Plato‘s REPUBLIC, Book 5, Part 2

Simple Gifts

Book 5 of Plato's Republic is devoted to two primary subjects, "family" life and a discussion of the nature of the rulers in our "good city" (the Kallipolis). Socrates is prevented from discussing the types of city and individual soul - of which there are 4 bad, wrong types and one good form - by the demand that he explain his comment he made in Book 4 about having women and children "in common" in the Kallipolis. About 2/3 of this book is taken up answering this question. In this discussion he makes the revolutionary proposals that 1) women should be able to act in any capacity within the city, even as guardians and rulers, and that therefore they must receive the same education and opportunities as the men. 2) That children should not know their biological parents and vice versa. All children are to be cared for and raised as the common children of everyone in the city. This proposal is meant to sever the "natural" ties of parenthood that cause them to favor their own over everyone else's, and thus to strengthen the unity of the city. As we saw earlier, Plato reasoned that property (what is one's own) causes division, and that therefore measures must be taken to prevent such division by holding all things "in common," a clear endorsement of early communistic practice. 3) Sexual couplings must be regulated by the state in such a way as to enhance the genetics of the "herd," the city's populace, so a system of rigged lottery must be introduced to sanction the fruitful sexual couplings, what he calls "marriages," of the best men with the best women, and discourage "promiscuity." Unfit children are to be disposed of, as was common with the Greeks in that age.

The next question is the obvious one, could such a society really come into existence? Provided, Socrates says, that we understand that practice never truly equals the perfection of theory, it can. And the way in which it could come into being is if PHILOSOPHERS ruled. The remainder of Book 5, then, is taken up with the beginning portrait of what true philosophers are like. In this discussion Plato's theory of the Forms, to be more clearly developed later, begins to show itself.