

The trail of tears continues when oligarchy's inherent class division reaches a tipping point and the poor revolt to create a democracy.  Socrates even proposes a plausible description of the exact moment at which this occurs.  If fat, luxury loving merchants are forced to fight a war side by side with lean, fit farmers and blacksmiths, the latter aren't going to remain impressed with the value of rich men (556d).  ¡Que viva la revolución, carajo!   After the revolution, the new democratic constitution makes everyone free and equal, and no longer prises money or honor as the means of selecting the ruler.  Indeed, for Socrates, the real problem with democracy is that it doesn't do any selecting at all (561c).  The ideas of freedom and equality simply level everything off, the variety they inspire mix everything up and prevent the city from organizing itself on any basis beyond this content-less love of freedom.  Say what you want about the tenets of timocracy or oligarchy, they may substitute some inferior value for the Good, but at least it's an ethos.  In Socrates' eyes, selecting freedom is really a non-selection.  It's what happens when an oligarch's thrifty son comes across one of those drones, who turn him on to every imaginable pleasure his father prohibited him (559e).  The Good here is reduced to mere immediate gratification.  

Eventually, this love of freedom for its own sake, a freedom from everything but to nothing (563e), sets up the downfall of democracy and the birth of tyranny.  The drones turn out to be central to Socrates' account of the final step of political degeneration, and their two types are revealed to be basically politicians and their sycophants.  

You asked what was the disease that developed in oligarchy and also in democracy, enslaving it.
That's true.
And what I had in mind as an answer was that class of idle and extravagant men, whose bravest members are leaders and the more cowardly ones followers. We compared them to stinged and stingless drones, respectively. (564b)

...

In an oligarchy it is fierce because it's disdained, but since it is prevented from having a share in ruling, it doesn't get any exercise and doesn't become vigorous. In a democracy, however, with a few exceptions, this class is the dominant one. Its fiercest members do all the talking and acting, while the rest settle near the speaker's platform and buzz and refuse to tolerate the opposition of another speaker, so that, under a democratic constitution, with the few exceptions I referred to before, this class manages everything. (565e)

The democratic city contains three classes of folks -- the drones, the rich, and what we would call the middle class craftsmen.  The drones seize power in a democracy by exploiting the class tension that defined oligarchy.  They go after the remaining rich and fool the middle class into believing it benefits them.  Of course, in the end, most of the honey from this redistribution ends up enriching the drones (565b).  Seems that tyranny began with exactly this triumph of corrupt populism even 2,500 years ago.  Once the drone class eats the last of the rich they choose a champion and set him up as a tyrant.  And the tyrant finishes the process of political and moral degeneration.  Constantly paranoid of losing power, he constantly stirs up war (567b) and eliminates anyone of competence who might challenge him (567d).  In the end, he even turns on the middle class that fathered him, upending even the most basic rules of family order and enslaving the people who created him (569a).  Here ends the degeneration of organizing political principles -- from the Good, to honor, to wealth, to freedom, to slavery and the Bad.