![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
Early in Plato’s Republic, two cities are depicted, one healthy and one with ‘a fever’—the so‐called luxurious city. The operative difference between the two cities is that the citizens of the latter ‘have surrendered themselves to the endless acquisition of money and have overstepped the limit of their necessities.’ The luxury of this city requires the seizure of neighboring lands and consequently a standing army to defend those lands and the city’s wealth. According to the main character, Socrates, war thus finds its origin in communities living beyond the natural limits of necessity. In short, the healthy or true city is sustainable, limiting its consumption to actual needs, while the luxurious city seems not to be sustainable, living beyond its needs in a perpetual quest for more. Plato spends the rest of the Republic attempting to reveal the political organization and virtues—in particular, the virtue of moderation—necessary for the luxurious city to be just, healthy, and thereby sustainable. The contrasting images of the two cities and Plato’s subsequent discussion raise important questions about the interrelations between justice, consumption, and sustainability. In this paper we appropriate Plato’s images of these metaphorical cities to discuss over‐consumption and unsustainable practices by the nations of the contemporary ‘first world,’ which in turn perpetuate poverty and environmental degradation in the nations of the ‘two‐thirds world.’ Matters of equity and justice are preeminent in our discussion.
Notes
[1] 2003 census data indicate 35,861,000 people in poverty in the United States, or 12.5% of the population (US Census Bureau, Citation2004).
[2] When we use ‘Socrates’ we are referring to the main character in the Republic, not the historical person from whom Plato drew inspiration.
[3] Socrates, at first, says he can’t answer the challenge. ‘I don’t see how I can be of help. Indeed, I believe, I’m incapable of it’ (368b). All quotations from Plato’s Republic are from G.M.A. Grube’s translation (Plato, Citation1992), unless otherwise noted.
[4] Wilson argues that the problem with the first city is that it ministers only to the bodily needs of its citizen, not to their spiritual or moral needs. So, for Wilson, much of the Republic consists in determining what human beings really need. While Wilson seems right to contend that need serves as the basis for society throughout Socrates’ account, it is not at all clear that in the healthy city spiritual and moral needs are not being met. We take this point up below.
[5] Crispin Sartwell (Citation1995) develops this conception of art as devoted activity pursued for its own sake and its relation to the good life in some detail in The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions.
[6] But, as Hemmenway (Citation1999) suggests, it is the most morally ambiguous of the arts in this city; here, if anywhere, he suggests injustice might enter the healthy city. Also, among the non‐artisans, there will be a class of ‘wage‐earners,’ people who lack the aptitude to be artisans. While not artisans in Plato’s technical sense, we might easily imagine such people doing well what they do, doing it with art, even if what they are doing is a mundane, relatively unskilled activity. In this city, as Socrates is imagining it, it would seem that such people would also find a degree a satisfaction in their work.
[7] Poverty and war are both potential consequences of overpopulation and over‐consumption. If a society has more children than its resources can support, either they will be impoverished, or the city will go to war to get the necessary resources for their support. One might also imagine a war among citizens who are impoverished and those that are not.
[8] Hodges and Pynes (2003) contend that this city, not the one argued for over the course of the rest of the Republic, is the ideal city and the one that the historical Socrates would have preferred.
[9] Plato’s views regarding poetry and the mimetic arts in general are quite complicated. His worries about art, however, do seem to stem from their appeal to our desires for pleasure, or, in this context, for luxury.
[10] As we have noted, however, there is a real sense in which the essence of justice Socrates argues for later, namely ‘doing one’s own work and not meddling with what is not one’s own’ (433a), is substantially present in this healthy city.
[11] For a detailed account of wealth and poverty in the Republic, see Lötter (Citation2003).
[12] The standard reading of this passage is that the first city is rejected because human beings really need or, at least, want more than it can provide and as such it is simply unrealistic. Cooper (Citation2000), for instance, writes:
When Glaucon scornfully dismisses Socrates’ minimal first city as suited only for pigs Socrates responds by expanding his city. He introduces what, as I mentioned, he calls ‘luxuries’ of all sorts (372e ff.). In doing this, he is recognizing the presence in human beings, and the power, of desires for pleasures of all sorts … along side the basic Socratic desire for one’s own good. (p. 14)
The first city and its inhabitants, according to Howland, ‘are “healthy” or well‐ordered, but radically deficient in eros and thumos and so incompletely human; the Feverish City, which typifies existing cities, is fully human but disordered or “feverish” in its erotic and spirited character’ (Citation1993, p. 88); see also Roochnik (Citation2003) for a similar point. Hodges and Pynes (2003) offer a very different assessment of the first city, arguing on the basis of the Statesman,Laws, and Xenophan’s testimony regarding Socrates that this first city is Plato’s ideal, despite its being dismissed in the Republic.
[13] It is our view, however, that while it is true that the citizens of the healthy city seem quite unlike us, the difference may have to do less with their nature than with the nature of their community. There is good reason to think that their manner of life, their devotion to good work for the benefit of others, plays a significant part in the shaping of their desires. If each person is wholly devoted to producing things necessary for the survival of the community, then there will be no time to make or to consume luxuries. Furthermore, if people find their work inherently satisfying, not drudgery, they may simply have no desire for such luxuries.
[14] The ‘footprint’ of the average American is 30 acres (De Graff et al., Citation2001).
[15] This assumes fixed rates for the period 1965–1986 of 2.3% for the wealthiest 20 countries and 3.1% for the poorest 33 countries (Lummis, Citation2001).