Comment: “Plato’s communism is a supplementary machinery to give effect to and reinforce that spirit which education is to create.” (Nettleship) (2007)
Richard Lewis Nettleship (1846–1892), the Balliol idealist, makes this judgement in his Lectures on the Republic of Plato, published posthumously in 1897. It ranks the two institutions of the Republic: education is primary and positive, forming the guardian’s character; communism is secondary and protective, removing whatever might undo that formation. The reading is faithful to the text, and it exposes a tension in Plato’s premise.
Education Creates the Spirit
- Justice in the guardian is the rule of reason over appetite, and devotion to the whole city rather than to self. Only a long training in music, gymnastics, mathematics and dialectic can produce it.
- Socrates calls education “the one great thing” (423e): well-trained guardians will settle lesser questions themselves.
- The textual order confirms Nettleship. Asked for the best safeguard against guardians preying on citizens, Socrates answers a truly good education (416b–c); only then does he add that their dwellings and possessions must neither weaken their virtue nor tempt them (416d–417b).
Communism as Supplementary Machinery
- “Give effect to.” An education in selflessness would be contradicted by a life of private accumulation. Common barracks, common meals and a ban on gold and silver make daily life consistent with the lesson.
- “Reinforce.” Property invites bribery; the family breeds partiality and nepotism. Holding both in common removes the two strongest counter-pulls on a ruler’s judgement and secures unity, since what divides a city is its greatest evil (462a–b).
- Negative, not economic. Plato’s communism is not a response to poverty and applies only to the highest classes. It is ascetic discipline for rulers, not redistribution, which separates it sharply from Karl Marx.
- Plato’s own retreat confirms the ranking. The Laws restores property and family yet keeps education at the centre, while still calling common possession the ideal (739c–e). The machinery could be dropped; the education could not.
Assessment
- Aristotle (Politics II.5) agrees that education comes first but rejects the machinery: the city should be made one by education, with property private in ownership and common in use.
- The Socratic tension. If virtue is knowledge, a ruler who has seen the Good needs no insurance. That Plato adds it concedes education may fail and appetite may overpower reason, as his cycle of decline, beginning with a mistake in selection, admits.
- Karl Popper reads the communism as a device to keep the ruling class united and so arrest political change, and Julia Annas argues that abolishing the family was about breeding, not liberation.
- An Indian parallel. Kautilya (Arthashastra, Book I, ch. 10) also distrusted character alone, prescribing secret tests (upadha) of ministers’ integrity. Modern India pairs the training of civil servants with property returns under the All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968, a formation-plus-safeguard model close to Nettleship’s reading.
Conclusion
Nettleship is right: in the Republic character comes first and institutions guard it. The supplement, however, reveals the flaw in the design: a safeguard against the failure of wisdom is an admission that wisdom needs checks, which is why institutional restraint, not ascetic communism, became the lasting answer.