In the beginning there would be four persons. Maybe five. Just about as many as the needs of the body. A farmer for food, a mason for housing, a weaver for clothing. To these let us add a shoemaker and some other worker to provide for material necessities.
That is how Plato's republic presents itself. Without a deity or founding legend. With individuals, needs, and the means to satisfy them. A masterpiece of economy—with its four or five workers Plato founds not only a city but a future science, sociology. Our nineteenth century will be grateful to him.
His own century had a different judgment of it. His disciple and critic Aristotle put it succinctly: a city is not simply a concentration of needs and a division of the means of production. Right from the start something else is needed—justice, the power of what is better over what is less good. There are greater or less noble tasks, jobs that are more or less degrading, natures appropriate for one group or for another, and all these must be distinguished. Even in a republic of four or five citizens, there must be someone to represent and ensure respect for the common good that defines the aim [la fin] of the city above and beyond the satisfaction of needs. How else could justice ever come about from simply gathering together equally indispensable workers?1
There must be a misunderstanding somewhere. Or a trick. For justice is, precisely, the subject of Plato's dialogue, and in order to define it he constructs his society as a magnifying glass. So justice must already be there in his egalitarian gathering of workers, or else it will never turn up at all. It is up to us to look for it.
Source: http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v30/30n2.Ranciere.html
