Socrates Democracy Analysis

Socrates outlines a simple blueprint for understanding the progression of regimes in the Republic as he describes it. That blueprint is especially useful for someone who wants to study the text on its own terms: Socrates gives the reader a lens through which to view the evolution of various political arrangements.

Regimes arise, says Socrates (albeit, socratically, in the form of a question), “from the dispositions1 of the men in the cities, which, tipping the scale as it were, draw the rest along with them” (544e).2 According to that framework, the transition from any form of government to another has the same cause: a regime’s effects on the character of its people drive them to prefer a different regime. To determine whether democracy is

Poverty prompts them to scrutinize and to envy the rich, who have what they want. Soon afterward (being used to getting what they want, they are not patient), they decide to take it for themselves, and the rich, who have become soft (556c), cannot defend it. With disparity of power and money still fresh in their minds, they enforce equality, redistributing wealth and filling offices by lot (557a).

All that tells the discerning political scientist quite a lot about democratic souls. They are born from “stingy” oligarchical souls, but they, thanks to their fathers’ “lack of knowledge about rearing” (560b), lack the virtue of moderation. Quite the opposite: democratic men embrace their “unnecessary desires” (559a) “out of hatred of [their fathers’] stinginess” (572c). Democratic souls are rebellious ones. Rebellion leaves an opening for

Since luxuries abound in a democracy, anarchy cultivates tyrannical souls. Just as democrats found pleasures under oligarchy, tyrants find them in democracy. Except that now, with moderation long since forgotten to society and alien to individuals, pleasures run rampant, and the tyrant’s “gourmand” soul (579b) gorges unrestrained, growing corrupt without limit. Democracy thus provides the kind of person whose disposition makes them susceptible to corruption by nature a perfect environment in which to develop the soul of a