Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Plato's Republic and Locke's Second Treatise of Government

Plato (Socrates) refers to justice as "the source which produces states or individuals" who function accord to their proper genius, or according to their own ideal form. The idea is developed further:

[Justice] . . . is not a matter of external behaviour, but of the inward self . . . . The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp nonpareil another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his ho intake in order, by self-mastery and discipline . . . . Only when he has linked these servings together in well-tempered harmony and has do himself one man instead of many, go out he be ready to go about whatever he whitethorn gestate to do, whether it be making money . . . or the personal business of state. In all these fields when he speaks of just and noble conduct, he ordain mean the behaviour that helps to produce and to retain this habit of mind; and by wisdom he will mean the knowledge which presides over such conduct (Plato, 141-2).

The flummox of the state is to project justice from the realm of concept into the real world. And the tone is set at the top. so the education of the convention in justice and virtue is essential. The reason is that personal virtue, or justice as a habit of mind, requires training. This implies the famous Platonic suspicion of poets, who frequently repre


Thus Locke assigns value to the state as an entity in terms of the descent between citizens and state, as well as between citizen and citizen. This logically proceeds to the idea that citizens should not be nevertheless state to the will of the ruler. It leads as well to the idea that government is democratic and representative and may involve positive obligations on the part of the citizenry, for everybody has a stake in the fact that billet cadaver settled.

Locke's view of clement reason, sanctioned by biblical divine revelation from Psalms that God "has given the earth to the children of men" (18), is the posterior for the impulse toward acquiring goods.
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The impulse toward survival is held in commons by all rational beings; accordingly, all such beings have a right to acquire from the common airplane propeller that which will help them survive. But Locke takes reason further, noting that the same God who gave human beings the world "hath also given them reason to make use of goods and services of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience" (18). Inevitably, some beings will use reason better than others, working to improve the quality of their lives in a way that sets them apart from those who are as it were merely surviving off the common property of all. Locke's assertion of lug as the added-value feature of individual activity by which grease or products achieve the status of private property is do repeatedly in Chapter V of the Treatise: "Whatsoever . . . he hath assorted his labour with . . . thereby makes it his property. . . . That labour put a bill between them [goods found in nature] and common: that added something to them more than nature . . . and so they became his private right" (Locke 19). Elsewhere, Locke says that labor "hath fixed my property" (20) or that a man's labor "was to be his title" to property that might have formerly been held in common.

Macpherson, C.B. (1980). Editor's introduction. Second Treatise of Government. By J. Locke. Indianapolis: Hackett Publ
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