bees is from a single country, either when friends leave friends, owing to some pressure of population or other similar necessity, or when a portion of a state is driven by factions to emigrate. And there have been whole cities which have taken flight, when utterly conquered by a superior power in war. This, however, which is in one way an advantage to the colonist or legislator, in another point of view creates a difficulty. There is an element of friendship in the community of race, and language, and laws, and in common temples and rites of worship; but colonies which are of this homogeneous sort are apt to kick against any laws or any form of constitution differing from that which they had at home; although the badness of their own laws may have been the cause of the factions which prevailed among them, yet from the force of habit they would fain preserve the very customs which were their ruin, and the leader of the colony, who is their legislator, finds them troublesome and rebellious. On the other hand the conflux of several populations might be more disposed to listen to new laws; but then, to make them combine and pull together, as they say of horses, is a most difficult task and the work of years. I was going to say that man never legislates, but accidents of all sorts legislate in all sorts of ways. The violence of war, the hard necessity of poverty, are constantly overturning governments and changing laws. And the power of disease has often caused innovations in the state, when there have been pestilences, or when there has been a succession of bad seasons continuing during many years. Any one who sees all this, naturally rushes to the conclusion of which I was speaking, that no mortal legislates in anything, but that in human. affairs chance is almost everything." 68

Of this Giddings says: "In no later writing that I know do we find in so few words so many cardinal generalizations as these lines contain. upon the nature and behavior of human society." 69 Nowhere else in all Plato's writings does he exhibit the same degree of insight into the influence of environment not only in shaping social behavior but also in the formulation of the concepts of the human mind. It is the one conspicuous example of the Philosopher turned scientist.

The thought of this entire chapter is summarized admirably by Giddings as follows: "Social philosophy grappled in its youth with its most difficult questions, those, namely, of personal causation and of the action of society upon the individual character. This was not because systematic inquiry into the nature of society was a legacy from anthropomorphic ages. On the contrary, it was because it arose in that Grecian The Laws, 708-9.

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world where, for the first time, man had become in the true sense of the word a citizen, and had experimentally demonstrated that, through a free and plastic social organization, he could in a measure control his own economic and moral destiny. In Egypt and in Babylonia political integration, hastened and hardened by empire-making militarism, had brought all the eastern lands under a remorseless despotism. Peoples once free and happy had been so crushed by exploitation that hope itself had almost died within them. Despairing of redress at the hands of any earthly power, and distrustful of themselves, they could only create and embrace, according to their temperaments, the religions of resignation, or those of apocalyptic vision. In the Aegean Grecian world geography and race had conspired to prevent a too rigid centralization of power. The city states were still free and proud. Man still believed in himself and respected his fellow men. Rejoicing in political as in artistic creation, loyal to the state which his own thought had fashioned, he believed that he could make it perfect, and thereby perfect himself. Therefore it is that the first comprehensive work on the nature and possibilities of human society which has come down to us from the past was the utopian Republic of Plato.

The imperishable contribution which this work makes to our reasoned knowledge of human society is found not in its communistic plan of life, but rather in its analysis and its correlation of moral and social forces; above all, in its actual solution of the problem of social reaction upon individual character. Assuming that man as a personal cause can in fact mold the commonwealth to his will, assuming also that the final end of endeavor is the attainment of a good life-which should consist substantially of those kinds and degrees of pleasurable activity that reason can approve of-The Republic demonstrates that the 'good life' so conceived, after all depends upon a certain objective condition which reason and the human will may create, and which is called 'justice. Moreover, reason and will cannot create justice directly. They can establish it only through the fine adjustments of a social order. Thus, in the thought of Plato, the 'good life' is a function of 'justice' and to maintain justice is the function of social organization." "

To Op. cit., pp. 101-2.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Ernest, Greek Political Theory, Plato and His Predecessors, Methuen, London, 1918.

Botsford, G. W., and Sihler, E. G., Hellenic Civilization, Columbia University Press, New York, 1915.

Burnet, John, Greek Philosophy, Macmillan, New York, 1914.

Bury, J. B., History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Macmillan, New York, 1906.

Dunning, W. A., Political Theories, Ancient and Medieval, Macmillan, New York, 1902.

Giddings, F. H., Studies in The Theory of Human Society, Macmillan, New York, 1922.

Grote, George, History of Greece, Harper, New York, 1865.

Grote, George, Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates, Murray, London, 1867.

Loos, Isaac A., Studies in the Politics of Aristotle and The Republic of Plato, University Press, Iowa City, 1899.

Nettleship, R. L., Lectures on The Republic of Plato, Ed. by Charnwood, Macmillan, New York, 1914.

Plato, The Republic, Tr. by Jowett, in Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, Oxford University Press, Third Edition, 1892.

Plato, The Laws, Tr. by Jowett, same, Vol. V.

TOPICS FOR CRITICAL STUDY

1. What confirmation or disproof for Plato's theory of the diversity of human abilities is found in the modern psychological hypothesis of different "Mental Levels" in the population? Cf. Yoakum and Yerkes, Army Mental Tests, Chapters II and V.

2. How does Plato's Theory of War correspond with that of Edw. Van Dyke Robinson's "War and Economics in History and Theory," Polit. Sci. Quar., Vol. 15, Dec. 1900, pp. 581-628, Reprinted in Carver, Sociology and Social Progress, pp. 133-173.

3. Compare the system of education of guardians given in this chapter with his larger development of the subject in Book VII of The Republic.

4. How does Plato's concept of the purpose and content of education compare or contrast with that of Lester F. Ward? Cf. Dynamic Sociology, Vol. II, Ch. XIV.

5. What are Aristotle's criticisms of Plato's communism? Are the arguments sound? Cf. The Politics, Book II, 1-6.

6. Discuss the criticism of W. A. Dunning that "In The Laws he (Plato) formally abandons his idealism and seeks to set forth a system that would be workable among imperfect men." Political Theories, Ancient and Mediæval, p. 37.

7. What specific influence did Plato's work have upon Sir Thomas Moore, Rousseau, and Comte? Cf. E. Barker, Greek Political Theory, pp. 383-92.

8. Compare Plato's concept of Justice with that of Spencer, who thinks of it as "that limitation of liberty which equalizes it among men." F. H. Giddings, Studies in The Theory of Human Society, p. 110. Cf. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, pp. 33-34.

9. How far and in what respects does Plato's theory of "social utility" as an explanation of society correspond with Lester F. Ward's theory of "collective telesis"? Cf. Pure Sociology, Ch. XX.

CHAPTER II

ARISTOTLE

HISTORIC BACKGROUND

ARISTOTLE was a contemporary of Plato for the last thirty-six

years of Plato's life and survived him by twenty-six years. The survey of social and political events presented in the former chapter needs only to be supplemented to cover the period from the Peloponnesian war to approximately 320 B.C. in order to provide the background of Aristotle's social theory.

For a generation following the Peloponnesian war Sparta enjoyed supremacy among the Grecian states, but in the administration of the terms of the Peace of Antalcidas she committed acts of perfidy in the interest of selfish aggrandizement which were destined to react disastrously upon her own fortunes, as well as those of the whole of Greece.

The dissolution of the Boeotian League and the later invasion of Thebes evoked what Xenophon regarded as "Divine Retribution" in the destruction of the Spartan army at the battle of Leuctra by Epaminondas through the invention of the phalanx. A short period of Theban supremacy followed, but in breaking the power of Sparta she had exhausted herself. In the battle of Mantinea, 362, Epaminondas was slain. While the battle was a victory for the Thebans, the loss of their great leader resulted in negotiations for peace with Sparta.

Another act of Spartan perfidy, disastrous to the liberty of Hellas, was the dismemberment of the Olynthian Confederacy of Macedonian and Grecian cities in the Chalcidian region which might easily have served as a buffer nation between the Greeks and the new and ambitious Macedonian Empire.

By 360 the Greek cities were so far isolated and exhausted as a result of their own internecine strife as to be able to offer no united resistance to the semi-barbarian monarchy now rising in the North and threatening what was left of Grecian independence. It was a period likewise of social and political disintegration in which even the oratory of Demosthenes could not arouse the ancient Greek spirit.

The year 350 marked the beginning of the ascendency of this hardy