Plato and the Police: Dogs, Guardians, and Why Accountability is the Wrong Answer

Abstract

Attention to significant commonalities between the position of teachers and police officers, we suggest, illuminates problematic aspects of their position within a democracy.  Demographically, both the teaching force and the police force are disproportionately white, yet the commonalities extend beyond race. We suspect too little attention has been paid to other social categorizations, namely social class and gender. Toward this end, we explore the significant commonalities between the position of teachers and police officers and suggest that aspects of their position within a democracy make accountability a problematic tactic for addressing systematic failures. In this article we turn to Plato's discussion of the guardians for his ideal Republic because Plato squarely faces a problem that still dogs us: How are those persons given the right to uphold order to be prevented from turning on the polis they are meant to protect? The answer we offer rests on a theorization of a middle position and on a democratically situated ethical response to the other.

Notes

1. We say “seems” because exact numbers are impossible to state. The only nationwide compilation of data on civilian deaths at the hands of police is the FBI's homicide tables, which includes a section on “justifiable homicides,” i.e., civilians killed by the police claiming self-defense. This record is likely incomplete, as it includes only data reported by local police forces. Even on this list however, those killed are disproportionately Black men and Black youth (FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 2014).

2. On the “city of pigs” and education, see Jonas, Nakazawa, and Braun (2012). In “The city of sows and sexual differentiation in the Republic,” Marina McCoy (2015) reminds readers that sow, the term used in this passage (rather than the gender neutral pigs), was a pejorative Greek term for female genitalia. In calling this a city of sows, therefore, Glaucon implicitly criticizes the first city's femininity. “Thus Glaucon's dismissal of the ‘city of pigs’ could even be translated more aggressively: ‘If you were providing for a city of cunts, Socrates, on what else would you fatten them than this’” (McCoy, 2015, pp. 149–160)?

3. The Greek term for spirit, thumos, means more than readiness to fight. Although thumos is often associated with courage and, especially in Plato, with manliness, its use in other Greek texts treats it as the site of a range of emotions, including grief and fear. It might best be understood as analogous in its usage to the English heart, also a physical part of the body treated as host for the emotions, in phrases like great-hearted, lion-hearted, and wearing one's heart on one's sleeve. For an excellent discussion of thumos, see Koziak (2000).

4. Importantly, in Plato's Republic, educators of the young are also guardians.

5. The calamity of canine error is dramatically illustrated in Thomas Hardy's (1993) Far From the Madding Crowd, in which an overeager young sheepdog ruins his master by enthusiastically driving his herd of sheep over the edge of a cliff. The sheep all die; the master loses his farm; the dog is shot. With these themes of misrecognition and overeagerness to act, the analogy to police shootings such as those listed in the first paragraph of this article is easy to draw. Importantly, the sheepdog in Hardy's novel is not depicted as malicious, just wrong. The sheep are dead, and therefore the dog has to go, regardless of whether the act was committed out of ill-will or error. As this applies to police misrecognition of Black men as gun-carrying threats, we mean to suggest that bad intentions are beside the point. Racist misrecognition itself is grounds for intervention (though we are not suggesting that police officers should be shot).

6. As Franco also notes, the erosion of this taboo among contemporary European and American dog owners calls for a new anthropological study of naming conventions and human-dog relationships.

7. Given the association of dogs with women in Ancient Greece—both treated by men as almost human, as naturally promiscuous and mentally unstable, as valued companions who were never entirely trustworthy—Plato's call for the insertion of dogs into the Kallipolis makes further sexual allusions. In response to Glaucon's demand that he replace the city of cunts, he offers a city of bitches.

8. In his essay “Who Let the Dogs Out?” Christopher Long (2015) emphasizes the political ramifications of dogs and wolves in the Republic. The dog passages we have cited in this article are framed by the earlier and later appearance of wolves in this text, who are characterized as preying on the city and illustrating the dangers of tyranny.

9. Unlike Plato's Republic, the United States (like most first-world democracies) differentiates between a police force charged with upholding state order internally and a military charged with upholding national interests externally. The military shares with the police the right to state-sanctioned violence. Significantly, the roles of police and military have blurred recently, as local police forces have bought up deaccessioned military equipment following US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Apuzzo (2014). Interestingly, 5th-century Athens entrusted policing to public-slaves from Scythia. What's intriguing about 5th-century Athenians decision to entrust policing to public-salves is the seeming recognition that because the socially structured identity of the police is liable to corruption due to ones relation to the community, it should be entrusted to strangers or aliens, again in the Greek sense of the term.

10. Biesta draws this insight from Bruce Charlton. See Charlton (1998) “The ideology of ‘accountability’” and Charlton (2002) “Audit, accountability, quality and all that: The growth of managerial technologies in UK Universities.”

11. In “Sense, nonsense, and violence: Levinas and the internal logic of school shootings” Keehn and Boyles (2012) offer a compelling analysis of gun violence through a Levinasian lens.

12. Ethnologists may debate whether dogs truly love or not, but we and many other dog-owners think they do, which is grounds enough for using them to signify love.