Key Arguments

• When intemperance and diseases multiply, 'halls of justice and medicine are always being opened,' and their arts 'give themselves airs.'
• It is 'disgraceful' that even the liberally educated depend on 'first-rate physicians and judges' and must 'go abroad for his law and physic.'
• Worse is the man who prides in 'life-long' litigiousness, 'bending like a withy' to 'get out of the way of justice,' for 'small points,' instead of ordering life to 'do without a napping judge.'

Source Quotes

Most true, he said. But when intemperance and diseases multiply in a State, halls of justice and medicine are always being opened; and the arts of the doctor and the lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest which not only the slaves but the freemen of a city take about them. Of course.

And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state of education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also those who would profess to have had a liberal education? Is it not disgraceful, and a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man should have to go abroad for his law and physic because he has none of his own at home, and must therefore surrender himself into the hands of other men whom he makes lords and judges over him? Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.

Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful. Would you say 'most,' I replied, when you consider that there is a further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or defendant, but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his litigiousness; he imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole, bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice: and all for what?—in order to gain small points not worth mentioning, he not knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing. Is not that still more disgraceful?

Key Concepts

• when intemperance and diseases multiply in a State, halls of justice and medicine are always being opened
• Is it not disgraceful, and a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man should have to go abroad for his law and physic
• life-long litigant, passing all his days in the courts
• bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice
• so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing.

Context

Social critique linking institutional expansion of law and medicine to moral and educational failure; preference for self-governed lives over procedural cleverness.

Perspectives

Plato

Sees a diseased polis externalizing its lack of inner order into hypertrophied technai; true paideia would make judges and doctors less necessary.

Socrates

Condemns clever injustice and dependency; the goal is self-commanded life, not technical evasions.