Superphysics Superphysics
Chapter 1b

Well-ordered States with Self-Restraint

by Socrates Icon
3 minutes  • 576 words
Adeimantus

What would you say about:

  • the business of the agora,
  • the ordinary dealings between men,
  • the agreements with artisans,
  • insult and injury,
  • the commencement of actions, and
  • the appointment of juries?
Socrates

There may also arise questions about:

  • impositions of market and harbour dues,
  • the regulations of markets, police, harbours, etc.

But, heavens! Shall we condescend to legislate on any of these particulars?

Adeimantus
I think that there is no need to impose laws about them on good men. They will find out soon enough for themselves what regulations are necessary.
Socrates
Yes, if God will only preserve to them the laws which we have given them.
Adeimantus
Without divine help, they will go on forever making and mending their laws and their lives in the hope of attaining perfection.
Socrates

You would compare them to those invalids who have no self-restraint. They are always:

  • doctoring, increasing, and complicating their disorders, and
  • imagining that they will be cured by any medicine given by anybody.

Those invalids think that their worst enemy is the one who tells them that the only remedy is to simply give up eating and drinking, wenching and idling.

Socrates
You would not praise the States which act without self-restraint.

Well-ordered States forbid, with death, the altering of their constitution. Yet he who sweetly courts people into this liberal system is skillful in anticipating and gratifying their desires. He is even held to be a good statesman. But those States are really as bad as those invalids.

Do you not admire the coolness and dexterity of these ready ministers of political corruption?

Adeimantus
Yes, I do.
Socrates

But not of all of them. There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into thinking that they are really statesmen. These are not to be admired.

When a man declares himself to be four cubits high and many others cannot measure it, he cannot believe them.

So do not be angry with them. They are not as good as a play.

They try to begin paltry reforms. They imagine that they can end frauds in contracts by legislation. They do not know that they are merely cutting off the heads of a hydra.

The true legislator will not trouble himself with this class of laws. Such laws are useless in an ill-ordered state.

A well-ordered state can make the correct laws, flowing from previous regulations.

Adeimantus
What then is still remaining to us of the work of legislation?
Socrates

The religious and spiritual laws remain:

  • the institution of temples and sacrifices,
  • the entire service of gods, demigods, and heroes,
  • the ordering of the repositories of the dead, and
  • the rites for propitiating the inhabitants of the world below.

These are matters that we ourselves are ignorant of. As founders of a city, we should entrust them to our ancestral deity and not to any interpreter. He is the god who sits in the centre and is the interpreter of religion to all. Amid all this, where is justice?

Socrates

Now that our city has been made habitable:

  • light a candle and search,
  • get your brother, Polemarchus, and the rest of our friends to help.

Let us see where in it we can discover justice and injustice, how they differ from one another, and which of them man would be with.

Glaucon
You promised to search yourself. You said that it would be an impiety to not help justice in her need.

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