Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment

There are different Sophistic perspectives on the convention of justice, each seeing the will to pleasure and power, disguised as the reason for morality, as coming from a different social source. For the upper-class Callicles, who stands to gain by the rule of force, morality is a slave revolt. Glaucon expresses the view of the average middle-class person, who is more likely to see reason as serving the individual as an instrument to secure what s/he can get out of a dangerous situation; suggesting the calculating convention of morality as a nonaggression pact. As Glaucon describes it such a Hobbesian contract is an insurance policy; it is rational to pay the premium, but only if it cannot be avoided. Thrasymachus, however, albeit unconsciously, represents an underdog view of the same scenario. He maintains that conventional justice is always, in fact, whatever the strong impose to their own advantage, so that the just person always loses by obeying their rules. His position is in a way the antithesis of Callicles's. Callicles sees conventional justice, the social contract, as the conspiracy of the weak. Thrasymachus sees it as the advantage of the strong. That is a reading of the basic factual situation which Thrasymachus shares with the Cynics and the early Stoics. Unwittingly, in his justified realism about the facts or the existence (which he, however, wrongly identifies with the nature or essence) of social life, he takes up the theme of the oppressed, the anarchist protest against institutional justice as disguised power, against justificatory reason as disguised will. This is a partial insight which later served natural law theorists in their critique of unjust law as an act of violence; which served the bourgeoisie in its ideology critique of the Ancien régime; which served Marx's ideology critique of capitalism; and which is now being rediscovered by postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida, in the critique of "actually existing" Marxism. Thrasymachus has a very important half truth, one which must be maintained against any attempt (including the misuse of dialectics) to justify unjust rule by identifying it with the ideal function of ruling which Socrates speaks of. That, I think, is why Plato in The Republic shows Thrasymachus remaining throughout the entire later discussion. Socrates sees him as a comic and rather pathetic figure; while calling him, tongue in cheek, "my most noble Thrasymachus", he compares him to a slave boy in the baths, sluicing down the customers. But Thrasymachus is a fool to be suffered gladly; unlike Callicles, he is not malevolent.