Key Arguments

• Political design seeks justice by ordering the city for the good of the whole; happiness assessment comes after justice is found in the well-ordered State.
• Functional integrity: giving guardians class-specific pleasures (wealth, travel, mistresses) would corrupt their role, just as painting ‘purple’ eyes would stop them from being eyes.
• Specialization: making husbandmen and potters live like revelers would dissolve distinct functions; when guardians only seem and are not real guardians, the State is overturned.
• Guardians are to be ‘true saviours’ who do their own work; happiness is distributed according to nature when each class performs its function.
• The objection imagines a festival of peasants, not citizens doing their duty; thus it misconceives what a State is.

Source Quotes

If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall find the answer. And our answer will be that, even as they are, our guardians may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier. At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State, not piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view the opposite kind of State.

Suppose that we were painting a statue, and some one came up to us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body—the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black—to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful. And so I say to you, do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of happiness which will make them anything but guardians; for we too can clothe our husbandmen in royal apparel, and set crowns of gold on their heads, and bid them till the ground as much as they like, and no more. Our potters also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by the fireside, passing round the winecup, while their wheel is conveniently at hand, and working at pottery only as much as they like; in this way we might make every class happy—and then, as you imagine, the whole State would be happy.

At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State, not piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view the opposite kind of State. Suppose that we were painting a statue, and some one came up to us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body—the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black—to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful. And so I say to you, do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of happiness which will make them anything but guardians; for we too can clothe our husbandmen in royal apparel, and set crowns of gold on their heads, and bid them till the ground as much as they like, and no more.

Our potters also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by the fireside, passing round the winecup, while their wheel is conveniently at hand, and working at pottery only as much as they like; in this way we might make every class happy—and then, as you imagine, the whole State would be happy. But do not put this idea into our heads; for, if we listen to you, the husbandman will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter, and no one will have the character of any distinct class in the State. Now this is not of much consequence where the corruption of society, and pretension to be what you are not, is confined to cobblers; but when the guardians of the laws and of the government are only seeming and not real guardians, then see how they turn the State upside down; and on the other hand they alone have the power of giving order and happiness to the State.

But do not put this idea into our heads; for, if we listen to you, the husbandman will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter, and no one will have the character of any distinct class in the State. Now this is not of much consequence where the corruption of society, and pretension to be what you are not, is confined to cobblers; but when the guardians of the laws and of the government are only seeming and not real guardians, then see how they turn the State upside down; and on the other hand they alone have the power of giving order and happiness to the State. We mean our guardians to be true saviours and not the destroyers of the State, whereas our opponent is thinking of peasants at a festival, who are enjoying a life of revelry, not of citizens who are doing their duty to the State.

Key Concepts

• our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole
• do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of happiness which will make them anything but guardians
• the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black
• the husbandman will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter
• when the guardians of the laws and of the government are only seeming and not real guardians, then see how they turn the State upside down

Context

Socrates answers Adeimantus’s charge that the guardians’ austere life makes them miserable, reframing happiness as a property of the whole city achieved through functional order.

Perspectives

Plato

Agrees: the just city’s telos is systemic harmony; granting pleasures that unseat reason’s rule destroys justice. The aesthetic analogy (eyes/purple) illustrates formal-functional fit that his metaphysics of Forms underwrites.

Socrates

Defends role-appropriate happiness: the guardians’ good is to be excellent guardians. Luxury would deform their function and thereby the city’s justice and collective happiness.