Reading: Plato, Republic, book IV, Stephanus 419–445e (pp. 95–121). Be sure to read the notes below!

Notes and questions:

1. Before I offer notes and questions on the assigned reading (nos. 4–5 below), I offer a summary of the part of the Republic between where the previously assigned reading ended and where this assignment begins (369b–417b, pp. 44–93). In that part of the text, Socrates discusses with Adeimantus and Glaucon the makeup of an ideal perfectly just city, beginning with the question of what arts or professions its members will have to practice. Socrates lays down a principle that will subsequently become very important in the overall argument of the Republic, namely the principle that things will be done best in the city if each person practices only the one art that he or she does best. (See 370c: ". . . More plentiful and better-quality goods are more easily produced if each person does the one thing for which he is naturally suited, does it at the right time, and is released from having to do any of the others." Similarly, at 374a: ". . . We agreed, if you remember, that it's impossible for a single person to practice many crafts or professions well.")
   
2. Socrates asserts that, in addition to the various kinds of wage-earning craftsmen that the city will require (farmers, builders, merchants, etc.), there must be a special class of citizens whose job it is to guard the city against its enemies (374e). These guardians, as Socrates calls them, must be both spirited and gentle, as well as "philosophical," in the sense that they must have a love of wisdom or knowledge (375e–376c). Most of the rest of book II and all of book III are concerned with how these guardians should best be educated.
   
3. Toward the end of book III, however, Socrates distinguishes another special class of citizens, namely the rulers, who will be selected from among members of the guardian class (412b–e). There will thus be three classes of citizen in Plato's ideally just city: the craftsmen, the guardians, and the rulers. This point will be important later in the dialogue (see note 6 below). 
4. Now to the assigned reading. At the beginning of it (419), Adeimantus raises the objection that, given the account that Socrates has given of the life of the guardians, they will not by happy. How does Socrates answer this objection? Why, according to him, is it important that the guardians be allowed to be neither rich nor poor?
   
5. In 427d–428a, Socrates explains how the conception that he and the others are forming of an ideal city is supposed to yield an explanation of what justice is: they will conceive of a city that possesses the four virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice; then, once they have identified what characteristics of the city make it wise, courageous, and moderate, whatever is left over will be the characteristic that makes it just; and that will tell us what justice consists in. Wherein do the wisdom, the courage, and the moderation of the city consist, according to Socrates (428b–432a)?
   
6. Note that the definition of justice as an attribute of a city does not yet tell us what justice is as an attribute of an individual human being (see 434d–435a). Answering that question, in Socrates' view, requires that we distinguish among the different aspects or "parts" of the human soul; and, according to him, there are three of these, corresponding to the three classes of citizen identified earlier (434b–441c; on the three classes of citizen, see note 3 above). What are these three parts of the soul, and how does Socrates distinguish them? What, according to Socrates, does justice in the individual consist in?