appetites – unlawful ones aside -- and is vulnerable to the appeal of tyranny.
Oligarchic, democratic and tyrannical people are ruled by different aspects of their
desires, and all are unhappy.
Aristotle offers a different evolution and logic of
transformation, but based on the same understanding of the psyche.
Plato’s Socrates makes an explicit analogy between the psyche and the polis, and
insists that both individuals and cities require a consensus about who is to rule. In a just
city, every person performs his assigned role, making civic justice a collective
representation of individual justice. Socrates also draws parallels between individual and
political pathologies. He describes four deviant constitutions -- timocracy, oligarchy,
democracy and tyranny – each of which comes about in the same way as their individual
counterparts. This is the progression that Athens went through in Socrates’ lifetime, and
the Republic can be read as a commentary on that city’s constitutional history. For
people to live good and just lives, Socrates concludes, their appetites and spirit must be
well-trained by reason and willing to do the right thing. At the level of the polis, this
requires the active collaboration of all citizens, making justice on the individual level the
prerequisite of civic harmony. For the individual and the collective, the three parts of the
psyche must be in balance and work together harmoniously.
Thucydides was a good generation older than Plato, and wrote an historical
narrative rather than a philosophical dialogue. His understanding of the psyche is
embedded in his narrative. It attributes the Peloponnesian War to psychological
imbalance in individuals, which replicates itself in their cities and then in Hellas more
generally.
At the outset, Pericles appears to be model of the wise statesman because of
his ability to get citizens to rise above their parochial concerns to support policies that are
in the best interest of their polis. Thucydides attributes his success to self-mastery;
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Convention