Note 134 — Chapter XXXVII · REPUBLIC — REMARKS ON THE PLATONIC COMMONWEALTH.

The foregoing remarks are an expansion, and a sequel, of Aristotle’s objection against the Platonic Republic — That it is not One City, but two discordant cities in that which is nominally One. I must however add that the same objection may be urged against the Xenophontic constitution of a city; and also, in substance, even against the proposition of Aristotle himself for the same purpose. Xenophon, in his Cyropædia, proposes a severe, life-long drill and discipline, like that of the Spartans: from which indeed he does not formally exclude any citizens, but which he announces to be actually attended only by the wealthy, since they alone can afford to attend continuously and habitually, the poorer men being engaged in the cares of maintenance. All the functions of the state, civil and military, are performed exclusively by those who go through the public discipline. We have here the two cities in One, which Aristotle objects to in Plato; with the consequent loss of civic fraternity between them. And when we look to that which Aristotle himself suggests, we find him evading the objection by a formal sanction of the very mischief upon which the objection is founded. He puts the husbandmen and artisans altogether out of the pale of his city, which is made to include the disciplined citizens or Guardians alone. His city may thus be called One, inasmuch as it admits only homogeneous elements, and throws out all such as are heterogeneous; but he thus avowedly renounces as insoluble the problem which Plato and Xenophon try, though unsuccessfully, to solve. If there be discord and alienation among the constituent members of the Platonic and Xenophontic city — there will subsist the like feelings, in Aristotle’s proposition, between the members of the city and the outlying, though indispensable, adjuncts. There will be the same mischief in kind, and probably exaggerated in amount: since the abolition of the very name and idea of fellow-citizen tends to suppress altogether an influence of tutelary character, however insufficient as to its force.