By the Dog 
M.F. Burnyeat
- The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues by Ruby Blondell
Thrasymachus, a well-known teacher of rhetoric, has listened with growing impatience to the discussion of justice in the first Book of Plato’s Republic. ‘What balderdash you two have been talking,’ he says to Socrates and Polemarchus. He cannot wait to astound the company, and win their acclaim, by unmasking justice as nothing but the advantage of the stronger, dominant group in society. Consider the facts. In each city the ruling class – which could be many individuals in a democracy, a few oligarchs, or a single tyrant – has fixed the laws to serve its own interests. The rest of us, if we obey these laws as justice requires, are simply profiting the rulers. And profiting them means harming ourselves. Thrasymachus sees all human life – not only interactions between rulers and ruled, but also dealings between one individual and another – as a zero-sum game. Every gain is someone else’s loss.
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M.F. Burnyeat has returned to Robinson College, Cambridge after ten years as senior research fellow in philosophy at All Souls. He is the author of The Theaetetus of Plato, among other books.
Other articles by this contributor:
Other Lives · The Truth about Pythagoras
Excuses for Madness · On Anger
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