Short Essay #1 by Jordan Harper

Jordan Harper

Plato’s Republic

Short Essay #1

February 14, 2016

Book 5

            The world as we know it has essentially always been defined by family. Everything from battles being fought over a slight on your sister’s honor to the empires built through the legacies of royal lineages to betraying your country for protect your children, family has been a constant influence in how problems and decisions are solved and made throughout history; people will do anything for their family The strength of this familial norm makes the idea presented in “Plato’s Republic” that much more extreme. In Book 5 of “Plato’s Republic” three ideas or waves on how the city should be structured and operated are presented. These waves are extremely radical in their way of thinking and completely change the norm of how the city is operated. The reason for the emphasis on the importance of family is because in the second wave Plato says essentially says that there should be no families, no wives or children and everything belongs to everyone. I will explain this idea in further detail below. This is clearly an extremely radical idea by all accounts, and it could probably be assumed that this idea would instantly be turned down as a feasible plan for a community. When looked at unemotionally, however; a very interesting conclusion can be seen. I believe that, while this plan of a community family will never actually happen in the world due to the emotional importance of family already ingrained around the globe, for what Plato was trying to accomplish this idea is actually a very good one and makes perfect sense with his model of the city he is building. In an ideal community, this community family would accomplish everything that Plato wishes to accomplish.

            Before I continue explaining why this idea of a community family actually has potential as a model of a city, I feel I must briefly describe exactly what this community family means in the Republic. The main idea of the second wave is given in the following statement, “All these women are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their turn, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent” (5.457c-d). What this all means is that there are no husbands or wives or children; instead they are all just one big family. Festival would be held at certain points in the year (5.459e) that would give men and women a chance to engage in intercourse and procreate, with intercourse illegal at all other times of the year. This union would only last as long as the festival, and once it was over the men and women would no longer have any personal connection. If a woman got pregnant, she would give birth to the child and then immediately give the child over to the city to be raised by the city along with all of the other children. In this way there would be no real connection and by extent loyalty between individual citizens because the men and women would only join to procreate and neither sex would know the identity of their children and vice versa so they must assume all of the children of the city are theirs; the city then becomes one big family rather than hundreds of little ones. Many guidelines are given to cover all the details about how this form of community would actually work, but for the sake of this discussion, all that is needed to be known is what is actually meant by a community family by Plato. It is also worth mentioning that this community family also includes all positions belonging to everyone, so no one person can claim anything as their own, it is everyone’s.

            Now at first hearing of this radical idea, most people would probably say that this proposal could never work, and I would completely agree; however, my point is not to say that this community family would actually work, but to instead say that it is a good idea. My whole argument for this belief in this idea can be summed up completely in one word, factions. Various factions within a city have the potential to completely destroy the foundations of that city and have done so numerous times throughout all of history. Plato mentions factions when speaking on the pros of the community family:

“Won’t lawsuits and complaints against one another virtually vanish from among them thanks to their possessing nothing private but the body, while the rest is common? On this basis they will then be free from faction, to the extent at any rate that human beings divide into factions over the possession of money, children, and relatives?” (5.464d-e).

These arguments are valid because as far as factions that form over money, children, and relatives the reasons for those factions are gone since everything including family belongs to everyone. A key word to why this model is effective is “loyalty.” If a father has a child, often times that child is the most important thing in that father’s world and he would do anything for it, even to the point of doing something that is not in the best interest of his city; this model of the community family removes this possibility of split loyalty between city and child or city and anything else. As long as a person remains completely loyal to their city, the one big family, the possibility of factions forming because of loyalties to other things is completely removed, “Since they are free from faction among themselves, there won’t ever be any danger that the rest of the city will split into factions against these guardians or one another” (5.465b). Factions forming up against the ruling body is one of the most dangerous things that a civilized community can face and in theory this idea of community family solves that problem perfectly by, for the most part, removing all the possible reasons that these factions form.

            In Book 5 Plato is giving his model of how he would create an ideal city if given the chance; the catch is that even Plato knows that these ideas will never happen and our purely hypothetical. In a controlled perfect world, the community family is the perfect solution to many problems that plague the city. The problem with this argument is, however, that there is no such thing as a controlled perfect world. On paper a community family makes sense as a strong alternative way of living that solves so many problems, but in solving these problems it ignores very important outside variables such as emotions and greed. Even communism looks perfect on paper, and is much less radical, but it clearly has not worked in practice. Plato designed his model of a perfect city if he could control every aspect, and as far as that design in concerned I believe that a community family fits perfectly in the model of the city he creates and solves many of the issues that could harm that city.