Page 14 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes Plato made two important points here. The first was that every individual was a functional unit,
assigned a particular task with clear-cut obligations and privileges, which one was expected to
perform diligently and meticulously. It also underlined the fact that none were born to render a
specific function. Certain levels of training and skills were required. Moreover, since everybody
would be involved in the performance of a socially required function, it would minimize, if not
altogether eliminate, the probability of being a free rider or a shirker. Second, society was visualized
as a harmonized, orderly whole, based on the recognition of individual talents and contributions.
The functions of a society were broadly three—ruling, defence and production. The last one
included all kinds of trades and crafts.
Plato was the first to picture political society as a system of distinctive or differentiated roles ...
each represented a necessary function; each was defined in terms of its contribution to sustaining
the whole society: each bore rights, duties, expectations which provided definite guides and
signposts for human behaviour and defined the place of the individual within the system. The
harmonization and integration of these roles made a political society a functioning interdependent
whole. To maintain it required a sharp demarcation among the three classes of the community ...
no confusion of roles, no blurred identities. From Plato onwards, one of the distinctive marks of
political philosophy was its approach to political society as a functioning system (Wolin 1960: 33).
Theory of Three Classes and Three Souls
Plato explained his arguments for differing individual capacities with the help of the theory of
three classes and three souls, an idea borrowed from Pythagoras. He pointed out that every
human soul had three qualities: rational, spirit and appetite, with justice as the fourth virtue,
architectonic in nature, balancing and harmonizing the other three qualities. He took psychological
disharmony among the constituent parts into consideration.
In each soul, one of these qualities would be the predominant faculty. Individuals in whom the
rational faculty was predominant would constitute the ruling class, and the virtue of such a soul
was wisdom. This soul, a lover of learning, had the power to comprehend the Idea of Good. Those
in whom spirit was the predominant quality were the auxiliaries or warriors, and the virtue of
such souls was courage, implying the ability to hold on to one’s convictions and beliefs in adverse
times. Together, the rulers and soldiers would constitute the guardian class. Socrates compared a
spirited or thymotic individual to a watchdog, capable of great bravery, public spirit and anger
while fighting strangers in defence of one’s city. It indicated the willingness to sacrifice one’s
material desires for the sake of the common good. Such a soul was a lover of honour and victory.
It was basically a political virtue necessary for the survival of a community and ought to be kept
under control. Thymos, an ally of reason, was a distinct quality representing self-worth and dignity:
Plato’s thymos is therefore nothing other than the psychological seat of Hegel’s desire
for recognition ... . Thymos appears to be related to a good political order in some way,
because it is the source of courage, public spiritedness, and a certain unwillingness to
make moral compromises ... . A good political order ... must satisfy man’s just desires
for recognition of his dignity and worth.
Individuals whose souls were appetitive exhibited a fondness for material things. They were
lovers of gain and money. These were the artisans, the producing class. The quality of such an
appetitive soul was temperance, though Plato did not see temperance as an exclusive quality of
the artisan class. He considered it as being necessary for all individuals. Using a Pythagorean
analogy between a tuned string, a healthy body and an alert mind, Socrates considered a balanced
individual as a just one. He reasoned that in the application of intelligence to activity of any kind,
supreme wisdom was to know just when and where to stop. A fool or a quack lacked this knowledge.
The underlying idea was that in everything it was important to ensure the “just right” in order to
achieve happiness.

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