the two agree in this conception of what is just. At a later stage of the inquiry, Glaucon, describing a current opinion, says:
In this significant passage several things are to be noted. There is first a recognition of the fact, above indicated, that at an early stage the practice of justice is initiated by the dread of retaliation, and the conviction, suggested by experience, that it is on the whole the best to avoid aggression and to respect the limit which compromise implies; there is no recognition of intrinsic flagitiousness in aggression, but only of its impolicy. Further, the limit to each man's actions, described as "a mean of compromise," and respect for which is called "the path of justice," is said to be established only "by the force of law." Law is not considered as an expression of justice otherwise cognizable, but as itself the source of justice; and hence results the meaning of the preceding proposition, that it is just to obey the law. Thirdly, there is an implication that were it not for retaliation and legal penalties, the stronger might with propriety take advantage of the weaker. There is a half-expressed belief that superiority ought to have the advantages of superiority; inequality occupies a prominent place, while equality makes no definite appearance.
The conception here indicated that justice consists in legality, is, toward the close of Book IV, developed into the conception that justice consists "in each of the three classes doing the work of its own class": carpenter, shoemaker, or what not, "doing each his own business, and not another's"; and all obeying the class whose business it is to rule.[2] Thus the idea of justice is made to include the idea of inequality. Though there is some recog-
- ↑ Book II, p. 229.
- ↑ On another page there is furnished a typical example of Socratic reasoning. It is held to be a just "principle that individuals are neither to take what is another's, nor to be deprived of what is their own." From this it is inferred that justice consists in "having and doing what is a man's own"; and then comes the further inference that it is unjust for one man to assume another's occupation, and "force his way" out of one class into another. Here, then, because a man's own property and his own occupation are both called his own, the same conclusion is drawn concerning both. Two fallacies are involved—the one that a man can "own" a trade in the same way that he owns a coat, and the other that because he may not be deprived of the coat he must be restricted to the trade. The Platonic dialogues are everywhere vitiated by fallacies of this kind, caused by confounding words with things—unity of name with unity of nature.
