On War Judgment in Plato's Republic

Wages of War: On Judgment in Plato's "Republic"
Author(s): Jill Frank

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Aug., 2007), pp. 443-467
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452570 .
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Wages ofWar
On
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in Plato's
Judgment
hosted at
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Republic
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JillFrank
University of South Carolina, Columbia
This essay argues thattheRepublic is, among other things,a meditation by

Plato on theproximityof philosophyandwar and on thedangersof thatprox
imityforphilosophy and politics. It is also Plato's reflectionon theconduct,
execution,and impactof a particularwar, thepanHellenic PeloponnesianWar,
inwhose aftermaththedialogue was writtenand againstwhose backdrop it is
set.Destabilizing settledrulesof engagementand categoriesof identification,
thatwar made especially urgentthepracticeof independentjudgmentand its
virtues,whose inculcation,I show,amount to theeducation tophilosophy that
is thedialogue as a whole.
Plato; Republic; war; judgment
Keywords:
the desire for more-more

territory,more goods, more
the origin of war. So says Socrates in theRepublic (373e).1
power-is
It is the origin of the civil war, stasis, among theparts of the soul when they
overstep theirbounds; and among brothers, friends, or citizens when they
compete over scarce resources; and it creates conflicts among Greek city
Pleonexia,
states and wars, polemoi, between Greeks and non-Greeks by orienting them
to conquest, domination, or empire.With both an aggressive and a defensive
aspect, pleonexia generates the rule "take from another before another takes
fromyou," a rule characteristic of "apprehensive" states of war of all kinds.2
From 600 to 300 BCE, poets, lawgivers, historians, and philosophers
wrote compellingly about thedisruptive and corrupting effects of pleonexia
Author's
Note: Earlier versions of this essay were presented at Princeton's University Center
forHuman Values,
Association
theYale
Meetings.
to: the audiences
Political Theory Workshop,
at these venues;
Shakman Hurd, Nadeem
and theAmerican
For their helpful comments, questions,
Political
Science
and suggestions, my thanks go
toAmittai Aviram, Susan Bickford, Larry Glickman,
Beth
Hussain, George Kateb, Priscilla Larkin, Liz Markovits, Allen Miller,
BlaiseMisztal,Clifford
Orwin,Jennifer
Pitts,EstherRichey,StephenSalkever;andespecially
toBryan Garsten, Bonnie Honig, Gerald Mara, Mary Dietz,
Political
and the reviewers of this essay for
Theory.
443

444
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in the city ofAthens.3 Perhaps themost sustained exploration of the cooper

ation inAthens of psychic, domestic, and imperial pleonexia
isThucydides'
History of the Peloponnesian War.4 For this reason, that text is the locus
classicus for students of political science interested not only in domestic but
also international aspects of power and justice, warfare, and peace.5
Because Aristotle's ethical and political writings treatboth individual and
constitutional pleonexia, they are sometimes extended to questions of inter
polity relations as well.6 Not so, however, those of Plato. Most scholars agree
with Aristotle's claim that in theRepublic and theLaws, Plato does not attend
adequately to the city's relations with its neighbors (Pol. 1265a20).7 Plato
may "advocate the limitsof desire," but he does not see pleonexia as a prob
lem in interpolityrelations, nor, specifically, in the context of war.8
Is this true? Plato's political dialogues do focus most explicitly on the
internalworkings of thepolis, on the analogy between city and soul, and on
self-sufficiency as thenormative aim of a city.But because the city, like the
soul, is never as autonomous as it aspires to be, the city's relation to itself,
like the soul's relation to itself, always also involves its relations to others.
The Cretan city ofMagnesia under construction in theLaws, for example,
emerges by way of a conversation in comparative political theory about the
foundings and laws of any number of Greek polities and takes as its point
of departure the orientation towar of theCretan and Spartan constitutions
(625c-626c). In the Republic, only the first city in speech (of Book II),
capable ofmeeting its inhabitants' basic needs on itsown and through trade
(370e-37 1 a), exists in relative isolation from other cities. That city is
quickly abandoned, however; the remainder of the dialogue focuses on
cities inwhich pleonexia on the part of individuals, institutions, and con
stitutions necessarily moves them into engagement with other cities, not
least, by way of war.
Taking seriously themany references to and images of warfare in the
Republic, a rich recent scholarship has demonstrated that there can be no
adequate account of the philosophy of theRepublic without a due consid
eration of the dialogue's treatment of war.9 Based on Socrates' claim in
II that being a good warrior requires the virtues characteristic of a
philosophical nature (376a), and his statements in Book VII that the best
Book
rulermust be both philosopher and warrior (525b, 543a), some scholars

have argued that the education to, for,and by war presented inBooks II-V
is the key to understanding the education to philosophy that is the dialogue
as a whole.10
Warfare does matter crucially to the overall philosophy of theRepublic.
The dialogue describes what may summon a soul to philosophy as "holding

Frank /
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ofWar
445
opposite beliefs about the same thing at the same time," as in the case of
three fingers, each of which appears to be both big and small depending
on where it is in relation to the others. This sort of contradictory percep
tionmay awaken the reflection characteristic of philosophy (523a-525b).
Itmay also occasion war: an individual, "teeming with self-contradictions,"
is at war with himself (603c-d); factions within cities holding contrary
views about the distribution of divisible goods sometimes war with one
another; and cities war over border disputes and also when they disagree
over justice and injustice (Alcibiades 112a-d). The Republic is, indeed, an
extended meditation on the proximity of philosophy and war and on the
dangers of thatproximity forphilosophy and forpolitics.When modeled on
war and characterized by itsmotivating pleonexia, philosophy and politics
resolve contradiction and conflict by driving out opposition." Inmy view,
theRepublic models a differentunderstanding and practice of philosophy
and politics however, a philosophy and politics that are irreducible towar
and thatprovide an alternative to itsmotivating pleonexia by correcting the
virtues taught by an education to, for,and by war.'2 At stake, among other
things, is the practice of judgment.
I take theRepublic to be concerned with war, virtue, and judgment, in
general. It is also Plato's reflection on the conduct, execution, and impact
of a particular war, thepanHellenic Peloponnesian War, inwhose aftermath
he wrote the dialogue and against whose backdrop it is set.'3 That war,
which in Thucydides' estimation originated in an aggressive and a defen
sive apprehensiveness-a
growth inAthenian power coupled with Sparta's
fear of that power (History, 1.23)-made
the need for judgment and its
virtues particularly urgent for at least two reasons: unlike otherwars of the
classical period, thePeloponnesian War made foes of Greek cities thathad
fought as allies in earlier wars; it also broke the standing rules of warfare
thathad been in effect since theeighth centuryBCE, causing major changes
in the practice of war.'4 Destabilizing hitherto settled rules of engagement
and categories of identification, including, especially, thatof friendand foe,
and in the absence of other principles of containment, the Peloponnesian
War gave free rein to pleonexia
in all its registers, psychic, domestic, and
imperial.
The Republic's response to thePeloponnesian War is the same as theone
it offers topleonexia more generally: a call to justice, the dialogue's most
central concern. As "the having and doing of one's own and what belongs
to one" (434a), justice regulates thepleonexia thatcreates dissonance in the
soul and dissensus in the city, harmonizing the parts of the soul and the
parts of the city,whether they be individuals or classes (35ld-352a). By

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extending the analogy between soul and city to relations among cities, the
Republic, contra Aristotle, shows that it is concerned with interpolity jus
tice.15 It does not deliver a set of principles preserved through a system of
external punishments and rewards in answer to thatconcern, however.What
itdelivers instead is an account of good judgment as the virtue of justice.'6
Reading theRepublic through the lens of its treatmentof war highlights
a pressing set of philosophical and political problems of Plato's day and of
is a friend/enemy?
What, indeed, is an own/friend and/or
an other/enemy?And what ought I to do when the rules establishing these
ours as well. Who
distinctions and prescribing my conduct are opaque, unstable, or emergent,

and also when these rules appear to be clear? These are questions towhich
the practice of judgment responds psychically, domestically, and globally.
Part I of this essay analyzes the setting, context, themes, and action of the
Republic to establish that the dialogue sets up questions of judgment
against the backdrop of the destabilizing conditions of the Peloponnesian
War. Part II considers the early education of thewarrior class inBooks II
IV and the education towar through exposure towar inBook V to demon
strate the inadequacies of the specific virtues and practices of judgment
produced by war education. Part III explores corrections to these virtues
and practices by way of the dialogue's most fully developed account of
judgment inBook IX. Part IV asks what follows from this account for our
understanding of the dialogue's treatments of interpolity justice and the
relation between politics and philosophy.
Friends and Foes

Written sometime in the 380s-370s BCE, the Republic depicts a con
some forty or fiftyyears earlier during the
versation that takes place
lengthy and devastating Peloponnesian War.17 The dialogue is set in the

Piraeus, "a harbor area thatwas home to a vast polyglot community of
traders and foreigners," in the residence of the metic Cephalus, after
Socrates and Glaucon have attended a festival "which included not only an
indigenous but also a foreign procession," honoring a Thracian goddess
"new and strange toAthens."'8 Mirroring the society inwhich it is set, the
group present at the discussion staged by the dialogue is composed of men
from differentGreek cities (Athens, Chalcedon, Syracuse, Thurii), with
varying political statuses (citizens and resident aliens) and commitments
(soon-to-be victims but also friends and kin of theThirty Tyrants brought
to power inAthens by Sparta in 404-403.)'9 Advertising
their diversity,

Frank /
Wages
Plato names all themen
ofWar
447
in attendance along with their cities of origin,
The participants
in the
thoughfewof themsubsequently
speak (328b).20
dialogue do not all know one another and yet theydeal with each other, for
themost part, as friends and equals.2' Cephalus, for example, expresses his
pleasure at hosting Socrates and even before things get underway invites
Socrates to visit again (328d). The interlocutors are generally polite and
respectful and over the course of a lengthy and at times heated discussion,
they largely refrain fromname-calling, cursing, and interrupting.
Still, the threatof conflict, even of violence, is never far from the sur
Polemarchus, in the
face. The opening encounter of the dialogue-when
company of some companions, sends his slave to restrain Socrates and
Glaucon so thatPolemarchus can invite Socrates to his father's house for
conversation (327b)-is
edged with force: Socrates seems to agree to go
because themajority so resolves (328b), which is to say, because he is out
numbered (327c). At the beginning of Book V in a mirror of the opening
and Adeimantus are joined by Thrasymachus and
together, again by majority resolution, enjoin Socrates to
explain to their satisfaction the policies he has introduced of equal educa
scene, Polemarchus
Glaucon who
tion formen and women and of holding women and children in common
(449a-450a). Thrasymachus, who views arguments as a violent battle
(34la-b, 342d), famously enters the dialogue like a ferocious beast (336b).
In Book V, after Socrates has presented the idea that it is philosophers who
ought to rule thebest city as kings, Glaucon counsels Socrates to arm him
self lest he suffer"terrible things" (473e-474a).
Against this backdrop of potential and actual disharmony, however,
alliances are fluid and sometimes restored.After Socrates shows Polemarchus
the inadequacy of his early attempts to define justice inBook I, Polemarchus
agrees to "do battle in common" with Socrates to seek a better account
(335d). Although Glaucon was part of the group that prevented Socrates
from continuing his exposition in Book V, Glaucon also offers to take up
arms in Socrates' defense (474a). Thrasymachus, who initially set upon
Socrates as if to tear him to pieces,
manner
(354a, 450b). And Socrates,
later engages with him in a gentler

in Book VI,
refers to himself and
Thrasymachus as "new friends" (498c-d). The dialogue thus vividly por

trays in a web of martial metaphors the dynamic relations of a group of
Greek men familiar to one another and strangers,who shift from friend to
foe and sometimes back again.
The real-life circumstances of the cities represented in the dialogue and
of a number of the named characters were much less congenial. Thurii, an
Athenian-supported colony in Southern Italy in themid 440s, turnedagainst

448
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Athens
415-413;
to aid Syracuse
after the Sicilian
and after Chalcedon
and campaign
of
revolted unsuccessfully against Athens
expedition
in
407, Thrasymachus appeared inAthens as a diplomat on Chalcedon's
behalf
to "prevent harsh reprisals against his native city."22 Polemarchus
and
Niceratus lost their lives and Lysias suffered tremendous economic losses at
thehands of theThirty; Socrates was triedand executed after thewar in 399
by the restored democracy atAthens. By modeling interactions among polit
ical actors who do not resort to violence against the historical backdrop of
an extremely violent war, theRepublic depicts a differentpossible future
while also arguing for the conditions necessary for such change.
If the dynamism of friend/foerelations figures dramatically in the set
tingof theRepublic and in Socrates' engagements with his interlocutors, it
is a substantive theme of the dialogue as well, introduced explicitly early in
Book
I,when Polemarchus parrots the conventional definition of justice as
"helping friends and harming enemies" (332a-335e).
The friend/foetheme
arises here in reference to interpersonal relations. And yet Polemarchus'

name, "War-Ruler," his father's business of shield manufacturing, and the
exchanges probing Polemarchus' definition of justice (332e) imply an anal
ogy between interpersonal and interpolity relations.23When the friend/foe
theme resurfaces inBook II in Socrates' conversation with Glaucon about
the expansive city's need for a warrior class, it refers explicitly to both
intra-and interpolity relations and marks, as well, the continuities between
the two. To protect the "expanding city" (372e), a class of warriors needs to
be able to distinguish friend from foe so as to combine a gentleness toward
theirown citizens with a spiritedness, thumos, toward the city's enemies.24
To some commentators, this suggests an equivalence between friend and
citizen, on the one hand, and stranger and foe, on the other.25 In my view,
is problematized by thewarriors' second job, which
is to keep domestic peace (375c). As Socrates puts it later, the guardians
will watch "over enemies fromwithout and friends fromwithin so that the
ones will not wish and the others will not be able to do harm" (415d-e).
any such equivalence
Citizen-friends, it seems, can become enemies. Can strangers, even ene

mies, become friends?
Discerning friend from foe is no simple matter. That it is not a matter of
fact is suggested by the case of thewarriors who know a set of facts-these
are citizens; those strangers-but fail in their job if they simply, like the
loyal watchdogs to which Socrates compares them, identify those they
know as friends and strangers as foes. Nor is discerning friend from foe a
matter of following a rule, as the example of Polemarchus makes plain: he
has a rule-"help
friends and harm enemies"-but
cannot apply it.That is

Frank /
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why he agrees to join Socrates'

tional curriculum of Books
ofWar
449
investigation of justice.26The early educa
II-IV, whose goal is justice, is designed to help
warriors learn to distinguish friend from foe.And with the investigation of

the "feverish" city (372e), whose
engagements with other cities make
it
urgent to distinguish friend from foe, thequestion of justice in theRepublic

comes into its own. Insofar as these figures of war-in
the person of
Polemarchus, the class of warriors, and the space of the expanding city
motivate the dialogue's quest for justice, the action of the dialogue, like its
context, setting, and themes, signals to readers that the dialogue engages
both interpersonal relations and foreign policy. That these aspects of the
dialogue converge around the question of judging friend from foe under
scores the centrality of the practice of judgment to the dialogue's
philo
sophical quest for justice.
War Education
The story leading up to the initial appearance of war in theRepublic
the luxurious city engaging in wars for expansion-is
relatively straight
forward.27Dissatisfied with the first "city for pigs" (372d) founded to
satisfy people's basic needs, and which, in any case, provides an insuffi
cient occasion for an exploration of justice (37le-372a), Glaucon inter
venes tomotivate the transition to a second city, the "city with a fever"
where desire and appetites grow (372e). If the new city is to accommodate
desires for luxury,more goods will be required. Greater production means
more jobs formore people and, ultimately, a bigger city is necessary to
accommodate this growth.When a city grows, competition increases espe
cially outside the citywhere conflicts occur owing to territorialexpansion.
This, as we have seen, is theorigin of war (373e). Warfare requires warriors
toprotect the city from its enemies (bothwithin and without), and also from
itsprotectors: thewarriors themselves. To do theirjob, thewarriors must be
both courageous and moderate. The emergence of war thus sets off a
lengthy account of the inculcation in thewarriors of these virtues, an edu
cation thatoccupies much of Books 11-V.The curriculum thatSocrates sets
out in Books II-III includes music, the right diet, and gymnastics for the
warriors' souls and bodies. It rewrites the poetry of Homer and Hesiod to
excise references to violence and death and rejects the use of "polyhar
monic or multi-stringed" instruments (399c). Aiming
to produce via "an

it
is underwritten by
and
character
intelligentplan" simplicity
good
(399e),
an account of virtue thatexcludes vice.

450
PoliticalTheory
But teaching virtue in thisway is deceptive, for as Socrates explains in the

middle of Book III, an education to virtue requires knowing "the different
formsofmoderation, courage, frankness,high-mindedness, and all theirkin
dred and
their opposites"
(402c, emphasis added, also 409e, 49lb-c).
requires knowing immoderation; learning courage

requires knowing cowardice, and so on. Driving home the inadequacies of the
Learning moderation
early curriculum,Book III closes with Socrates posing the very same ques
tion that set off the discussion about education in the firstplace: "How can
we be sure that thewarriors now will, like dogs, be kind to those they should
treatwell rather than becoming like wolves or savage masters? Wouldn't a
really good education endow themwith the greatest caution in this regard?"
Glaucon responds, "But surely theyhave had an education like that."Socrates
is less sanguine. "Perhaps we shouldn't assert this dogmatically," he says.
"What we can assert iswhat we were saying just now, that theymust have the
righteducation, whatever it is, if they are to have what will most make them
gentle to each other and to those they are guarding" (416a-b, emphasis
added). An education to virtue proper has yet to be specified.
Many scholars treat the early education as a moral training and habitua
tion,which they take to be insufficient on its own but a necessary prole
gomenon to the education to philosophy of Books VI-VII.28 I disagree. This
evolutionary view obscures an important point: insofar as the education
offered throughBook V succeeds at educating warriors towarfare, it fails
even as a preparation for the education to philosophy.29 This is because, as
I argue next, the compliance to others and respect for authority inculcated
by the plethora of laws guiding the early curricula are fundamentally at
odds with the self-rule and independence of thought characteristic of phi
losophy. If, as Socrates announces, beginnings make all the difference
(377a-b), then the inadequate beginning instilled by the early education will
have lasting effects.Traces of these effects aremade visible over the course
of the dialogue by the reduction of the figures of war to supporting roles:
afterBook I, Polemarchus never again rises to the status of Socrates' pri
mary interlocutor; thewarrior class is renamed the auxiliaries with the tran
sition to the perfect city afterBook III; and thewarring city produced by
desires for luxury goods undergoes an austerity program that leaves it look
ing not unlike the firstcity inwhich war is only a possibility (372c).
Socrates sets forth two laws to regulate the curricular exclusions of
Books II-III (380c-d, 383a) and two laws to supervise the behavior of the
warrior-guardians in the perfect city (403b-c, 417b). He introduces more
legislation in Book V concerning marriage, procreation, piety, and war
(459e, 461b, 468c, 47 ib). All of these laws are oriented to breeding thebest

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451
possible guardians by cultivating in them the virtues of courage and mod

eration. Socrates is, however, skeptical of the sort of courage these laws
teach, which he calls "political" courage and defines as "the correct and
law-inculcated opinion about what is to be feared and what isn't" (430b).
The dialogue distinguishes this sort of courage frommere opinion, "which
is not the result of education" and belongs to beasts and slaves (430b), on
the one hand, and true courage, on the other, discussion about which
Socrates defers to "some other time" (430c). Political courage is not
courage proper because it is not the desire to act bravely for its own sake
but rather the result of the effective fear of punishment along with the pow
erful influence of shame, a psychological and cultural phenomenon.30
Insofar as law-inculcated courage is thusmotivated fromwithout, it shares
as much with the behavior identifiedwith "mere opinion" and denied the
name courage altogether (430b-c) as itdoes with courage proper. Political
courage may resemble courage proper in that both produce actions that
appear courageous. But political courage falters in the absence of laws that
compel compliance through fear and shame, producing soldiers who are
either unwilling to fightor excessively savage. The latterpossibility con
cerns Socrates most, as is evidenced by the account of war he offers in
IV which develops after the luxurious city has been transformed into
the perfect city in speech, founded upon the noble lie (414c-415a). The
city's fear for its security drives it towar against its neighbors who, owing
to their factionalism, are easily subjugated. Deploying strategies that recall
the destructive conditions at Corcyra (History, 3.69-85), the guardians suc
ceed at dominating theirneighbors. They are not yetmoderate at all.
Further evidence that the "reformed poetic education" does not produce
moderation may be found in Socrates' explicit signaling of the failures of
the breeding laws to achieve their ends (462e, 613d).3' If moderation is
inculcated by themyriad other laws, it is only as the "strictest obedience"
to "the rulers and to rule the pleasures of drink, sex, and food for them
Book
selves"
(389d-e).32 Moderation,
so understood, is not trulymoderation,
however. As Socrates'
tongue-in-cheek discussion of "self-control" sug

gests, moderation must rather be practiced within a person's own soul
(43 1a).33And as he makes plain in theApology, moderation in thecompany
of true courage, sometimes demands outright disobedience to the rules of

another (32a-e). Failing to cultivatemoderation proper and with no moder
ation to temper political courage, thewarriors' education produces a spirit
edness which tends, especially as between cities where laws are largely
ineffectiveat constraining compliance, to develop into thekind of brutality
practiced, for example, by theAthenians atMelos (History 5.84-116), and

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Political Theory
into the savagery they exercised later,with the help of the Thracians, at
Mycalessus (History,
7.29).
Agreeing
that the early war educations (Book II-IV) fail, although on
differentgrounds from the ones offered here,Michael
Kochin,
in a modi
fied version of the evolutionary view, argues thatBook V's education towar
throughexposure towarfare corrects the failures of the earlier accounts and
succeeds in inculcating themoderation and courage proper to philosophy.
It does so by running "a kind of contest of virtue" among the soldiers that
rewards restraint (469d-e) and punishes cowardice
(468a-b).34 I disagree.
Insofar as the soldiers refrain from defiling the corpses of theirenemies or

refuse to lay down theirarms not for theirown sake but as a means
to par
ticular ends, motivated by a system of rewards and punishments, their

behaviors may appear virtuous but they are not necessarily so. Socrates'
intention to produce skepticism about the virtues of these soldiers even in
Book V
is made manifest in that same passage where he describes their
practice of moderating others by way of war (471 a). Insofar as truemoder

ation is a virtue of self-regulation, "moderating" others throughwar, which
is to say, exercising control and, indeed, force over them, signals that the
kind ofmoderation Socrates advocates has not yet been actualized, even, or
especially, in those doing themoderating, a point Socrates makes in a dif
ferentcontext in theCharmides (176b-d).
That the educations to, for,and by war up throughBook V fail to teach
moderation and courage, and that readers of the dialogue are meant to see
that they fail, is signaled by the fact thatPlato has Socrates deploy decep
tion and constraint in a self-conscious manner and alert his interlocutors
and the dialogue's readers to theirpresence (377a, 382c-d). He thusmarks
both the inevitability of constraint and deception as conditions of war and
also the philosophical inadequacy of an education suitable to these condi
tions. About deception, Socrates says: true philosophers love truth and
hate falsity since falsitymakes philosophy impossible (485c-d).5 And if
Socrates opens his account of war inBook V by stressing the educational
opportunities afforded to children through theirexposure towar (466e-467a),
he later stresses the importance of play, not force, to a successful education.
Referring to the education throughwar as part of a "compulsory" (537b)
education, he maintains that "nothing taught by force stays in the soul"
(536e) except viciousness. As he has earlier insisted, children should not be
exposed to anything vicious because such exposure too early, by way of
experience rather than as a result of knowledge, can bring thatviciousness
into the child's soul and so corrupt it,making
it unable to judge, krinein,
soundly (409a-e).

Frank /Wages
ofWar
453
Together, the opening of theBook V account of war and these passages

on what children should learn and how suggest that Socrates does not
endorse war for its educative qualities. Children should not be exposed to
the experience of violence on the ground that it deforms their souls and
thereby threatens their ability to become virtuous. But this is not true of
exposing children to knowledge about war or to knowledge of vice, for that
matter (396a). The experience of violence corrupts their capacities for
virtue. But a curriculum that insulates children entirely fromknowledge of
violence is no good either.Neither the experience of violence throughwar
nor the censure of violence through the deception and constraint character
istic of war education, it seems, offers an adequate preparation for the life
of philosophy. This point is reflected in the drama of the dialogue as well
insofar as war stories are part of, but subordinate to,philosophy.
By underscoring the tensions between the conditions of war and those of
philosophy, the dialogue exposes the intended inadequacies of the educa
tion throughBook V as even a prolegomenon to an education to philosophy.
This point is anticipated at the start of the dialogue by the figure of
Cephalus who, though not a student of the reformed poetic education, is
like thewarriors whom
it trains in a telling way: he too ismoderate only
because of external factors, in his case, his old age (328e-329d); and he too
is unsuited tophilosophy, as his early departure from thephilosophical con
versation makes manifest.36 The inadequacy of external habituation is dri
ven home at the end of thedialogue as well, in themyth of Er, where a man
resembling those who have been educated by the curricula of the early
Books insofar as he has lived in a well-ordered citywhose laws have trained
him to virtue, turnsout tobe not trulyvirtuous: he chooses, forhis next life,
a life of tyranny(619b-d).
InBook II, Socrates describes being philosophical in themode of a good
warrior as defining "what is one's own and what is alien in termsof knowl
edge and ignorance" and so, like a pedigree dog, judging "what it sees to
be either a friend or an enemy on no other basis than that itknows the one
and doesn't know the other" (376b). Itmay be that "the dog is a friend to
what is "known," which is to say, of knowledge,"37 but true friends of
knowledge, namely philosophers, are not enemies of the unknown or unfa
miliar. Refusing to choose friend or foe, familiar or strange, knowledge or
ignorance, philosophy instead defines what is its own and what is alien in
termsof the dynamic relations between such binary opposites. That is not
true of thewarrior. The warrior acts, rather, in terms of an economy that
depends on treating strangers as enemies and citizens as friends, on decep
tion ("the enemy is not a person") and constraint (disobedience is treason),

454
PoliticalTheory
and on accepting and following the rules of others38.These are thepractices

inculcated as political courage and strict obedience
Books
by the curricula of
II-IV and by the experience of war described inBook V. But, as we
have seen, these same practices are called into question in Socrates' open
ing exchanges with Glaucon
and Polemarchus
and in the rest of the dia
logue.War education, then, is not a prelude to philosophy but a worrisome

obstacle to it.
Indeed, one of themost serious casualties of the education to, for, and
by war is the practice of independent judgment39.That theRepublic's pas
sages about warfare invite this focus on judgment is borne out by a feature
of the text that has, tomy knowledge, been overlooked by scholars. The
specific rules of war thatSocrates mentions and endorses inBook V (469b
471 c) are among those historians list as the standing rules of warfare that
held sway from the eighth through the fifthcenturies BCE.40 These rules,
which prohibited enslaving the enemy population, burning their houses,
laying the countryside towaste, or treating thedead dishonorably, governed
wars between Greek
cities and those between Greeks
and non-Greeks
(though "less reliably" in the latter case).41 They governed, more specifi
cally, a fighting class of hoplites or farmerswho waged war when their
crops did not need attending to, for short periods of time, and with armor
they could individually afford to purchase. During the Peloponnesian War,
theAthenians broke these standing rules. That change, togetherwith the
year-round battles and sky-rocketing expenses dictated by the expansive
military strategies necessary for empire-building on the part of the
Athenians, resulted, Josiah Ober argues, in the self-destruction of the polis
form.42
The similarities between
the rules Socrates proposes
and the stand
ing rules constraining war and limiting its practice are significant. It is
not unreasonable
to conclude that Plato, who set the dialogue in the
Peloponnesian War, is participating in an argument beyond the dialogue
regarding the goals and strategies of thatwar. Plato is not necessarily argu
ing for a return to a hoplite warrior class or to the standing rules. He might
be. Or he might be challenging the adequacy of rules as such. By placing
before his readers (and before Socrates' interlocutors) a set of rules thatno
longer hold at the end of an account of a set of warlike virtues and practices
thatdepend on rules, Plato underscores the inadequacy of rules to constrain
thepleonexia characteristic of war. What the experience of thePeloponnesian
War makes most urgent is a set of virtues and a practice of judgment that
can operate in the absence of rules and (as the case of Polemarchus demon
strates and as Plato implies here) also in theirpresence.

Frank/
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455
Judgment
Socrates broaches the question of judgment most explicitly inBook IX
in the context of a discussion about the tyrant.The tyrantappears to have
precisely what the effectivewarrior lacks, namely the capacity to judge in
the absence of pre-given rules, for the tyrant is himself, in virtue of his
power, the sovereign source of rule(s) and thedeterminer of facts.The self
rule associated with the tyrant is no more than the reverse of the rule
following associated with the effectivewarrior, however, and it is equally
inadequate to the task of sound judgment. Exemplifying warlike pleonexia,
the tyrantis, in Socrates' words, not only "compelled to compete and fight
with other bodies all his life" (579c) like thewarrior, but also at constant
war with himself. And being atwar in this latterway is no less an obstacle
to the exercise of sound judgment than is being atwar with others. To make
this point, the dialogue turns the tables on the tyrant,moving away from
how the tyrantdecides tohow we (Socrates' interlocutorsand Plato's readers)
are to judge the tyrant.
Socrates asks, is not
thepersonwho is fitto judge, krinein,someonewho in thought,
dianoia, can
go down intoa person's characterand examine it thoroughly,someonewho
doesn't judge fromtheoutside, theway a child does, who is dazzled by the
faqade thattyrantsadopt for theoutsideworld to see, but is able to see right
throughthatsortof thing?(577a)
The tyrant
may appear to be happiest owing to his boundless power, but
a fitor worthy judge, Socrates explains, does not judge by appearances in
theway of a child or, for thatmatter, in theway of a warrior who sees a
stranger and concludes enemy, or in theway of a tyrantwho determines
what is good based on his power to decide. Instead, a good judge sees
through the outside, presumably to how things trulyare.
By lining up appearance and falsity on the one side against being and
truthon the other, Socrates seems to confirm a set of familiar dichotomies
conventionally associated with the philosophy of theRepublic: being and
truthbelong with universal and eternal "forms" that,along with mathematics,
populate the intelligibleworld above the divided line described inBook VI;
appearance and falsitybelong with worldly experiences, theperceptions that
apprehend these experiences, and the opinions, beliefs, and imaginations
thatorganize them, all of which dwell in the visible world below the line.43

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PoliticalTheory
The Republic's
account of judging well challenges this "two-world" view,
however: as I show next, judgment depends not only on understanding and

cognition but on imagination and experience as well.44
A good judge, Socrates says, sees through the outside and reaches into
the tyrant's character, as Socrates puts it, "in thought." Judging well, this
means, is a kind of thought-experiment. It is a thought-experimentbecause
while itmay be possible to see through the outside-to
in by the tyrant's facade-it
refuse to be taken
is not trulypossible to see the tyrant's charac
teror the constitution of his soul as such. The soul, one's being, cannot be
perceived by the senses, and so itmust be thought.Grasping a person's
being in thought, seeing beyond or behind what appears, is, nonetheless, a
kind of seeing: it is a "seeing in" or an in-sight intowhat can actually be
seen only from the outside. The difference between a child who is dazzled
by facades and a good judge is not that the child sees only the outside while
the good judge truly sees outside and in, but rather that the good judge rec
ognizes that there ismore towhat is thanmeets the eye and that he must
use his imagination to determine what thatmore iS.45A good judge also
understands that the inability to see what is except from the outside, using
his own imagination, limits his capacity to determine what thatmore is
absolutely and with certainty.
It is because judging well is a seeing in from the outside, thatSocrates
pairs the fitness qualification with a competency criterion, based on expe
rience. Someone
is competent to judge, say, the happiness of a tyrant
andwitnessed his behav

because he has lived in thesame house with a tyrant
ior at home and his treatment
of each member of his household when he is
strippedof his theatricalfaqade, and has also seen how he behaves when in
danger fromthepeople (577a-b).
Judging the soul of a tyrant requires a familiaritywith what is being
judged, the sort of intense and textured familiarity that comes with living
with a tyrantover time and witnessing his behavior in private and in public,
in daily lifewith his family and slaves when he feels safe, and also when
he feels threatened by those he oppresses.
sort of
and broad set of experiences-the
self as having had of the tyrantDionysius
theywill expose to the competent judge
Judgingwell requires this deep

experience Plato described him
I (Seventh Letter)-not because
the tyrant's soul as such. It, of
course, cannot be seen. That iswhy familiarity is not enough. The compe
tent judge must also have imagination.
There are risks associated with experience. As we have seen, Socrates
insists thatchildren not experience war or vice precisely because itcorrupts

Frank /
Wages
their capacities
ofWar
457
to judge well. He says the same about children and crime
(409a). Children need to be protected from these experiences (though

not, as we have seen, from knowledge of them) because dazzled by
appearances, they tend to want to become what they experience. That
risk is attenuated in fit judges who are able to see not merely "from the
outside" as do children, and not merely "in from the outside" by using
their imagination, but who are also able to see "out from the inside" by
subjecting theirproximate experiences
to interpretation. Sound
indepen
dent judgment thus requires the proximity and engagement of experience

along with the distance and detachment of imagination, all at the same
time.46
Characteristic of sound judgment is the virtue of moderation-the
knowing and keeping of one's own bounds-and
the virtue of courage
understood as "wise endurance" (Laches 194a) and "standing fast"
(Apology 28e). If courage so understood is a military virtue, it is also a
philosophical
virtue involving "standing fast" in argument and saying
"no."47 It is to be noted thateven in themartial context, Socrates is consis

tently commended for his remarkable courage not at battle but in retreat
(Laches 181b; Symposium 220d-e, 221a), and the hallmark of Socratic
courage in the political domain is his refusal to do what he judges to be
unjust even when thatmeans contravening the policies of his regime and
endangering his life (Apology 32a-b). Moderation and courage, informed
by thewisdom thatcomes with seeing the limits of one's own imagination
and experience-called
by Socrates, in theApology, human wisdom (20d
23c), in the Symposium, "the one virtue containing all the virtues" (209a),
and in theRepublic, a practice of deliberation oriented tomaintaining good
relations both domestically and with other cities (428d)-the Republic
treats as co-conditions (428b, 430e, 618c; see also Gorgias, 506c-508a) of
judgment and justice (433b, 443d) and, thus, as responses to thepleonectic
drive towar.
With these qualifications forjudging before them,Socrates asks Glaucon:
"Do you want to pretend, prospoieisthai, thatwe are among those who
would be able to judge, krinein, and have already met up with such men
[i.e., tyrants]so thatwe'll have someone to answer what we ask?" Although
unlike Plato, Glaucon has no firsthand experience of tyrants,he replies:
"Certainly" (577b). And so Socrates calls on Glaucon to act "like the judge
who makes the final decision, [and] tellme who among the five-the king,
the timocrat, the oligarch, the democrat, and the tyrant-is first in happi
ness, who second, and so on in order" (580a-b, see also 583a, 585c forother
examples of Socrates invitingGlaucon to issue judgments).

458
PoliticalTheory
Before examining Glaucon's
response, consider what Socrates
fromGlaucon when he invitesGlaucon

like a judge. About
seeks
firstto pretend to be and later to act
the second, commentators write thatSocrates is refer
ring to "themode of awarding prizes in the comic and tragic competitions,"

that Socrates, in other words, wants Glaucon
to judge as he would a the
treatment,Plato
atrical spectacle.48 That is true. Indeed, in Sara Monoson's
sustains an analogy throughout the dialogues, perhaps especially in the
Republic
and Laws, between
the "intellectual toil" of Socrates
and the
mode of judging characteristic not only of the official judges at these com
petitions but of ordinary theater-goers.Drawing liberally on fifth-through
fourth-centuryAthenian practices of "audience performance," Monoson
describes the "active, possibly even creative (that is, notmerely passive and
observational), contributions of the audience to the theatrical experience,"
which
involved both seeing what appeared on stage and seeing what
appeared as appearance.49 This helps tomake sense of the simultaneously

participatory and detached mode of engagement characteristic of good
judgment I described earlier in terms of experience and imagination.
Further lightmay be shed on thismode of engagement by recalling the
practice of judgment Socrates rejects inBook I. There, in an exchange with
Thrasymachus, Socrates distinguishes two modes of adjudication: in the
first,participants make long speeches and then invite a jury to decide who
among the speakers was best; in the second, the speakers engage in dia
logue and, "seeking agreement with one another," act as both participants
and judges themselves (348a-b). In the firstmode, judgment is "from the
outside," not so much in the sense that it is based only on what appears but
in a second sense, namely that it is imposed by a thirdparty and not by the
speakers themselves. In the second mode, by contrast, judgments are issued
by those who are party to the exchange. These judgments are thus self
generated. Thrasymachus, who has entered the dialogue demanding that
Socrates compete with him and that the interlocutors judge, prefers the first.
Socrates rejects thismode, later decrying it as evidence of a lack of educa
tion in the polity and as generating a justice "imposed by others as masters
and judges" (405a-b). Glaucon signals his determination to judge "from the
inside" by maintaining that, like Socrates, he too prefers the second mode
of judging to the first (348b). Against this backdrop, Socrates' request in
Book IX thatGlaucon act like a judge may be read as an invitation to
to use his own experience and imagination as an active participant
spectator in the dialogue.
How does Glaucon fare as judge in Book IX? There is every reason to
expect thathe'll do well. Over the course of the dialogue he has displayed
Glaucon

Frank /Wages
ofWar
459
intellectual credentials ranging from an excellent memory (427d-e, 522a-b,

543c-544b)
to an ability to rehearse complex arguments (51 Ic-d). Portrayed
as good-natured and cooperative (328b, 435d, 475a), aware of the limita

tions of his own understanding (398c-d, 474d, 517c, 534b), and able to
learn from his mistakes (527d-528b, 528e, 529c), Glaucon also displays
a spiritedness in his desires to hear and learnmore and in his propensity
to interruptand demand a full account when he doesn't understand (338a,
thus appears to com
347a, 357a, 358bff., 368c, 471c-472b, 509c). Glaucon
bine the virtues of moderation and courage characteristic of a philosophical
nature.
In reply toSocrates' invitation to rank king, timocrat,oligarch, democrat,
and tyrantin order of happiness, however, Glaucon
says: "That's easy. I rank
them in virtue and vice, in happiness and its opposite, in the order of their
appearance, as I might judge choruses" (580a-b). Ranking the statesmen
strictly in order of theirappearance, Glaucon judges "from the outside" and
so fails to judge well. His failure is underscored when Socrates asks whether
he should add toGlaucon's verdict that "this is so whether the character [of
each ruler] is known or not known to all men and gods" and Glaucon says
"yes" (580c). His failure is forecast by themisplaced confidence of his
response toSocrates' invitation to pretend that theyare in a position to judge
the tyrant's soul, a confidence he also demonstrates close to the startof the
dialogue when he tells theGyges story from the standpoint of a tyrant.If
Socrates' invitation to pretend already suggests thathe and Glaucon may not
have the experience necessary to judge well and hence thatdoing so will call
for a double dose of insight-imagining the tyrant's soul and imagining that
he's well-positioned to imagine it while recognizing that he is not
Glaucon, despite his confidence or perhaps because of it, shows himself to
be unequal to this challenge (523b, 529a-b). Glaucon does not simply
declare in themode of a tyrant,however. He also regularly refuses to exer
cise his own judgment, repeatedly defers to Socrates, is unwilling to give
reasons, and unable to account for judgments not his own. Unhappy with
responses, Socrates attempts time and time again to orient
Glaucon's
away from taking Socrates' words to be true and toward argumen

tation,encouraging Glaucon to defend his own convictions (578c). Glaucon
Glaucon
is, however, unable to fulfillhis promise to generate his own judgments (also
and allows Socrates' views to replace his own (530b).
427d-e, 532d-533a)
By turns,Glaucon vests utter authority in himself like a tyrantand displays

strictobedience to the rule(s) of another like a warrior. He thus shows him
self to be lacking at thispoint in the dialogue themoderation, courage, and
wisdom proper to the practice of judgment.

460
PoliticalTheory
Philosophyand Politics
If Socrates offers his fullest account of judgment inBook
IX, the theme
of judgment is, as we have seen, a signal preoccupation of the dialogue

from beginning to end. It appears in Books I and II when the tools of
Polemarchus and thewarrior class of the luxurious city-rules
and facts
are shown to be inadequate to the task of discerning friend and foe. It

appears inBook VII when Socrates observes how difficult itcan be to judge
whether someone stumbling in the cave is a prisoner dazzled by even its
dim light or a philosopher unaccustomed
to the darkness (518a-b).
It
appears inBook VIII where democracy, the open regime, is described as so

tolerant as to be incapable ofmaking even those judgments necessary to its
own survival.50And, of course, themyth of Er which closes the dialogue, is
a "myth of judgment."51
The reason for the centralityof judgment is political. When
rules of con
duct and categories of identification are in flux and therefore insufficientto

give guidance, self-given judgment informedby virtue is necessary not only
to discern meaningful differences between friend and foe and to draw infer
ences based on these discriminations, but also to challenge the authority and
reificationof such categories and of the rules thatset them towork. Judgment
is also philosophical. This becomes clear inBook IX when Socrates suggests
that the features thatcharacterize good judgment also characterize philoso
phy. Socrates asks: "How are we to judge things ifwe want to judge them
well? Isn't itby experience, reason, and argument?" (582a) Who most excels
at all three?The philosopher (58ld-582e). Judgingwell and philosophizing
both call for grasping what is, on the basis of imagination and experience,
and offering an account of what has been grasped by giving reasons. Judging
well, we saw, requires a combination ofmoderation and courage. So too does
philosophy (376a). In itsquest forknowledge and awareness of itsown igno
rance, thepractice of judgment, like thepractice of philosophy but unlike the
practice of war, combines knowledge with ignorance. The education to phi
losophy that is theRepublic as a whole is perforce an education togood judg
ment. And approaching the Republic through the lens of the practice of
judgment sheds light on its understanding of philosophy. That learning to
judge well and learning tophilosophize are the same is implied from the start
of the dialogue. It is afterPolemarchus has shown himself to be neither a fit
nor a competent judge, having taken the threedefinitions of justice he offers
"from the outside" (from Simonides, conventional Athenian morality, and
Socrates) and failing to justify them, thathe agrees to "do battle in common"
with Socrates in defense of philosophy (335e). Polemarchus' recognition of

Frank /
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ofWar
461
his own failures of judgment may set off the quest for a philosophical
account of justice, but Polemarchus' mode of questing, themode of a com
pliant warrior, signifies thathe is not ready for thatquest and so afterBook
I, as we have seen, he moves backstage. In order to teach thepublic-spirited
warriors of the luxurious city to combine courage and moderation and thus
to acquire a "philosophical" nature (375e), Socrates sets out the educations
thatoccupy much of Books II-V which, as we have seen, orient to philoso
phy by underscoring the limitations of an education towar. Because the dia
logue teaches judgment and philosophy and theirvirtues "from the inside,"
so to speak, by way of the experience of thedialogue, the forces of imagina
tion upon which it draws, its reasoning and its argumentation, their fullest
elaboration is left toBook IX.
Reading theRepublic as, among other things, a pedagogy in a practice
of judgment both philosophical and political implies a mutual embedded
ness of philosophy and politics that goes against the grain of much of the
scholarship on thatdialogue and on Plato's political philosophy more gen
erally, challenging, in particular, the conventional assumption that Plato
sought to insulate philosophy from politics.52As commentators have noted,
Socrates opens theRepublic with the phrase "I have gone down" to signify
the geographical relation of Piraeus toAthens and also to signify the dia
logue's engagement with matters political: the Piraeus, a democratic
stronghold during the war, represents "the cave" of politics. If, to most
commentators, the trajectoryof the dialogue is one of ascent out of politics
and into philosophy, it is to be noted that the dialogue remains "down" for
its duration, a point that is underlined later (432d-e) and reinforced in the
myth of Er which takes place even further"down there" inHades.53 That
theRepublic does its philosophizing from "the cave" argues against those
who use Books VI-VII to separate politics and philosophy, tomake politics
safe forphilosophy, or to subordinate politics to philosophy.54
Disputes over questions of justice and injustice cause wars within souls,
within polities, and between polities. They may also, as the Republic
attests, summon a soul to philosophy.When the summoning fails, itmay be
because a soul is driven by pleonectic desires to declare that its belief(s)
rule based on power alone. That is themode of the tyrantdescribed inBook
IX and anticipated in the figure of Thrasymachus. Or itmay be because a
soul acquiesces
in one or another belief based on the rule of another. That

is themode of thewarrior figured by Polemarchus. The tyrantor thewar
riormay always triumph.Or both may: witness Glaucon. Or warriors may
be(come) philosophers: witness Socrates. Or tyrantsand philosophers may
become friends:witness Thrasymachus and Socrates.

462
Political Theory
In a time inwhich the polis and its resources were being evaluated for
theirwar-usefulness,
the Republic
uses figurations of war to model
and
articulate spaces of philosophy and politics that are not reducible towar.
These are spaces of shifting alliances among a plurality that attain a har
mony, if they do, not because of a pre-given set of forms, categories, or
rules, and not owing to a contingent set of facts or the exercise of force, but
through the comity of conversation among incommensurable parties. Their
harmony does not involve a warlike eradication of one or the other of their
incommensurable beliefs; nor does it entail the sublation of them through
abstraction, as in some kinds of metaphysical philosophy. Instead, sum
moned to seek an understanding of how and why their opposite beliefs
about the same thing could be held at the same time, souls summoned to
philosophy may generate new categories and rules fromout of theiralliance
and thereby produce harmony in thought and also in action. Holding con
flicting beliefs together in a harmony that depends on their differences,
them, is thework theRepublic sets for judgment and
for
both
within souls and cities and between these. This is a
hence,
justice,
practice of judgment whose value is set into relief by the unfortunately
even as itmediates
unvarying demands of war. And it occupies a hybrid position, still vexed,

even today: thatof political philosophy.
Notes
1. I have used translations of Plato's Republic by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
revised by C. D. C. Reeve in Plato's Complete Works, ed. JohnM.
1968); G. M. A. Grube,
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997); and Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1935); along with the Greek text and commentary by James Adam (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1902); and translations of Apology, Laws, Laches, Symposium, Charmides,
and Seventh Letter inPlato's Complete Works, ed. JohnM. Cooper (Indianapolis:
Alcibiades,
Cooper
Hackett,
1997). References toAristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics are from: H. Rackham,
Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and David
trans., Nicomachean
Ethics, revised by J. L. Ackrill and J.O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford

and H. Rackham,
Harvard
trans., Politics
(Cambridge, MA:
Jowett and J.M. Moore
(respectively), trans., The
University Press, 1977) and Benjamin
Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson
(New York: Cambridge
Ross,
trans.,Nicomachean
University
Press,
1980);
University Press, 1996). References to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War are to
Richard Crawley's The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian
War, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Touchstone,
1996).
2. For this rule, the observation about the two aspects of pleonexia and their description as
"apprehensive," see Harry Berger, Jr.,"Facing Sophists," in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies,
and Cultural Representations
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 381-414, 397-8.
For Thomas Hobbes, the logic of this rule justifies, in the name of security and self-preservation,
the doctrine of pre-emptive
University Press,
strike: see Leviathan,

13.
ed. Richard Tuck
(Cambridge:
1996), chap.

Cambridge
Frank /Wages
ofWar
463
3. For a comprehensive
treatment, see Ryan Balot's Greed and Injustice in Classical
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For an exploration of the eros at the
heart of desire, see Anne Carson, Eros: theBittersweet (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998).
Athens
4. Balot, Greed, 160. For a discussion of continuing debates inThucydides scholarship, see
Daniel Mendelsohn,
"Theatres ofWar: Why the battles over ancient Athens still rage," The
New Yorker, January 12, 2004, 79-84.
5. For the argument that political theorists would do well to take Thucydides more seri
ously, see Gerald Mara, "The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato: Classical Greek
Political Theory and the Limits of Democracy"
(SUNY Press, forthcoming).
6. Works that extend Aristotle's political theory to the domain of international relations
include: Anthony F. Lang, ed., Political Theory and International Relations: Hans
J.
on Aristotle's The Politics (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004); Thomas Pangle
Morgenthau
"Justice Among Nations in Platonic and Aristotelian Political Philosophy" American Journal
of Political Science 42 (1998): 377-97; Thomas Pangle and Peter Ahresdorf, Justice Among
Nations:
On
1999); S. M.
theMoral
Basis
Stern, Aristotle
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,

of Power and Peace
on theWorld State (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1970).
7. See, for example, Stephen Halliwell, Republic 5 (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1993),
25ff.; Leo Strauss, The City and Man
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 239.
Plato's political philosophy is seen to offer few resources for interpolity relations because of its
focus on the internal life of a polis and also because it is said to treat non-Greeks as essen
tially inferior to Greeks and hence to position these "barbarians" outside the demands of
justice, rendering any justification of Greek domination, subordination, and conquest of
non-Greeks unnecessary. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to subject this second claim
to scrutiny, let me draw attention to some evidence that suggests otherwise: the Statesman
rejects the barbarian as a "natural unit" (262c-d); theRepublic regularly insists on an interplay
between nature and nurture (395d, 396c, 424a-b, 431c, 453a) and treats human excellence as
characteristic of both Greeks and foreigners (499c). It is to be noted thatwhether they read
of gender equality literally or ironically, many commentators agree that it

complicates the conventional understanding of what is given by nature including: Adi Ophir,
Plato's Invisible Cities: Discourse
and Power in theRepublic (Rowman & Littlefield, 1991);
Halliwell, Republic 5, 149; Michael Kochin, "War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic"
Book V's discussion
Review ofMetaphysics
53 (1999): 403-23; and Leon Craig, The War Lover: A Study of Plato's
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 26. Unlike these commentators who
Republic
restrictPlato's criticism of essentialism to gender, I take it to apply to class and ethnicity as well.
8. Stanley Rosen, Plato's Republic: A Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 82.
9. See Kochin, "War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic"; Craig, The War Lover;
Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato's Republic
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana
"The Civic Conversations
of Thucydides and
University Press, 2002), chap. 4; and Mara,
Plato." As Rosen, Plato's
Republic, 95, notes, the educational curricula of Books II-III share

features of Sparta's training, oriented towar. Malcolm
Schofield, Plato: Political Philosophy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35-43, agrees but cautions against overemphasiz
ing the similarities. For an appreciation of the importance of war for understanding the
Gorgias,
see Arlene Saxonhouse,
11 (2) (1983): 139-69.
"An Unspoken Theme
in Plato's Gorgias: War," Interpretation
10. See, especially, Craig, War Lover, 270-1, who argues that becoming a philosopher
depends on the virtues characteristic of the warrior, although he locates the turn to philos
ophy inBooks VI-VII, whose education allows the victory lover to become a lover of wisdom;
and Kochin,
"War, Class,
and Justice in Plato's Republic?
403, who argues that the educative

464
Political Theory
qualities of exposure to warfare in Book V, though not the war educations

inculcates the orientation to philosophy necessary to achieve a just polity.
of Books
II-IV,
11. For an account of this sort of philosophy, driven by a pleonexia he calls an "imperial
ism of themind," which he attributes to Plato's figurations in his dialogues of such philoso
and Parmenides, but not to Socrates, see Harry Berger Jr.,
phers as Timaeus, Anaxagoras,
"Plato's Flying Philosopher," Philosophical
Forum 13 (1982): 385-407, 400.
12.When I speak of the philosophy of theRepublic I do not refer to the so-called "theory
that defines the philosophy of Kallipolis, but rather to the philos
of forms" of Books VI-VII
ophy of the dialogue as a whole which remains not fully articulated until the dialogue's clos
ing Books.
13. As Debra Nails,
The People of Plato: A Prosopography

of Plato and other Socratics
to
is
it
difficult
Hackett,
out,
324-6,
2002),
(Indianapolis:
points
pinpoint the precise dramatic
date of the dialogue because evidence points to 424 or 421 as the date of the original compo
sition of Book I, and to "after 411" as the date of the original composition of Books II-V
the dialogue as a whole, "as we have it," to 408/7, she concludes that the dialogue takes
place "throughout the Peloponnesian War."
14. For the distinctiveness of the Peloponnesian War, see Victor Davis Hanson, Warfare
Dating
and Agriculture in Classical

1998); Victor Davis Hanson,
Greece, revised ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press,

A War Like No Other: How theAthenians and Spartans Fought
(New York: Random House, 2005); and Josiah Ober, The Athenian
the Peloponnesian War

Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
in Classical Greece").
1998), chap. 5, 53-71
("The Rules
ofWar
15. Aristotle, therefore, follows Plato when he sets up an analogical relationship between
justice among those "who share a life together with a view to self-sufficiency" and justice
among those who do not share such a life. The first he calls "political justice"; the second
In "Justice Among Nations," 380,
"something just by way of resemblance" (NE 1134a24-30).
Pangle asks what it is about political justice thatmakes "only" a resemblance possible among
those who are not fellow-citizens, thus implying thatAristotle takes justice between cities to
be distinctly other and also less than justice among citizens of a particular city. By using the
language of resemblance to signal an analogical relation between these two modes of justice,
Aristotle, inmy view, suggests that he is concerned not only with the differences but also with
the similarities between these modes of justice. Thus interpolity justice may look a lotmore
like political justice than Pangle allows. For a discussion of the force of analogy to signal both
sameness and difference, see Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and theWork
of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 156.
16. There are important similarities between Plato and Aristotle on good judgment as the
virtue of justice and as more than the application of pre-given rules. For my treatment of judg
inAristotle, see Democracy
of Distinction, 95-103. See also Alasdair Maclntyre, After
Virtue: A Study inMoral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1984), 150-4.
ment
17. See Nails, People of Plato, 324-326. Other sources for dating and writing include:
on Socrates'
440; Eva Brann, The Music
Bloom, Republic,
of the Republic:
Essays
Conversations and Plato's Writings (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry, 2004), 118; Edward Cohen,
The Athenian Nation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21; Ophir, Plato's
Invisible Cities, 48.
18. See Cohen, Athenian Nation,
see Josiah Ober Political
Piraeus,
University Press,
20, 20-2. Strauss, City and Man, 62. For details about the
Dissent
in Democratic
Athens (Princeton: Princeton
1998), 215, and references therein.

Frank /Wages
ofWar
465
19. Seventh Letter, 324d. Ruby Blondell,
The Play of Character inPlato's Dialogues

(New
University Press, 2002), 167-8 and S. Sara Monoson, Plato's Democratic
Athenian Politics and the Practice
(Princeton: Princeton
Entanglements:
of Philosophy
University Press, 2000), 213 also note the range and diversity of the auditors.
York: Cambridge
20. Blondell, Play of Character, 203ff., notes that the conversation depicted in Book I
in the laterBooks a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon and Adeimantus, two
becomes
Athenian citizens, and that themistrust and animosities of Book I become trustand cooperation
in Socrates' exchanges with Glaucon and Adeimantus inwhat might be seen as the ready friend
ship among Athenian citizens. While itmay be true that Socrates' style of engagement changes,
the dialogue is punctuated throughout by temporary alliances forged among the diverse auditors
and if, as I argue, one of the targets of the dialogue isAthens's imperialistic pleonexia, then it
makes
Glaucon
sense that Socrates' primary engagement over the course of the dialogue would be with
and Adeimantus, representing theAthenians most in need of restraint.
21. They treat each other as friends and equals notwithstanding the important distinction that
pervaded Greek culture between native Greeks and nonresident aliens. For discussion see G. R. F.
Ferrari, City and Soul inPlato's Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11-5.
22. See Nails, People of Plato, 251 and 289; and Stephen A. White, "Thrasymachus the
Diplomat," Classical Philology 90 (1995): 307-27.
23. For this translation of Polemarchus' name, see Craig, War Lover, 3. Strauss, City and
Man, 63, calls him "War Lord." For Cephalus's
business, see Nails, People of Plato, 84; and
130.
Brann, Music of theRepublic,
24. Thumos is a complex and notoriously difficult motivator of action in classical ethics
and politics. Plato treats thumos as the seat of a number of different emotions and positions it
as themiddle or third part of the soul. I cannot in this paper address the issues raised by thu
mos. For an excellent treatment, see Christina Tarnopolsky, "Power's Passionate Pathologies,"
presented to the 2006 Annual Meeting
erences therein.
of theAmerican
Political Science Association,
and ref
25. See Pangle, "Justice Among Nations," 382, who takes as his point of departure "the
healthy society's insistence on the distinction between what is owed to citizens and what is
owed to strangers," and maps the citizen/stranger distinction onto the friends/enemies distinc
tion. See also Rosen, Plato's Republic, 85 and 86, who, maintaining that "friendship intersects
with familiarity," claims that from the perspective of the dialogue, "every stranger is a poten
tial enemy" or,more carefully, that "strangers or the unknown present a challenge and a warn
ing of possible dangers." That is certainly true. For Plato's Socrates (in the Republic and also
however, fellow-citizens are not necessarily friends. Instead, citizens are

and strangers and potential enemies are also potential friends.
enemies
potential
26. Socrates' eventual conclusion with Polemarchus
is that the just man harms no one
in the Apology),
(335e), the same conclusion he reaches in the Crito and the Gorgias. This does not make
Socrates a pacifist (he was, after all, a courageous warrior) nor is it to depoliticize justice.
Instead, it demonstrates that justice (along with just war, just punishment, etc.) is not an indi
vidual but a political practice.

27. In "War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic," K?chin helpfully distinguishes three
separate accounts of war in the dialogue: wars for expansion (Book II); wars against cities
riven by class conflict (Book IV); and the educative qualities of exposure to warfare itself
(Book V). I draw on these distinctions in the account that follows.
28. See, e.g., Brann, Music of theRepublic,
153, 217; Blondell, Play of Character,
and Schofield, Plato, 40, who calls the early education "embryonically philosophical."

214-6;
466
Political Theory
in
29. See also Harry Berger, Jr., "The Athenian Terrorist: Plato's Portrait of Critias"
Situated Utterances, 464-6. Kochin, "War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic," argues that
the curricula through Book IV fail as a preparation for philosophy but for different reasons
from the ones I offer here.
30. On
III.8. Shame
the confluence of shame and the laws, see Plato, Laws, 647a-c, and Aristotle, NE
is a complex and difficult idea in Plato, operating simultaneously from without
and from within. For detailed treatment, see Christina Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts and
Tyrants: Plato and the Politics of Shame (Princeton University Press, forthcoming); and
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993).
31. The phrase "reformed poetic education" comes from Kochin, "War, Class, and Justice
in Plato's Republic," 408-9.
32. For "strictest obedience," see Craig, War Lover, 8, 157.
33. As Socrates notes in Book IV regarding legislation regulating public venues, such leg
islation is unnecessary because either people will be finely brought up and properly educated,
inwhich case theywill not need laws to govern these practices, or theywill be so bad that no
laws will constrain them (425d- 427a).
34. Kochin, "War, Class, and Justice in Plato's Republic," 418.
35. Socrates' distinction between falsity inwords and falsity in the soul does not attenuate
nature of this deception: words, after all, are the logoi of the soul.
see, Blondell, Play of Character,
170, 173, 188-9; and Peter
Steinberger, "Who is Cephalus?" Political Theory 24 (1996): 172-99.
and Dialectic:
37. See Hans Georg Gadamer, "Plato and the Poets," in Dialogue
Eight
Hermeneutical
Studies on Plato, trans, and with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith (New
the problematic
36. For
discussion
Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 39-72, 56.

38. The warrior must not seek justification or individual accountability for his actions for
ifhe did, he might find himself unable to fight. For a moving account of this dilemma, see the
WW
I trilogy of the novelist Pat Barker: Regeneration

(New York: Plume, 1991); The Eye in
theDoor (New York: Dutton, 1994); and The Ghost Road (New York: Dutton, 1995).
39. For similar concerns about the practice of independent judgment, see theHistory, 1.20-22.
in Classical
40. The following draws primarily on Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture
Greece; Hanson, A War Like No Other; and Ober, The Athenian Revolution, chap. 5, who
establish the existence of these norms of war from sources other than thewritings of Plato.
41. For the applicability of these rules to wars between Greeks and non-Greeks,
inAthenian Revolution, 57, n.5.
ofWar inClassical Greece"
see Ober,
"The Rules
42. Ober,
"The Rules
ofWar
in Classical
Greece"
inAthenian Revolution,
70-1, links the
strategy that changed the rules, practice, and personnel of war with Athenian democratization
and argues that these changes undermined the polis form because on these fronts polities could
not compete with empires.
of the "two-world" view include among many others, Richard Kraut,
to the Study of Plato," Terry Penner, "Socrates and the Early Dialogues,"
and
to
all in The Cambridge Companion
Nicholas White, "Plato's Metaphysical
Epistemology,"
Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); C. D. C. Reeve,
43. Advocates
"Introduction
The Argument of Plato's Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

Philosopher-Kings:
1988). It may also be found in Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J.
(New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 40.
Hollingdale
44. For excellent work on the epistemology of this dialogue that challenges the "two-world
Socrates'
and to which my own is substantially indebted, see Gerald M. Mara,
Discursive Democracy:
(Albany: SUN Y
Logos and Ergon in Platonic Political Philosophy
view"

Frank /Wages
Press, 1997). See also Craig, War Lover, 276-7, whose

tion it depicts between intellect and sense is superb.
ofWar
467
account of the divided line and the rela
45. On the philosophical potency and pervasiveness of eikasia, "the lowest of the doxastic
100-1, 173-5, 267-8. On the notion of a lldianoetic
powers," see Brann, Music of theRepublic,
see Brann, Music
178, 188-94, drawing on Jacob Klein, A
eikasia,"
of the Republic,
Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 115-25.
For judgment as the activity of trust or pistis, themode of knowing characteristic of the sec
ond segment beneath the divided line of Republic Book VI combining eikasia with thinking,
see H. J. Paton, "Plato's Theory o? Eikasia," Proceedings of theAristotelian Society 22 (1921
1922): 69-104, 83-4.
46. A flavor of this combination of detachment and engagement may be found in the shift in
Socrates' mode of engagement with his interlocutors thatBlondell, Play of Character, 194-6,
221-8, argues takes place after Book I. If theRepublic begins with a Socrates focused on the
personalities and characteristics of his individual interlocutors, in later Books, she maintains,
he detaches his arguments from particular individuals to focus instead on general explanations.
When particular views reemerge in the later Books they are attributed to imaginary persons or
interlocutors so as not to reactivate
the animosities of the early encounter with

in particular, thus providing the distance required for the detached engagement
Thrasymachus
constitutive of sound judgment. For an original treatment of the importance of this aspect of
judgment in the work of Hannah Arendt, see Bryan Garsten, "The Elusiveness of Arendtian
abstract
Judgment," Social Research 74, no. 3, forthcoming, Fall 2007.

47. My discussion of courage draws on Ryan Balot's "Platonic Revisions
of Democratic
(unpublished paper on file with author). For a penetrating treatment of the virtue of
courage, see George Kateb, "Courage as a Virtue," Social Research 71 (2004): 39-72.
48. Bloom, Republic of Plato, 470 n. 5; Grube, Plato's Republic, 227, n. 5; and Adam,
Courage"
Republic of Plato, note on 580b. For a discussion of the controversies around Socrates' request
act like "a judge to make the final decision" which focus on Plato's use of
that Glaucon
"judge" in the singular and the adjective "final," see Adam, Republic of Plato, Appendix II to
Book IX, 373-6.
Entanglements, 206-26; quotations are from 222 n. 29, and 210.
see Arlene W Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 112-4.
51. For this phrase, see Julia Annas, "Plato's Myths of Judgment," Phronesis 27 (1982):
49. Monoson,
Democratic
50. For discussion,

and Ancient Theorists
119-43.
52. This is how Plato is usually read both by those who approve this insulation on the ground
that the life of themind ismore choice-worthy than the life of action and those who are critical
of the elevation of philosophy on the ground that itunjustly degrades the life of action.
53. See Brann, Music of theRepublic,
118-22, for a detailed elaboration of the force and
pervasiveness of thismetaphor throughout the dialogue.
see also Gerald Mara,
54. For the interdependence
of politics
and philosophy,
"Constitutions, Virtue, and Philosophy
esp. 380-2.
in Plato's Republic
and Statesman?
Polity
13 (1981):
355-82,
Jill Frank
is an associate professor of political science at theUniversity of South Carolina
author of A Democracy
of Chicago
Press, 2005)
essay as a Laurance
of Distinction:
Aristotle and theWork of Politics
along with articles on classical
S. Rockefeller
Fellow
political
and
(Chicago: University
theory. She completed
this
at Princeton University's Center forHuman Values.


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Wages of War: On Judgment in Plato's "Republic"

Author(s): Jill Frank

This content downloaded from 161.116.100.129 on Thu, 2 Oct 2014 17:38:58 PM

This essay argues thattheRepublic is, among other things,a meditation by

the desire for more-more

to: the audiences

Political Theory Workshop,

Shakman Hurd, Nadeem

For their helpful comments, questions,

and suggestions, my thanks go

toAmittai Aviram, Susan Bickford, Larry Glickman,

Hussain, George Kateb, Priscilla Larkin, Liz Markovits, Allen Miller,

and the reviewers of this essay for

This content downloaded from 161.116.100.129 on Thu, 2 Oct 2014 17:38:58 PM

in the city ofAthens.3 Perhaps themost sustained exploration of the cooper

rulermust be both philosopher and warrior (525b, 543a), some scholars

This content downloaded from 161.116.100.129 on Thu, 2 Oct 2014 17:38:58 PM

in all its registers, psychic, domestic, and

This content downloaded from 161.116.100.129 on Thu, 2 Oct 2014 17:38:58 PM

ours as well. Who

distinctions and prescribing my conduct are opaque, unstable, or emergent,

Friends and Foes

versation that takes place

lengthy and devastating Peloponnesian War.17 The dialogue is set in the

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Plato names all themen

in attendance along with their cities of origin,

(354a, 450b). And Socrates,

later engages with him in a gentler

refers to himself and

Thrasymachus as "new friends" (498c-d). The dialogue thus vividly por

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after the Sicilian

and after Chalcedon

revolted unsuccessfully against Athens

407, Thrasymachus appeared inAthens as a diplomat on Chalcedon's

to "prevent harsh reprisals against his native city."22 Polemarchus

I,when Polemarchus parrots the conventional definition of justice as

"helping friends and harming enemies" (332a-335e).

arises here in reference to interpersonal relations. And yet Polemarchus'

Citizen-friends, it seems, can become enemies. Can strangers, even ene

friends and harm enemies"-but

cannot apply it.That is

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why he agrees to join Socrates'

investigation of justice.26The early educa

II-IV, whose goal is justice, is designed to help

warriors learn to distinguish friend from foe.And with the investigation of

engagements with other cities make

urgent to distinguish friend from foe, thequestion of justice in theRepublic

sophical quest for justice.

to produce via "an

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But teaching virtue in thisway is deceptive, for as Socrates explains in the

(402c, emphasis added, also 409e, 49lb-c).

requires knowing immoderation; learning courage

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possible guardians by cultivating in them the virtues of courage and mod

so understood, is not trulymoderation,

tongue-in-cheek discussion of "self-control" sug

of true courage, sometimes demands outright disobedience to the rules of

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that the early war educations (Book II-IV) fail, although on

differentgrounds from the ones offered here,Michael

On War Judgment in Plato's Republic

On War Judgment in Plato's Republic