Plato's Republic : The Good Society and the Deformation of Desire 9780844495309, 9780844409511

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martha nussbaum

Plato’s Republic the good society and the deformation of desire









Plato’s Republic

Plato’s A Bradley Lecture Series Publication

MARTHA NUSSBAUM

Republic The Good Society and the Deformation of Desire

Library of Congress · Washington · 1998

The publication of this booklet was made possible through a contribution from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Copyright © 1998 Martha Nussbaum Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947– Plato’s Republic : the good society and the deformation of desire / Martha Nussbaum. p. cm. (A Bradley lecture series publication) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 0-8444-0951-0 Copy 3. z663 .p57 1997 1. Plato. Republic. I. Title II. Series. jc 71.p6n87 1997 321'.07– dc 21 97-4414 cip

Foreword

Made possible by The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Bradley Lectures are designed to explicate classic texts that have mattered to Western citizenship, statecraft, and public policy. Each lecturer has analysed a text, explained the circumstances of its creation, dealt with its ambiguities in treatment and historical understanding, drawn out its central theses, and addressed the degree to which its basic arguments remain essential for us today. We at the Library of Congress are most grateful that The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has given us the opportunity to be the venue for these lectures. The series has demonstrated persuasively the value of a close reading and re-reading of texts, the interpretation and significance of which has shifted over time, so that even texts we thought we knew well gain immeasurably from a fresh explication. What could be better for a library than a demonstration of the intellectual vitality of some of its most treasured holdings? The first series of Bradley Lectures dealt with Plato’s Republic, with The Federalist Papers, and with Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. We are pleased to be able to present the expanded versions of these lectures as separate pamphlets in the Bradley series, so that audiences unable to hear the original presentation may still benefit from the insight of the lecturers. The Bradley Lecture series will continue during 1997 and 1998, and we anticipate being able to add to this printed series four more lectures on classic texts. We hope that readers will gain as much enjoyment from these pamphlets as the audiences did from the delivery of the original lectures.

Prosser Gifford Director of Scholarly Programs

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Plato’s Republic The Good Society and the Deformation of Desire Martha Nussbaum

The ideas of Plato’s Republic are still with us, posing disturbing questions about democratic freedom. In Singapore in 1990 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew defends the achievements of his illiberal regime. Moralistic controls on public and private behavior, eugenic policies to promote high birth rates in the allegedly most productive and intelligent classes, public provision of a highly controlled and stratified type of education: All this has raised Singapore to thirty-fifth position in the current United Nations Development Index, just ahead of Portugal. Lee Kuan Yew holds that there is an “essential conflict” between political liberties and human well-being. Political institutions must take responsibility for ordering and constraining choice, and this requires us not to care a great deal about liberty. This view is receiving increasing attention in international human rights debates, where one increasingly hears the claim that rights are an insular modern Western phenomenon and that values of moral order should take precedence in thinking about the future. Unlike some other comparable Third World leaders, Lee does not call himself a Platonist, since he is eager to stress the Eastern origins of his views; nonetheless, in substance his program is remarkably close to that of Plato’s Republic. The Singapore success story has produced what economist Amartya Sen has called “a deep agnosticism about the urgency of political freedoms” in the international community.1 In Minnesota in 1983 the Minneapolis City Council passes an ordinance based on the proposals of feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin—a civil law under which women who believe themselves harmed as a result of the availability of violent pornography can sue the producers or purveyors of pornography. They argue that artistic representations shape the mind in fundamental and powerful ways, I am very grateful to Douglas Baird, Richard Posner, and Cass Sunstein for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

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deforming desire and choice—and that these representations, when they depict sexual violence, are a primary cause of the violence against women that actually occurs. They insist that law should respond to these moral problems, constraining choice—just as law has already responded to the deformation of desire in the case of laws against sexual harassment. On the other side of the debate, critic of feminism Christina Hoff Sommers writes that MacKinnon and many other current feminists are all Platonists.2 By this she means that they are thinkers who, like Plato, believe that desire and fantasy should be morally scrutinized and that it is the proper business of government to intervene when deformations of desire are discovered. Sommers, by contrast, holds that any criticism of existing preferences and desires as deformed or diseased is intrinsically undemocratic, and that these feminist writers are highly dangerous to democracy. In Washington, D.C., in 1995 William Bennett, former secretary of education, talks about Plato’s Republic, which he believes to be the most important work of political thought ever written.3 He makes Plato’s attack on the artists contemporary by talking about the allegedly soul-destroying effect of violent rap music. Sure, he says, Plato went too far, and we need to pull back from some of his more extreme antidemocratic conclusions—but on the whole, he was on the right track. He saw that society must exercise vigilant control over the minds of its young citizens and that it is proper for public policy to take a hand in purifying the nation of souldestroying fantasies. In Chicago in 1992 Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker announces a surprising change of position. He has for some time maintained that preferences are fixed independently of social conditions, an exogenous bedrock on the basis of which social policy is formed, but which are never themselves influenced by laws, institutions, and policies. Becker now writes, in his Nobel Prize address,4 that the preferences of individuals are profoundly shaped by their experience, both in the family and in society; he cites Plato as an example of a thinker who understood the importance of this question. Among his many concrete conclusions is the claim that women and minorities in the American democracy are likely to be affected by a legacy of racism and sex hierarchy, so that they underinvest in their human capital, making choices that are self-subverting. For example, responding to common stereotypes that they are likely to be less productive workers, they may underinvest in education, training, and work skills.5 Elsewhere Becker has concluded that law and public policy should sometimes act to intervene when such .

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distortions are present. Although he is best known as a libertarian champion of the free market, Becker has also recently defended compulsory policies promoting education for women in developing countries.6 In Maryland, at a conference on consumption and global stewardship, philosopher David Crocker describes the United States as a society in which greedy desires for consumer goods have run rampant, encouraged by our democracy’s indulgent attitudes to such desires. Crocker appeals to the ancient Greek philosophers for the view that consumption should have a limit set by a norm of the good human life; he argues that governments should exercise more careful stewardship over resources and over the desires that lead us to live in extravagant ways, slaves to the appetites that the market economy arouses.7 In these many ways, Plato’s ideas are in the news, shaping our contemporary political debate.

Plato’s Republic, written between 380 and 370 b.c., is the first great work of political philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition. It is great in large part because it is not just a work of political philosophy, but at the same time a profound analysis of the human being and human desire. It is also, and centrally, a deadly assault on democracy. It denounces free speech, majoritarian choice, the free choice of marital partners, freedom of literary and political expression, and more or less every other freedom that modern democracies hold dear. Plato grew up in the Athenian democracy of the fifth century b.c., the democracy that proudly boasted that its customs were an education to all the world, that it alone allowed each person to live in accordance with his own choices and thoughts, that it alone produced a type of virtue that was not mindless obedience to custom but the flowering of a person’s inner faculties of love and reflection. Plato tells us that these boasts are hollow: Democratic choice breeds license and corruption in the soul. Its emphasis on love and free reflection robs individuals of the opportunity for the deepest types of self-development and self-expression, and robs politics of its stable adherence to virtue. Social norms must be shaped by true wisdom, not by majority vote. Because Plato’s hatred of democracy is so evident, the reputation of the Republic in democratic societies has fluctuated wildly. In the early decades of the twentieth century, in both England and America, the Republic was treated with veneration, like a kind of secular Bible. Because veneration took precedence over analysis, interpreters tended to

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gloss over, or to read merely metaphorically, any aspect of the political design of the work that seemed objectionable to liberal democrats. In the aftermath of World War II, however, it proved impossible for Plato’s readers to ignore what he was actually proposing. A distinguished philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper, produced a blistering indictment of Plato and of the whitewashing of Plato that had been typical of the academy.8 Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies treats Plato as one of history’s three great enemies of democratic freedoms of inquiry and debate (the other two being Hegel and Marx). Popper demonstrated vividly, often simply by quoting uncomfortable passages from the text, the extent of Plato’s kinship with twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. His conclusion was that Plato should be simply dismissed, as a fear-ridden spiteful intellectual unable to stand living in the open realm of Athenian democratic debate. He saw nothing deep in Plato’s arguments; dwelling on their repellent conclusions, he neglected to trace the path by which the arguments moved the reader from commonly accepted premises to those conclusions. As a result, Popper’s work is commonly itself dismissed by philosophers today, and we are largely back, if not to veneration, at least to a tendency to deny that the work is really making serious political proposals. Once again the political passages are being treated metaphorically, as mere devices through which Plato is making statements about psychology and ethics. But Popper is correct. Plato does make serious political proposals. They were understood as such by his contemporaries, and attacked as such by his greatest pupil, Aristotle. They drew from real-life political debates in Sparta, Crete, and Athens, and they influenced the development of real regimes. Plato himself went to Sicily to attempt to implement them, and failed only because the party that supported his reforms lost out in a bitter political struggle. Plato’s proposals constitute a living and deadly assault on democracy; it is correct to take that assault at its face value. Plato does say that democracy rots the soul, and he does defend the totalitarian rule of an elite, who will impose their ideas and values through a system of total social control that begins with rules for breastfeeding and goes on to suffuse every aspect of every citizen’s life. So Popper is right: Plato is our enemy, and Plato is to be feared. But Popper draws the wrong conclusion from these observations. It is mistaken to suppose that Plato can and should be dismissed because we do not like—indeed, in some ways detest—what he has to say to us. It is mistaken to suppose that we should just stop reading Plato, as if that would keep us clear of the threat he represents. Plato’s political proposals are not

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simply a manifesto; they are the conclusions of arguments, arguments that begin from a profound diagnosis of human nature and human deficiency. If we find his diagnosis compelling, as I believe we should, we are under heavy pressure to show to ourselves and to others why the repellent conclusions should not be drawn. That is why Plato has been over the centuries the best friend democracy could have had: for he challenges it to know, and to justify, itself. As my present-day examples suggest, I believe that Plato’s arguments pose a challenge to democratic ideals and institutions that is with us today everywhere we turn. Because of the depth with which Plato connects institutional design to analysis of the soul and its desires, he poses the strongest challenge to democratic freedom that any philosopher ever has. He forces the defender of democracy to grapple with issues many defenders would prefer to avoid. If the end result of that confrontation is not to be the Singapore of Lee Kuan Yew, it will have to be because we have thought more deeply about democracy and desire than we have thought before. And on some crucial questions about moral education and the shaping of desire, I believe it will turn out that Plato was at least partially correct, in the contours if not in the content of his proposals. Some desires, deformed by anger and fear and group hatred, are so pernicious to society that we should discriminate against them in at least some ways in the formation of law and public policy.

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h e Republic is a long and intricate work, comprising ten books, each of which occupies about forty pages of printed text. Plato took about ten years to write it, allegedly honing every detail of language and word order. In form it is the story, narrated by Socrates, the great philosopher and Plato’s teacher, of a conversation he had with a group of well-off Athenian intellectuals about the topic of justice. In the lengthy dialogue, the character Socrates often makes long speeches, advancing opinions that other ancient writers—for example, Aristotle—describe as views that Plato himself maintained in his oral teaching in the Academy. Although in some of his earlier writings Plato seems interested in representing his teacher as he was in real life, in the Republic Socrates seems to function instead as a spokesman for Plato’s own convictions. These convictions are in many respects opposed to those of the historical Socrates, who was a determined, if critical, defender of democracy as the best form of government.9 In what follows I shall assume this distinction, speaking of the views advanced by the character Socrates as Plato’s views.

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The problem of deformed desire is with us from the work’s very opening. “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday,” says Socrates, “along with Glaukon the son of Ariston.” While he describes his literal descent from the hills of Athens to the coastal seaport, he alludes already to the work’s central metaphor of descent and ascent. Most people, Plato later tells us, live like prisoners in an underground cave. The cave is lit only by firelight, and the prisoners are chained in such a way that they can only watch the shadows that play on the wall, shadows created by real objects that, being chained, they cannot turn to see. When at last, unshackled, they turn to see the objects that make the shadows, they are ready to begin their laborious ascent to the real light of the sun in the world above. When, having climbed up into the world, they can look at reality in the sunlight, then they have access to truth and to real beauty and value. The prisoners in the cave are like us, Plato says, because we go through most of our lives as prisoners of our desires and the shadow images of value these desires construct before our eyes. Only a few people will extricate themselves from bondage to desire, and so only a few will be able to look reality in the eye. Which people do we want running our lives? Socrates, the philosopher, descends to the Piraeus with Glaukon (who is Plato’s older brother), where he finds some typically democratic entertainments: a parade in honor of a newly imported Asian goddess, to be followed by a torch race on horseback (in modern terms, something like a country music festival to be followed by a rock concert). As he heads home—presumably to pursue his own personal search for wisdom—he is waylaid by a group of prominent citizens, active in politics, who want to squeeze in a little philosophical discussion between one pop entertainment and the next. Plato later tells us, contemptuously, that the only place for reflection in a democracy is as one more fad of the day, since democracy treats all desires on a footing of equality. The democratic citizen every day indulges the appetites of the day, now getting drunk and abandoning himself to the pleasures of erotic music, now going on a diet and drinking only water; one day exercising, the next day forgetting all about exercise; sometimes he makes a show of caring about philosophy. And often he gets enthusiastic about politics, and bounces up and says whatever enters his head. And if military life excites him, he runs off to see that, and if it’s rich people, he stares at them, and there is no order or necessity to his life, but he calls this life the pleasant and sweet and happy life, and he clings to it until he can no longer. That [says Glaukon] is a perfect description of a devotee of democratic equality.

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In just this way, at the very start of the work, these devotees of democratic equality stop Socrates and Glaukon on their way, dragooning the wise philosopher into the service of their whim. “Do you see how many we are?” they ask. “Well then, you must either prove yourself stronger than we are or stay with us.” “Isn’t there another alternative,” says Socrates, “that we might persuade you to let us go?” The democrats know their script well. “Could you persuade men who do not listen?” they ask, and Glaukon, admitting defeat, simply says, “No way.” All know well from experience of democratic deliberation exactly what role reason and persuasion usually play there. Majority rule, laughing at reason, imposes its unordered whims by force of law. They go together to the home of Cephalus, a wealthy man of virtuous character. Cephalus, nearing death, raises once again the problem of distorted desire. For he tells us that he is delighted to have reached old age, because it has freed him from slavery to sexual appetite. Most people, he says, dread the waning of desire and hate the impotence that comes with old age, but he finds in these changes “a great peace and freedom,” as if he has been released from slavery to “many mad masters.” For the virtuous man, then, desire is a crazy tyrant, which he has to fight continually; for most men, it is also a corrupter of judgment, through the lens of which they learn to see the good in a distorted way. The characters begin to discuss the topic of justice, and as they do so, Plato asks his reader to think about who these people are. The dialogue takes place about 421 b.c., a time of peace and relative stability in the middle of the disastrous Peloponnesian War, which eventually led to the victory of Sparta and the collapse of the Athenian empire. By the time of composition of the work, more than fifty years later, most of the principal characters are dead, but few of them have died peacefully. Three (Polemarchus, Niceratus, and Socrates) have been executed on political charges. The first two were brutally murdered for their money by an oligarchic faction called the Thirty Tyrants that briefly held power in Athens in 404 b.c.; the murdering oligarchic faction was led by relatives of Plato, and Plato’s family is represented in the dialogue by his two halfbrothers, Glaukon and Adeimantus. Lysias, a silent character in the Republic and a prominent orator, tells us that the oligarchs, in putting people to death, used the slogan “Let us cleanse the city of the unjust.” They used justice as their pretext, he says, but their real goal was to line their own pockets. After they murdered the wealthy Polemarchus, they dragged his wife out into the courtyard—and so great was their greed that they ripped the gold earrings out of her ears before they killed her. Some

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years later, Socrates was executed by the restored democracy, on politically motivated charges that used moral corruption of the young as an excuse to get rid of a troublesome dissenter. So we see people who will soon be murdered having some peaceful academic chit-chat with people who will soon be accomplices to their murder. Knowing all these things, the reader follows the conversation with apprehension and a sense of impending violence—a violence nourished, evidently, by the diseased and greedy appetites of a democratic society. The characters begin to try to give an account of what justice is. Cephalus says, reasonably enough, that it is telling the truth and paying back what you owe. Socrates objects: Suppose someone has lent you a knife, and now, in a state of sudden insanity, he comes to you asking for it back, with evident intent to do harm. Would it really be just to return it? Cephalus, not very interested in the refinements of philosophy, laughs gently and takes his leave, saying that he has to see to the sacrifices. His son Polemarchus takes his place, offering a conventional definition of justice as helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. Socrates tries to get him to admit that true justice is different from retaliation: A truly just person will not harm anyone; even in inflicting punishment, his thought will be for the good of others. At this point Thrasymachus bursts in, angry at the high-minded platitudes. Justice, he says, is nothing but a name given by the strong to their own self-interest. In any society there is some group of people who have gotten together and gained power, and this group makes up ethical norms that serve to perpetuate them in power. They invent ideas of lawabidingness and rule-following that keep other people down and themselves on top. A really smart person will see through all this and break the rules whenever it is to his advantage and when he can do so without getting caught. The most admirable person of all is the one who not only sees through the legal and moral system but successful subverts it, gaining all the power for himself. Thrasymachus’ cynical realism is placed so as to express an average reader’s own mistrust of politics. Especially when we think about what the dialogue’s characters will eventually do to each other in the name of justice, using justice as a pretext for greed and personal power, we are likely to find Thrasymachus’ challenge deeply disturbing and highly plausible. Socrates attempts to answer him, arguing that the ruler is like a good shepherd: His function is to promote the health of the ruled. But Socrates’ reply is unequal to the power of the challenge. Thrasymachus is utterly unconvinced, and the reader, like the other characters, is left with major doubts. Without an account of what

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justice is, furthermore, we have a hard time saying whether justice is a good thing or, as Thrasymachus suggests, a kind of “high-minded foolishness.” The second book of the work begins, then, with a restatement of Thrasymachus’ objection by Glaukon, who from now on becomes Socrates’ central challenger. He asks Socrates to do two things: first, to give an account of what justice is, and second, to show that it is something good for its own sake, not only for the sake of its consequences. We might grant, he says, that behaving justly is frequently useful, since one escapes painful punishments. But is it good by itself, apart from these consequences? Glaukon now constructs a mythic example that poses the challenge vividly. He tells the story of an ancestor of the Lydian king Gyges, who found a ring of invisibility in an underground cave. Give someone a ring like that, he says, and he’d be a big fool not to use it for his own advantage, doing wrong with impunity and reaping the profits. Let’s now imagine two men. One is unjust, but like the man with the ring, he succeeds in getting all the rewards reserved by society for justice. The other is just, but nobody knows it; they all think him unjust, and he gets the punishments and the opprobrium reserved by society for the unjust. Which of the two, he asks, is the happier? This discussion might seem to be unconnected to what I have identified as the central focus of the work: desire and its distortion by social norms. However, Plato will shortly make the connection clear. For it will emerge that justice, in his view, involves the correct ordering of the soul and its desires. His answer to Glaukon’s question will be, ultimately, that justice is to be cherished for its own sake because it is an orderly state of oneself and because being in such an orderly state, with one’s desires regulated by a correct account of what is worth valuing, is something precious. But it will appear that to get this correct ordering one needs to live in a correct society—and that this society is profoundly antidemocratic. Let us now follow the somewhat complex course of this argument. Glaukon, then, challenges Socrates to show the worth of justice in a person’s life. The discussion now takes an unexpected turn. For Socrates holds that we cannot really understand what justice is in an individual person without seeing it at work in the construction of a society. The project of designing an ideal city begins as a device through which Socrates will answer Glaukon’s questions about justice and happiness. But it soon becomes clear that the significance of the device is far more complicated, since the education supplied by the ideal city turns out to be necessary in order to produce, in a reliable way, the right relationship between

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justice and happiness—and, indeed, in order to provide a reliable education for justice in the individual soul. The first city designed by Socrates is a simple one, in which people divide up the necessary tasks peacefully and live side by side without quarrels or injustice—because Socrates has imagined that they have relatively simple and uncorrupted desires. But we know that Plato won’t stop there, because from the opening of the work he has told us that the central problem of politics is the corrupt character of desire. Sure enough, Socrates soon complicates the simple city by adding greedy and irrational desires. At this point, he says, we have to introduce lots of public measures to impose a discipline on these desires. He begins this process, introducing an ever more elaborate system of control, until we have, in the end, the famous totalitarian society that Plato calls ideal. The process of construction has five main elements: the division of labor, the elimination of the nuclear family, the reform of poetry and early education, the proposal for women’s equality, and finally the notorious proposal that the city should be ruled by philosophers. First, Socrates introduces a division of labor through the assignment of people to fixed and mandatory occupations. We divide up the tasks to be done, and we create three classes of people in keeping with those tasks. Some will be farmers and craftsmen, some will be military types, and some will be ruler types; he calls the last group the “guardians” of the city. Socrates thinks that we can often match personality types to occupations, so that we will make the people who are materialistic and not very bright into craftsmen, those who love honor and are high-spirited into soldiers, and the intellectually gifted into rulers. But he acknowledges that there won’t always be a perfect fit between talent and occupation, so a system of public lies must be introduced. He calls the main falsehood the “noble lie.” All citizens will come to believe that there are from birth three species of human beings, made from three different types of metals, iron, silver, and gold. They will believe that the rulers can always find out what type an individual is and assign the individual to the appropriate class. Why is this a lie? Because, as Socrates makes clear, the children of the rulers are treated differently from birth and will be far better equipped for success on the public tests than the children of soldiers or farmers. But a belief rather similar to our erstwhile faith in the neutrality of IQ testing will screen the operations of social caste from the citizens of the ideal city; when they are seeing a result influenced by the operations of class and social advantage, they will think they are seeing nature. Plato believes that on this basis they will accept the mandatory division of labor

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happily, secure in the belief that they are doing what nature meant them each to do. Second, Socrates reforms the family. As things now stand, society is a breeding ground of conflict, since people learn to love some people as their own and to care about these people more than about the state. Sometimes their duties to their family collide with their public duties, and people are at odds—both with one another and with themselves. Socrates does not exactly want to eliminate the family—for he recognizes that a type of intense love and care is fostered by parent/child attachments and that the city can ill afford to do without this intensity. But we should try to eliminate the nuclear family; then citizens would all love one another equally, and painful conflicts would be removed. He therefore argues that children should grow up communally, not even knowing the identity of their own parents. They will nurse at the breasts of interchangeable wet nurses. As they grow, they will learn to think of the city itself as their parent and to love one another without barrier. When they reach marriageable age, marriage itself will be arranged by the state in ways that block any avenue of growth for subversive personal affections. In the third phase of his program, Socrates introduces educational censorship. In a discussion highly pertinent to our contemporary debates over violence on television and over pornography, Socrates tells us that the minds of young people are as impressionable as wax, and the stories we let them hear will shape their desires in ways that have far-reaching effects on their lives. We should therefore exercise great vigilance over the content of stories and works of art. Socrates argues that virtually all of existing Greek mythology and literature will have to be removed from his city, on the grounds that its stories portray false images of the gods and heroes, giving the young bad models for their own desires. He focuses on the bad effect of seeing representations of cowardice, adultery, and intense personal grief and love (which, he argues, sap the strength with which citizens devote themselves to virtue). This education, Socrates now urges in a fourth phase of his program, will be given equally to both men and women. In all societies, ideas that are new seem strange and unnatural; we should therefore not shrink from proposing one that sounds highly unnatural to Athenian ears. Drawing on the real history of Sparta, which allowed women considerable freedom and physical training, Socrates proposes that women will share the physical and mental regimen of males and will be selected for occupations based on their own individual talents. These proposals were taken very seriously in antiquity, where they became the source for Stoic

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arguments for women’s equal education that were put into practice in ancient Rome to a remarkable extent. Here we see a new side to Plato’s critique of democratic habits, and this discussion reminds us that his mistrust of majority choice can lead in the direction of changes that are genuinely farsighted and humanly valuable. Plato is known to have taught women in his school. Having gotten this far in the discussion of education and institutions, Plato now introduces a fuller account of the individual person, or soul. (This discussion actually precedes the discussion of women’s equality, dividing the two sections of his educational proposal, which I have presented as a whole for the sake of clarity.) Each of us, he says, is composed of three elements: a reasoning element, which evaluates and ranks choices and makes a plan for life as a whole; an appetitive element, which reaches out for satisfaction in a brutish and unreflective way; and an emotional or honor-governed element, which makes us high-spirited and is responsible for military courage. These elements correspond to the dominant characteristics of the three classes in the city: the guardians are reasoners, the auxiliaries have military emotion, and the craftsmen, he somewhat oddly claims, without argument, are controlled throughout life by their bodily appetites. Socrates now tells us that the essence of justice in society is a state of affairs where each segment in society “does its own thing,” not taking what is someone else’s, not poaching on someone else’s terrain. So too in the individual, the virtue of justice is a state of the soul in which its desires are balanced and ordered by reason, and each does its own thing without interfering with the others. This state of the individual requires control by reason, just as the good social state requires control by reasonable rulers. We are now ready to hear about the rulers. Socrates knows that he will be laughed at, he says, but he believes that there will be no happiness for anyone in our city unless philosophers are put in charge of things. This, of course, sounds laughable to the other characters: Imagine those intellectuals, those abstract and woolly characters, trying to run a city. But Socrates spends the next two books showing what he has in mind. Among the guardians, he says, we should select a smaller number who are outstanding for their quickness of mind and their love of truth. We give them a rigorous education in which they will spend years mastering mathematics and the study of nature, and then more years analyzing the nature of the moral virtues. Finally, they will become capable of contemplating the eternal objects that Plato calls the Forms, the unchanging ideal essences of goodness, justice, unity, and other norms. They will learn to

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see what justice really is, not just our fads and conventions about justice. Here Plato introduces the famous image of the cave, to show how correct understanding is needed to free the human being from slavery to false desires. Its position at the heart of the work confirms my argument that the distortion of desire is its central theme. Emerging from the dark cave into the sunlight, the philosophers will fix their eyes on the truth in the light of day. Only such men—and women, Socrates carefully adds, reminding Glaukon that he expects qualified women to be represented even in the highest class—can be trusted to run a city, because only such men are really wide awake. Only these can distinguish a real example of justice from a bogus one, a real instance of social good from one that is merely habitual. Will such men and women, loving truth as they do, really be willing to go back down into the cave, ruling in the city that has educated them? Socrates answers this question by saying that they will do so out of gratitude for the upbringing this city gave them, for “we are imposing just commands on just men.” But the question has vexed interpreters of the dialogue over the years, since Plato himself says that they will prefer contemplating the ideal forms to any other occupation and will view the descent to the city “not as something fine, but as a necessity.” Why should rulers impose this burden on themselves? Socrates seems to have many doubts, himself, about the feasibility of the ideal city that he has proposed. Nonetheless, he says, people in today’s diseased cities can still learn about justice from this hypothetical construction. It is as if there is a blueprint of it set up in the heavens for people to contemplate if they wish—“and, contemplating it, to enroll themselves as its citizens. It doesn’t matter whether it ever comes into being or not. The politics of such people will belong to that city and no other.” “That seems likely,” says Glaukon. The dialogue concludes with one more discussion of the purification of poetry and a myth about the rewards of justice in the afterlife, designed to convince the skeptical and unphilosophical Adeimantus. But its real conclusion is in that exchange with Glaukon, where Socrates urges the ambitious youth to enroll himself in the ideal city, practicing its politics as best he can in a defective real-life setting.

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any things make Plato’s Republic a work of enduring value and interest. Its account of truth and knowledge, though controversial in its claim that truth requires a grasp of eternal and unchanging objects, has

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inspired philosophers, artists, and religious thinkers over the ages. Its moving image of our life in the cave and the ascent of the soul into the sunlight has impressed many of these thinkers as a poignant description of our mental plight in a world we have not made and do not fully comprehend. Philosophers grew accustomed to see the problem of ethical knowledge in terms of a contrast between the idealistic views of Plato and the more this-worldly, empirical orientation of Aristotle. In Raphael’s great depiction, Plato points upward to the heavens, while Aristotle directs our attention downward to the earth. Again, Socrates’ argument that a life of justice is superior to a life of pleasure or self-interest continues to inspire moral thinkers of many kinds; his severe call to the pursuit of what is right regardless of the consequences is profoundly moving to my students today, who too rarely encounter such uncompromising moral firmness in their daily lives. Plato’s ideas about the structure of the personality—Greek philosophy’s first serious attempt to have a theory of mind and emotion—deeply influenced all of modern psychology and psychiatry. So there are many aspects of this work on which one could dwell in arguing for its continued life and relevance. But I have chosen a task that is in some respects tougher: commending Plato’s political ideas and arguments as relevant, even and especially for people in a democracy, who are likely to disagree strongly with the substance of his political proposals. I have suggested that the enduring value of those ideas derives from the connection Plato draws between an account of desire and an account of political institutions. The central argument of Plato’s Republic connects the soul’s desires to an institutional structure. This argument begins from the claim, repeatedly made in the early books of the work, that people do not always desire what is really best for them. Or rather, although they do at some level desire the good, their view of what really is good is likely to become distorted by the pressures of the bodily appetites and especially the pressure of cultural norms, presented to young democratic citizens through poetic representations. Plato makes the profound discovery that desire is in part a social artifact, that people’s anger, grief, and passion are shaped by the institutions and social norms in which they dwell. Through a typically free and open Athenian upbringing, Cephalus’ friends have learned to be so keen on sex that they are upset when old age removes desire. Through this same upbringing, young future leaders learn to weep and wail when a friend dies in battle, to tremble before the wrath of the gods, to desire adulterous relationships. Democracy treats all such preferences

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and desires as on a par, letting them compete as in a marketplace. Democratic equality, Plato says—means, in effect—that all preferences are equal before the law. Choice is the result not of wisdom but of the collision of preferences uninformed by wisdom. Plato argues, plausibly enough, that this situation is often bad for people. The license of democracy allows them to develop desires that do not serve their own long-term self-interest, and the person in whom such desires run rampant is not very good to other people who might happen to be better ordered internally. Socrates was killed by the democracy; and the dialogue, as I have said, is saturated with images of greed and violence. People who learn to be greedy for sex, possessions, and power are not likely to leave others in peace. If justice is a situation in which nobody poaches on the preserve of another, people with greedy desires are not likely to be just. Once we grant to Plato that the bad desires are not altogether inevitable or natural, but are at least in part created by laws, norms, and social institutions, we must grant him, as well, that the damage they do is damage for which we should hold society responsible. These problems are real problems, and they demand to be solved. We do have at least some power to make a society that is more or less aggressive and hate-driven, more or less covetous, more or less misogynistic, more or less compassionate, more or less just. If we reject the full institutional solution Plato offers us, in which there is virtually no freedom of choice for individual citizens and in which all education, representation, and daily decision-making are governed by the wisdom of an elite, we need to say why: How do we propose to handle the problem of deformation of desire, and why do we think we should and can handle it without removing democratic freedoms? Let me now try to answer this question. I shall do so by first developing further the contemporary significance of Plato’s ideas, and then tracing a line of modern democratic reflection about related issues to see where it leads us. Eventually I shall argue that the best democratic answer to Plato is one that comes from another part of the ancient tradition—namely, from Aristotle and from modern liberal thought influenced by Aristotle. As I have said, it is a mistake not to take Plato’s critique of democratic desire seriously. One of the few things that the political left and right in the United States seem to agree on at this moment is that Plato is correct in holding that democracy houses a massive problem of deformation of desire, and that this problem is caused, at least in part, by too much democratic freedom. For the left, we have given too much license to desires connected with racial hatred and oppression, to sexual desires

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involving the subordination of women and violence against women, to galloping consumption that is held to be dangerous to the ecosystem. For the right, the problems include the violent sexual desires allegedly aroused by rap music, desires for nonstandard family structures allegedly aroused by seeing single mothers supported and respected, desires for deviant sexual acts allegedly aroused by seeing homosexuals respected and openly affectionate in our community. For both sides, a critique of desire is urgently called for, followed by public action in response to that critique. I could pursue the topic of Platonism in contemporary political thought in several ways. One fascinating avenue would be the comparison of recent arguments about violence and sex in the media with Platonic arguments about the pernicious power of art. Instead, however, let me pursue the Gary Becker example. What has led democratic economists, working in the tradition of Milton Friedman, to incorporate a critique of desire into their arguments? According to Friedman, we have to start with preferences as given, and there is nothing more to say about the evaluations they incorporate, since about matters of value “men can ultimately only fight.” 10 What has led contemporary economic thinkers to feel, in contrast to Friedman, that a critique of value, as embedded in desire and preference, is both urgent and feasible within a democratic society? This way of thinking about preferences11 began—in the modern utilitarian tradition—with John Stuart Mill, whose Subjection of Women presented a forceful argument for seeing the desires of both men and women as deformed by a long tradition of sexual inequality. Mill’s arguments are clearly indebted to Plato’s arguments about women’s equal education. Like Plato, he castigates the mistake of supposing the status quo to be natural, especially in areas, such as the lives of women, where we have such deeply rooted habits and prejudices. Women internalize the view that they are fit only for domestic life, and therefore they often do not demand political equality; they believe that their subordination is natural, and many of their desires are based on that belief. Indeed, they learn to find submissiveness erotic and to expect that their own erotic attractiveness depends on submission. Men’s desires, too, are corrupt, Mill holds, for to be taught that without any personal distinction, just in virtue of being male, one is superior to the most talented woman is the source of a view of oneself and one’s conduct that is diseased and that leads men to endorse diseased social choices. Such customs, he concludes, “pervert the whole manner of existence of the man, both as an individual and as

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a social being.”12 Similar deformations are created by divisions of class and rank; here Mill agrees with earlier liberal thinkers, such as JeanJacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, as well as with Plato. Greed and an overweening sense of what one has a right to are common artifacts of a class-divided society. Mill thought that liberal democracy should address these ills through persuasion, not coercion, wherever possible, because of the priority he attached to liberty. But he recognized as well that laws and institutions must in some cases limit people’s liberty in order to protect the liberty and dignity of others. He took his reflections on desire to entail the legal prohibition of marital rape and of all arrangements that did not give women equal legal control over the lives of their children. That such legal changes were not endorsed by a majority did not, in his view, make them less urgent; he compared the situation of women in marriage to the situation of slaves. Following his argument, one could hold that women’s basic right to bodily integrity should have the same fundamental status as a constitutional prohibition of slavery, neither being simply subject to majority vote. Here, at the heart of Mill’s democratic and libertarian thought, is an element of Platonism.

Today, most economic thought in the utilitarian tradition follows Mill’s lead, holding that the long-term well-being of individuals (which all individuals are thought to desire, at some level) is not always well served by their current desires and preferences, which may be distorted by many factors. Many economic theorists maintain that in any responsible process of social choice we must at least attempt to separate the “true” or “authentic” preferences of the individual—that is, those that really do conduce to that individual’s long-term well-being—from those that are so distorted. Where we can do this convincingly, we should base social choice on the former rather than the latter. In introducing this distinction, they are following Plato. To take just one representative example, Nobel Prize–winning economist John Harsanyi argues that “any sensible ethical theory must make a distinction between rational wants and irrational wants, or between rational preferences and irrational preferences.”13 He holds that the true preferences of an individual are those that the person would have had “if he had all the relevant factual information, always reasoned with the greatest possible care, and were in a state of mind most conducive to rational

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choice.” Social policy must be built on the authentic, not the inauthentic, preferences of individuals, wherever this can be done. Here we have at least some of the constraints that Plato sought to introduce by making the wisdom of the philosopher the criterion of what is good for individuals. But it is not clear (given the lack of definition of the notion of “conducive to rational choice”) that Harsanyi includes value distortion among the conditions that render a preference inauthentic. Shortly thereafter, however, he makes this point explicit by adding that we must exclude from the social-choice function preferences deformed by “antisocial” factors, such as “sadism, envy, resentment, and malice.” What does Harsanyi have in mind? It would appear that he intends to call into question preferences distorted by the type of class- and wealthbased envy that is common in a materialistic society, and also preferences formed under the influence of hierarchies characterized by hatred and resentment, whether racial, sexual, or class-linked. In practical terms, he is in effect offering a defense of laws against race and sex discrimination and against sexual harassment, which are major ways in which liberal democracies have refused to allow social choice to reflect the actual preferences and desires of individuals. Most Americans currently hold that the racial bigot, however sincere that person’s desire that his or her children should attend a segregated school, should be told that that desire is not equal to the desires of other parents for integrated schooling. Even if segregationists were in a majority in a community, their desires would not be honored, because we hold those desires to be deformed by false evaluations. Most also believe that the desires of individual men not to work with women should not be honored and that their desires to harass women sexually or to intimidate them in the workplace should be subject to the authority of law. Where informal moral education is concerned, most Americans are far more Platonistic than we are in the area of law and public policy. Most of us hold that in the education of the young care should be taken not to transmit false racist evaluations, and we would probably support some form of restriction on racist literary materials because of the role they play in building such patterns of desire. We can say similar things about sexism. Although most would not support restrictions on the publication of such materials, except possibly in the case of violent pornography and child pornography, we do think that a good classroom should not teach or use such materials, and that a good parent will try to discourage children from using them. On the other side, both good parents and good classrooms should be on the lookout for paradigms of racial and sexual

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equality to present to the young. This idea lies behind William Bennett’s Book of Virtues, as well as behind proposals that come from people of more center/ left political convictions: There appears to be a general consensus that we need to think about the stories we tell the young and about the effect of these stories on their capacity for good citizenship. In all of this, we are agreeing with Plato, if not in the precise content of his proposals, still, in their overall moral purpose. Economists who study international issues have taken an even bolder Platonic step: They have held that where an entire culture reflects deformed evaluations, social policy should avoid basing itself on those false evaluations. One can find many societies in which both men and women have internalized and become accustomed to patterns of evaluation that are subversive of women’s well-being and even life. Such preferences and desires may be deeply embedded, even though they do not reflect deliberation about long-term well-being. For this reason they are known as “adaptive preferences.” 14 Amartya Sen and others have argued that where we find evidence of such preferences, social policy should not be built on them. For example, if Indian women when polled say that they do not want more years of schooling, this should not be used, as it sometimes is, as an argument against compulsory secondary education for women. It is this type of argument that Gary Becker has recently endorsed, holding that even a libertarian has reason to endorse government policies that impose some constraints on personal liberty, where we find such strong evidence of value distortion—for example, not just mandatory primary and secondary education, but also disproportionate expenditure on female literacy and education in developing countries. Interestingly enough, in his October 5, 1995, address to the United Nations, Pope John Paul II has taken a very similar position, arguing that we must respect cultural and religious diversity, and yet insist in an uncompromising way on the protection of basic human rights, even where those rights are not respected by local traditions. The protection of these rights entails many constraints on the liberty of religion and custom. My claim, then, is that almost all of us agree with Plato that political choice should discriminate among preferences, constraining individual liberty where we feel that there is a severe problem of value distortion. We are also in agreement with Plato that the moral education of the young is one place in which reflection about the good is especially urgent. Nonetheless, we do not agree with Plato’s institutional conclusions: Most of us would not agree with Lee Kuan Yew that these facts about human

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desire give us reason to turn all choice over to a wise ruler or rulers. We do agree with some parts of Plato’s critique of democracy. For example, we do assign a large role in social choice to the judiciary, a group of people who are at least supposed to instantiate an unusual degree of wisdom and reflection. We do turn over certain parts of policy-making to administrative agencies that are supposed to embody particular types of wisdom. Relatively few people would urge the abolition of these agencies in favor of unfettered free choice, although some are beginning to do so. Again, we hold that certain important principles should not be subject to majority vote—the principles, namely, that are embodied in the U.S. Constitution. But where other very important matters are concerned, we are extremely far from being Platonists, and we allow a great deal of latitude for democratic choice, even when we are aware that this choice frequently expresses distorted evaluations. What do we have to say to Plato in defense of this way of doing things? Let me now give an answer that derives in large part from Aristotle, though it is an Aristotle filtered through the Enlightenment. First, we should say to Plato that liberty of choice has intrinsic worth, a worth independent of the value of what is chosen. We are willing to forgo the value of free choice in some matters—thus, as I have argued, few of us are libertarians all the way down, and most of us support a wide range of coercive laws and practices. But we still insist on giving democratic choice a very large role in our lives because of the importance we attach to personal liberty as a separate value. (This commitment to liberty seems to be what makes William Bennett pull back from being a thoroughgoing Platonist, when he refuses to advocate outright censorship of dangerous materials, even though he feels the force of Plato’s position.) In answering Plato, we will need to think hard about the reasons why we think choice and liberty so important, for only this thought will reveal to us which liberties are really central and which may be more negotiable when they are in tension with wisdom. My own view distinguishes sharply between the liberties of speech, expression, assembly, political participation, and bodily integrity—all of which might be thought to be intimately constitutive of a person’s life—and the liberty of property, which seems to me to have only instrumental value, though of course it does have such value, frequently to a high degree. Others—for example, Richard Epstein—will treat property rights more like speech and assembly rights, refusing to make that distinction. So we need to pursue that argument further, at the level both of philosophical reflection and of political practice.

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A second area that would need to be explored concerns our differences about the good. As my opening examples illustrate, when we evaluate desires using a theory of the good, different people come to very different conclusions. Catharine MacKinnon, William Bennett, Lee Kuan Yew, Gary Becker: These people will not all agree about the correct theory of the good and therefore will not agree in their account of what desires are healthy or unhealthy. American democracy, to some extent unlike ancient Athens, is inescapably pluralistic about the good, inhabited as it is by different religious and secular traditions. This gives us additional reasons to care deeply about choice. On some especially important matters, we feel we must take a public stand about the good. We have tended to agree that racism in employment and education is one such matter. Most of us can also agree that the equality of women is a matter on which we cannot be neutral, which should not be up for grabs in legislative choice. But there is much controversy on how far this nonneutrality should extend, about how far it is right for the public sphere to take stands that promote one conception of the family over another or one conception of proper entertainment over another. I myself am with Mill here, and therefore only minimally with Plato; I think only issues of special urgency, involving harms to others, justify the use of the coercive powers of law to shape or restrict desire. Many of my fellow citizens, however, are prepared to be far more Platonist than I would be. Few of us would follow Plato to the end of his argument. In part this is because history has taught us to mistrust what government will do when it tries to take control of our lives through superior wisdom; usually the governmental cure turns out to be far worse, and less susceptible of correction, than the original disease. But it is also because we know that our society contains many reasonable and defensible theories of the good, and because we respect our fellow citizens. Most of us believe deeply in religious toleration and in the firm protection of many personal liberties that Plato takes lightly. Even where we have deep moral convictions that we believe we can defend, we are more inclined to be followers of Aristotle than of Plato. We often hold off from seeking to turn our convictions into law, or even into public education, on the grounds that others should be allowed to reflect in their own way and to come to their own conclusions, even though these conclusions may be quite wrong. The idea that respect for persons fundamentally requires allowing them to reflect about the good and possibly to make a mistake is one that the Catholic tradition derives from its reading of Aristotle, and it was well expressed by liberal Catholic Aristotelian Jacques Maritain:

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There is real and genuine tolerance only when a man is firmly and absolutely convinced of a truth, or of what he holds to be a truth, and when he at the same time recognizes the right of those who deny this truth to exist, and to contradict him, and to speak their own mind, not because they are free from truth but because they seek truth in their own way, and because he respects in them human nature and human dignity and those very resources and living springs of the intellect and of conscience which make them potentially capable of attaining the truth he loves. . . . And we do not call upon the people to decide because we are aware of our ignorance of what is the good, but because we know this truth and this good, that the people have a right to selfgovernment.15

Maritain defends democracy against Platonism not by retreating to skepticism about the good—for he agrees with Aristotle that we can present cogent arguments for preferring one picture of the human good to another—but by appealing to the worth of personal reflection and its relation to the dignity of persons. This is a basically Aristotelian thought, even if we may doubt how far Aristotle would agree with Maritain’s institutional argument. For Maritain, democratic choice, even when it produces mistaken outcomes and enacts the diseased preferences of those who have made a mistake about the good, expresses a value that is itself essential to human flourishing, and indeed a sine qua non of all other values—namely, the value of choice.

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have argued—or at least sketched a path along which one might more fully argue—that the political arguments of Plato’s Republic not only are not outdated, but also are deep and valuable, as we ponder the limits of democracy and the role that a theory or theories of the good should play in a democracy. On the one hand, I have argued that any plausible political proposal for today’s world must incorporate at least a part of Plato’s insight, refusing to base social choice on deformed desires in some especially grave and urgent cases, especially those involving the life chances of people and their basic equality of opportunity. I have argued that political institutions and especially institutions of moral education should be developed in ways that reflect this insight. On the other hand, I have argued that Plato leaves out something of fundamental importance, which is stressed in the Aristotelian tradition: the intrinsic value of choice. Responsible political deliberation for the next century—especially international deliberation—will require an ever more careful weighting of this value against the value of other constituents of human

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flourishing, the truth in Platonism against the insight of the Aristotelians. On this ground we must fight out the increasingly vexed debates about women’s role in developing countries, about the relevance or irrelevance of the human rights movement to Eastern societies, about the latitude we are to give our citizens on issues of sex and race and pollution. We need to enlist the guidance of both Plato and Aristotle as we grapple with these problems, for, as Socrates said, “it is no chance matter we are discussing, but how one should live.”

NOTES

1. Amartya Sen, “Freedoms and Needs,” New Republic, January 10 and 17, 1994. 2. In her book Who Stole Feminism? Sommers replaces the term “Platonists,” used throughout her earlier articles, by the term “gender feminists” and the (approved) term “Aristotelians” by the term “equity feminists.” See, for example, “Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?”, Public Affairs Quarterly 2 (1988): 97–118: “For the platonist feminist, the cave is darkened by the androcentric distortions of all knowledge and values. In the deceptive light of the patriarchal cave the traditional family often appears desirable to the average woman, who may tell you that she wants to marry a good provider and have children.” On MacKinnon, see Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?, chap. 12. 3. These conversations were taped by Discovery Channel and were part of a broadcast on the Republic aired in the fall of 1995. 4. “The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior,” reprinted in The Essential Becker (Stanford, 1995), pp. 633–58; Plato is mentioned on p. 646. 5. Ibid., p. 636. Becker does not say whether he thinks they internalize the stereotypes of their own inferior productivity or simply take the presence of these stereotypes in others as reason to be pessimistic about success. But later in the article he emphasizes the role of experience in shaping desire and tastes, as well as actual choices: “An Indian doctor living in the United States may love curry because he acquired a strong taste for it while growing up in India, or a woman may forever fear men because she was sexually abused as a child” (p. 647). 6. Becker’s new book (Gary Becker and Guitz Nashat Becker, The Economics of Life [New York, 1997]) contains much more relevant discussion. 7. For Crocker’s position, see D. Crocker and T. Linden, eds., The Ethics of Consumption and Global Stewardship (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). He does not defend governmental restrictions on personal consumption, and the primary focus of this argument is on voluntary restriction by individuals. 8. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, 1962).

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9. See Gregory Vlastos, “The Historical Socrates and the Athenian Democracy,” in Socratic Studies (Cambridge, 1993). 10. Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Daniel S. Hausman, ed., The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology (Cambridge, 1984), p. 212. 11. In the economic tradition I describe, preferences are treated not as identical with choices (as they are by Samuelson and the “revealed preference” school) but as lying behind and explaining choices. Usually, preferences are understood to be a certain sort of desire. 12. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. S. M. Ukin (Indianapolis, 1988), p. 87. 13. John C. Harsanyi, “Morality and the Theory of Rational Behaviour,” in A. Sen and B. Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 39–62. 14. See Jon Elster, “Sour Grapes—Utilitarianism and the Genesis of Wants,” in Sen and Williams, Utilitarianism and Beyond, pp. 219–38; Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge, 1983); Amartya Sen, “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts,” in Irene Tinker, ed., Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development (New York, 1990), pp. 123–49; and Sen, “Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice,” in M. Nussbaum and J. Glover, eds., Women, Culture, and Development (Oxford, 1995), pp. 259–73. 15. Jacques Maritain, “Truth and Human Fellowship,” in On the Use of Philosophy: Three Essays (Princeton, 1961), pp. 21, 24.

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Plato’s Republic: The Good Society and the Deformation of Desire by Martha Nussbaum was presented as a lecture at the Library of Congress and has been printed here in an edition of 1,000 copies. The typeface used throughout is Electra, a digital version of the hot-metal face designed by W. A. Dwiggins for the Linotype Corporation. The text paper is 80# Monadnock Caress and the cover is Strathmore Grandee. This booklet was printed by letterpress at The Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont. Design by Christopher Kuntze.