# Posted 9:36 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: The more I read of the Republic, the more ignorant I know I am. From Socrates' perpsective, I guess that makes it the perfect book.

By posting my thoughts on OxBlog, I hope that I can draw more of you into this coversation about Plato so that you can help me appreciate his work. The more I read, the more I recognize that I cannot begin to understand Plato's significance without being able to place him within the context of the Western philosophical tradition.

Unfortunately, in contrast to Josh, I did not participate in Yale's Directed Studies (DS) program, which introduces a select lot of freshman to the great works of Western civilization. Therefore, I want to take advantage of the fact that the readers of this website have a wealth of untapped knowledge. What I post will consist more of questions and speculations than of answers.

Then again, turnabout is fair play. Instead of blogging to advertise my opinions to the world, I will now take advantage of my blog to learn from it. Here goes:

In Book II, Sec. 358-59, Glaucon observes that

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; --it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.

To the modern reader (or at least to this modern reader), Glaucon's observation presciently anticipates the work of Locke, Rousseau and others on the social contract. A footnote to the Penguin edition of The Republic (Pp. 45-46) observes that Enlightenment philosophers were more interested in providing a legal justification for state sovereignty, whereas Glaucon's interest is in the moral foundation of obedience to the law.

That seems fair. But what I find much more striking about Glaucon's words are the way in which they prefigure Rawls' description of the 'original position' which exists behind the veil of ignorance. Justifiably, Rawls has been attacked for describing the original position in a manner so abstract that it becomes impossible to derive any sort of ethical precepts from it. In contrast, Plato (through Glaucon) seems to deal with a more concrete situation in which actual victims of injustice engage in an effort to draw up a constitution for civil society. Will Socrates later explain why this approach to the law is deficient?

I imagine so, since the Republic is famous for its identification of the sovereignty of the philosophers as ideal. On the other hand, some have argued that Rawls' original position is nothing more than an elaborate disguise for the rule of the one philosopher, namely Rawls.

For the moment, I'd like to contrast Glaucon's description of the origin of the law with Socrates' description of the origin of society later on in Book II, Sec. 369. It reads as follows:

A State, I [Socrates] said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other origin of a State be imagined?

--There can be no other.

Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply them, one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and when these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the body of inhabitants is termed a State.

--True, he [Adeimantus] said.
And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.

--Very true.
Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

What I find especially interesting about this passage is its description of a society that has come into existence not because of a social contract, but because of mutual needs. If memory serves, Locke argues that the state of war between man and man only comes to an end with the conclusion of a social contract. Yet here, a peaceful and cooperative society exists in the absence of a social contract.

Alternately, one might say that it is exists in the absence of a conscious social contract. Rather, it seems that an implicit recognition of the value of cooperation has led to the creation of an informal social contract. Perhaps the more formal one described by Glaucon above is the one that communities institute in order to resolve those conflicts that are not amenable to resolution via the cooperative division of labor.

These different models of conflict and arbitration seem to prefigure some of the game theoretic models of international cooperation developed by political scientists. From what I know, the sophistication of such models pales in comparison to the game theory applied by economists. But that is the sad fate of international relations; to recylce the detritus of other social sciences. (What, me melodramatic?)

In short, Glaucon's scenario accounts for the resolution of zero sum conflicts, whereas Socrates' describes the natural outcome of positive sum games. Is it going too far to suggest that Plato had some fundamental awareness of these different scenarios, even if he was not able to apply the language of modern game theory? I guess I will have to read on and find out.




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