Socrates' Economics

There is something truly divine in you arguing for the superiority of adharma, and remaining unconvinced by your own arguments.

You were not satisfied with my answer to Thrasymachus that proved the superiority of dharma over adharma.

Suppose that a short-sighted person were asked to read small letters from afar. He would start reading the large letters first, then the smaller ones.

Dharma is sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.

A State is larger than an individual. Its quantity of dharma is likely to be larger and more easily seen. And so we should enquire into the nature of dharma and adharma:

• as they appear in the State, and
• in the individual.

We should start from the bigger to the smaller and then compare them. If we imagine the State in process of creation, we shall see the dharma and adharma of the State in process of creation also.

We can more easily discover dharma and adharma after the State is completed. A State arises out of the needs of mankind. No one is self-sufficing. We all have many wants. Many persons are needed to supply them.

One takes a helper for one purpose and another helper for another purpose.

When these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the body of inhabitants is called a State. They exchange with one another. One gives, another receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.

The true creator of a State is necessity.

• The first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.
• The second is a dwelling.
• The third clothing and the like.

How will our city be able to supply this great demand? One man is a husbandman, another a builder, someone else a weaver. We add to them a shoemaker or some other purveyor to our bodily wants.

The barest notion of a State must include 4-5 men. Each will bring the result of his labours into a common stock. The individual husbandman produces for four. He labours 4 times as long and as much as he needs to provide food for others and himself.

Will he provide only for himself 1/4 of the food in 1/4 of the time? In the remaning 3/4 of his time, he will make a house, coat or shoes, having no partnership with others?

Yes, that would be the better way. We are not all alike. There are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations. A person works better when he has only one occupation instead of many. A work is spoilt when not done at the right time.

Business does not wait when the doer of the business is at leisure. Instead, the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make the business his first object.

If so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.

Then more than four citizens will be needed.

• The husbandman will not make his own plough or other implements of agriculture.
• The builder will not make his tools if he too needs many.
• The same is true for the weaver and shoemaker.

Thus, carpenters, smiths, and many other artisans, will be sharers in our little State which is already beginning to grow. We can even add:

• shepherds and other herdsmen so that our husbandmen can have oxen to plough with and our builders can have draught cattle, and
• weavers so that they can have fleeces and hides.

At this point, our State will not be very large but not too small. Then it is impossible to place a city where nothing needs to be imported.

Then there must be another class of citizens who will bring the supply from another city. A trader must have something to give or produce at home must be not only enough for themselves, but such both in quantity and quality as to accommodate those from whom their wants are supplied.

This would require more husbandmen and artisans, merchants who import and export. If merchandise is to be carried over the sea, many skilful sailors will also be needed.

They will need a marketplace and money-token to exchange their productions. If a husbandman or an artisan brings some product to market, and no one is available to exchange with him, he will not sit idle in the market-place.

He will find people there who, seeing the want, be salesmen. In well-ordered states, these salesmen are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength and are therefore of little use. Their duty is to be in the market to give money in exchange for goods from sellers and to take money from the buyers.

This want, then, creates a class of retail-traders in our State.

• ‘Retailer’ is the term for to those who sit in the market-place engaged in buying and selling.
• ‘Merchants’ are those who wander from one city to another.
• ‘Hirelings’ are another class of servants, who are intellectually hardly on the level of companionship.
  • They have plenty of bodily strength for labour which they sell.
  • ‘Hire’ is the name for the price of their labour.
  • These hirelings help to make up our population.