Chandler Hatch

In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon dismisses Socrates’ first model “city in speech” (396c), complaining that Socrates equips it as if it were a “city of pigs” (372d) and insisting on adding luxuries to the city. When Socrates accedes, readers are left with a puzzle: why would Socrates abandon this first city, which he describes as “true” (alēthinē) and “healthy” (hugiēs), for a new city that he describes as “sickly” (phlegmainousan, 372e)? This paper argues that the many proposed solutions to this puzzle miss the dramatic significance of Socrates’ acquiescence: this episode is an enactment of the educational model from the allegory of the cave. Hence, Socrates goes along with Glaucon in order to turn his entire soul toward justice. Besides illuminating the dramatic aspects of the episode, this interpretation clarifies the role of the first city in Socrates’ account of justice. The first city is indeed true and healthy. However, it is ill-suited to showing Glaucon justice because it is incomplete. Like Glaucon himself, the first city lacks protections against the corrupting effects of luxury. Socrates develops such protections for Kallipolis, which helps him show Glaucon the nature of justice.

Interpretations of Rousseau’s general will have tended to privilege one of two aspects of the general will over the other. Procedural accounts identify the general will with the result of a majority vote of all the citizens. Common good accounts identify the general will with the common good (often as publicly understood by the citizens). In this paper, I argue that identifying the general will with either of these aspects makes the Rousseau’s insistence on other aspect mysterious. I propose a shared capacity account which unites both aspects. Like an individual’s will, the general will is a capacity for self-determination in accordance with a conception of the good. To be a will, it must have both a procedure for self-determination and a constitutive end. To be general, both procedure and end must be shared by all the citizens. I defend my interpretation on the grounds that it accords with Rousseau’s insistence on both procedure and end and that it yields a compelling account of the freedom that Rousseau thinks we enjoy under the general will.