Anna Greco

This essay takes issue with a common interpretation of Book II of Plato’s Republic as anticipating the modern theory of division of labour, first promoted by Adam Smith. It is argued that, far from anticipating Adam Smith, Plato developed original reflections which, though naturally shaped by the economic reality of his time, reveal a concern for fundamental issues of economic thought: the value of labour, the nature of economic interdependence in a political association, the relation between economic behaviour and justice. However, despite having recognized some of the fundamental forces behind human economic behaviour, Plato ends up with an envisioned ideal state in which those forces are given no scope, for he makes no room for economic competitiveness and technological advancement.

Ever since Aristotle, tradition has it that Plato postulated a static world--different and separate from the physical world--to be the proper object of knowledge, on the grounds that objects in the physical world are unstable. But why should the proper object of knowledge be unchanging? The answer depends on Plato's view of what it is to have knowledge rather than his view of what knowledge is: to have knowledge entails being immoveable by persuasion. ;The roots of this view are found in Plato's initial interest in moral issues and moral knowledge, when he began his philosophical career by portraying Socrates' philosophy. Socrates' moral project, as presented in Plato's early dialogues, is based on a conception of what it is to have moral knowledge. To have moral knowledge depends on "properly caring for one's soul." The typical symptom of lack of moral knowledge is oscillation between contrary beliefs . Plato's reflections on Socrates' moral project led him to investigate two obstacles to the moral life: hedonistic inclinations and theories; the harmful effects of sophistic and rhetorical teaching. Under the hypothesis that the requirement that the knower be unmoveable by persuasion refers to the kind of persuasion induced by rhetoricians, we can see how Plato, motivated by a concern to neutralize the pernicious effects of rhetorical persuasion, came to extend the Socratic model of knowledge to serve as a model for knowledge tout court. In particular, in light of a psychological theory unable to separate perception from either perceptual judgement or emotional reaction to it, Plato came to attribute to the body's emotional and perceptual experiences the same power that the rhetoricians' logoi have to affect the soul. These experiences are deceptive in the same way a persuasive logos by a rhetorician is deceptive: the person who lacks knowledge can thereby be shown to be cognitively unstable. Independently of any supposed prior instability of the physical world, Plato came to have sufficient reasons, rooted in his understanding of Socrates' philosophy, for belittling the cognitive value of objects in the physical world, qua perceptible objects

Although Plato did not explicitly propose any principle of distributive justice, he indicated that justice involves both the doing and the having of one's own. On the interpretation I am proposing: (i) 'having one's own' refers directly to the compensation one receives for doing one's own; (ii) the principle of distribution of benefits that is actually operative in Plato's system is that any form of compensation must be such that the worker (whether ruler, soldier or producer) has his needs satisfied. I also highlight how Plato's account does not quite fit any contemporary conceptual framework--either utilitarian or desert-based. But it encourages us to reflect on the moral aspects of economic interactions of exchange, resulting from a fundamental collective choice to associate in order to satisfy individual needs, broadly understood as what human beings need to flourish in their social life