ABSTRACT
Plato invents not only a new system of education, in virtue of which the State is reformed, and its government recast, in the name of justice and for the sake of spiritual betterment: he also invents a new social order, under which the governing class surrenders both family and private property, and embraces a system of communism. This, too, as we shall see, is done in the name of justice; and here again spiritual betterment is the ultimate aim. Because Plato was Plato, the reform of education, and thereby of government, was the centre and basis of his thought; and the new social order was only an outwork or bastion. But because his critics and commentators have been repelled or attracted by the novelty of that order, and because, in more modern times, it has been natural to emphasize the affinities between Plato’s communism and the tenets of socialism, attention has principally fastened on what Plato himself would have regarded as a subsidiary part of his scheme. Aristotle gave the cue, when, in the second book of the Politics, he directed his criticism entirely against the new social order, and when, in the course of that criticism, he urged that the way of reform lay rather in education than in sweeping material changes, thus accusing Plato, by implication, of having inverted the proper order of progress. If, however, we turn to Plato’s own exposition, and seek to apprehend the balance of his own convictions, we cannot for an instant doubt that communism is only a material and economic corollary of the spiritual reformation which, first and foremost, he sought to achieve. A really good education, he holds, furnishes the best safeguard of the State’s unity (416 B); ‘if our citizens are well educated … they will easily see their way through … other matters, such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women, and the procreation of children.’ In spite of Aristotle’s criticism, it cannot be doubted that it was primarily by spiritual means that Plato sought to regenerate man and society. 1 The material institutions of a communistic system are consequential: they are simply meant to clear the ground, and to remove the hindrances in the way of the operation of those spiritual means. This is implied in the fundamental conceptions of the Republic. The State is a product of man’s mind: to reform the State, we must reform man’s mind. Justice is nothing external: it is a habit of mind; and true justice can be realized only when the mind acquires its true habit. On the other hand, the possibility of a permanent reform of men’s minds depends, to some extent, on the character of the social conditions in which they have to work: and the reign of justice, if it primarily depends on the presence of a habit of mind set towards the discharge of specific function, depends also, in some degree, on the absence of material conditions which are inimical to such concentration. It is no disloyalty to the spirit, after all, to recognize that material conditions exist, and can affect its life, for better or worse, according as they are favourable or unfavourable. 1
