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“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” is a slogan attributed to Marx and the communist programme of government. Yet we know that the early Christians led a form of life that could be described in such terms. The above slogan has also been connected to the Platonic Principle of Specialisation(used to define justice in the Republic) that was supposed, by Socrates, to be the mark of healthy cities before the wish for a commodious/luxurious form of life became an almost universal object of desire.
The “fevered city” that could not control the above desire became, in Socrates’ view, a divided city where the rich ruled and their disgruntled poor sons sat in the agora stirring up trouble for the city-state. Solon was forced to address this problem in the name of justice and via the mechanism of the passing of just laws. One of the aims of Solon was to ensure that everyone got what they deserved or what they were worthy of. The Socratic Principle of Specialisation was also supposed by Socrates to achieve the end Solon had in mind, even if it failed to address the issues of procedural justice which led to the conviction and death-sentence of Socrates himself. Aristotle’s principle of formal justice complemented this Socratic principle in an account which distinguished between distributive, retributive and restorative justice, and this principle might have saved the life of Socrates if the Socratic defence that Philosophy was one of the children of the Gods could have been formally entered as a plea in his trial.
“From each according to their ability” could well be a consequence of the principle of specialisation which required that people should only be asked to perform tasks that they have the ability or power to perform. Part of the Philosophical project of Socrates was to convince people, who thought they had knowledge of various kinds, that they were overestimating their ability or power to know certain things. Socrates was actually not insisting that everyone take up Philosophy and learn from him, but he was rather insisting on a civic spirit which the Greeks already understood to be important, a spirit best described in terms of the Greek ideas of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), arché(using principles to understand/justify), epistemé(using knowledge in ones judgements) and diké(justice).
It was Aristotle who fathomed the depths of the problem of political life in engaging with the problems of class and power, by asserting prophetically that the divided city will not become united until a large enlightened middle class has the power to decide the agenda of the state. Aristotle even outlines the mechanism by which this telos can be achieved: the principle of the Golden Mean. He gives an example of the operation of this principle(arché) in relation to the important virtue(areté) of courage, so important for the defence of the city against its enemies. Young citizens, put in warlike situations, actually or hypothetically, might respond with the extreme behaviour of foolhardiness or cowardliness, and will be steered toward the golden mean of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). This was part of the Greek “Culture”. The outcome of this process, the virtue of courage, is then, a synthesis of dialectical opposites—a synthesis aiming at “The Good”.
Eliot speaks against the above account when he invokes the idea of an elite or “higher class”, which will lead the society, and in exchange be given certain honours and emoluments. Plato avoided such a situation with his philosopher-class rulers being fed and housed by the state but being refused access to money or property. Honours, per se, for Socrates would be a direct breach of areté(self-control), encouraging a life-style that continually strives after satisfying the appetites of the thousand headed monster whose appetites increase exponentially over time, and thus contributing to the ruin of the healthy city and the construction of the “fevered city”.
Eliot does, however, see the limitations of a class-ridden society, but instead of embracing the Aristotelian idea of an enlightened middle class, he settles instead for the idea of a classless society which in Marxist theory is tied to a dissolution or “withering away” of the state. Yet, for Eliot, this classless society will require an elite of leaders who require honours and emoluments. This elite corps will be drawn from a number of cultural domains of society, e.g. politics, art, philosophy, and science and these leaders will, according to Eliot, somehow form a natural homogeneous unified group.
Eliot was writing at a time when two political leaders, Hitler and Stalin had succeeded in mobilising the masses against the elites of their society in the name of perverted ideas of justice and morality. Freud, writing during the same period, used psychoanalysis to analyse both the behaviour of the masses and their leaders in his work “Group Psychology and the Ego”. Freud pointed to the operation of certain pathological processes and mechanisms such as projection, reversal, narcissistic behaviour and identification with the aggressor. Freud’s account pointed to an end for tyrants (obsessed with power and honour), which had in fact been predicted for all tyrants in the last books of Plato’s Republic. The context for this account was the failure of understanding, judgement and reason, and the consequent telos for such a failure, namely justice(getting what one deserves). Tyrants create such a culture of death and hate around themselves that it does not require any advanced form of reasoning to understand the connection between the cause of the culture they have created and the effect of their fate.
Eliot discusses Russia and regrets the removal of the Russian elite class which he believes will eventually prove disastrous for the country. There is also an interesting discussion of the role of the family in the task of the transmission of culture, which is surprising, given the qualified scepticism of both Plato and Aristotle insofar as this issue was concerned. We know Aristotle called for a more formal education of the public, perhaps because of the limitations of the resources of all families to provide all the elements necessary for the transmission of an entire culture. For Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, education and the transmission of knowledge, especially knowledge of “The Good”, was decisive for the well-being of the state. For Eliot, it appears as if Public Education can not bear the burden of transmission, and he believes more in his leaders and the family. Indeed towards the end of this chapter of his work , it is the aristocratic family that emerges as the best transmitter of Culture to the next generation.
Aristotles view of the city differs in many respects to the accounts given by both Socrates(who was in favour of a healthy city that would require neither a military force not philosophers to thrive) and Plato. For Aristotle, the city state was a complex creation building upon several prior structures, the first of which is the structure of the family(which is not self-sufficient), and the second of which is the large group of families constituting a village(which is more sufficient than the family but still not self sufficient). The potentially self-sufficient structure of the city-state is constituted of a number of villages unified by a legal constitution. For Aristotle, this final structure contains the possibility of neutralising the forces of oligarchy and democracy(constituted by the disgruntled sons of the oligarchs) with the powers of areté, arché, epistemé and diké. These powers help to create the leader or leaders the city needs. Such a leader or leaders he calls a phronomos, a great-souled man. Some might arrive at the conclusion that the phronomos is an aristocratic man but if this is an appropriate term for this great souled man, he is surely a very different kind of being to that imagined by Eliot. Aristotle’s aristocrat would not require the instrumental benefits of honours and emoluments to deliberate and perform the duties necessary to serve the city-state. The good-spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia) he leads would be sufficient reward for his work.
Kantian political philosophy does not specifically take issue with the idea of class(this being a phenomenon of more modern political philosophy) but, like Aristotle, he sees the threat of ruin and destruction the oracle warned of, and his account sees this threat to be best met by the cultural work of enlightened men who use their freedom and responsibility to create and maintain enlightened institutions of government. Kant, even sees a role for the ecclesiastical church in this process which he claims is destined to end in a kingdom of ends in which the idea of the Good-in-itself plays a key role supporting a culture constituted by areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), epistemé(knowledge), arché(principles) and diké(justice. Whether or not the state will dissolve or wither away when the kingdom of ends is upon us is not discussed by Kant but he does present us with an image of a cosmopolitan man, emerging from this healthy, global state of affairs.