Plato’s three classes are hierarchically arranged, with the guardians at the top, a profession of leaders and presumably bureaucrats; then the auxiliaries, the military and police, the enforcers; then the Many, the workers with their multitudinous trades and crafts, who grow the food, build the buildings, practice trades, and buy and sell, in a manner not too different from what common people did in the cities of Greece. The ideal state will not, however, have citizen soldiers, but it will have a professional military class. And it will not have citizen rulers, such as Athens and other democratic states elected or chose by lot, but it will have a professional class of rulers.
But Plato goes one step further. He advocates for what he calls philosopher kings:
Unless philosophers become kings … or those who are called kings and rulers come to philosophize truly and competently, and political power and philosophy become one, so long as the many natures who are compelled to practice one in isolation from the other, there will be no end, I think, dear Glaucon, of evils for cities or for the human race.[26]
Plato worries about the practical problems of inventing an ideal state out in real life given the political and social obstacles, recognizing the low probability of this happening. But he does offer a scheme for providing competent rulers in case such a regime should arise. The key for him is education. Or rather, both genetics and un-natural selection play a part, with education as the preparation for the right “natures.”
When Plato imagines setting up the ideal state for the first time, he envisages the ministry of propaganda promoting a myth according to which all citizens are brothers and sisters, but some souls have a character of gold, some of silver, some of iron and bronze. An invented oracle decrees that the golden souls be the guardians, the silver souls the auxiliaries, the iron and bronze souls the workers.[27] Plato seems to draw on the poet Hesiod’s tale of generations of gold, silver, bronze, and iron to give authority to his myth.[28]
Plato allows for the possibility of a “golden” youth to appear among the workers and an “iron” one among the guardians, with the possibility of upward, or downward, mobility. But he assumes that good breeding, as in horses and dogs, is the most reliable way to produce good stock for the leadership of the state. Even within the guardian class he insists on eugenics. In the guardian class, a male and female will cohabit at appropriate times to beget a child. The pairings will be governed by a lottery rather than by the passions of the individuals.
“It is necessary,” Socrates concludes, “from what we have agreed that the best men must mate with the best women as often as possible, while the worst must seldom mate with the worst. And the offspring of some are to be nurtured, those of others not, if the flock is to be the best possible. And all this is to be kept secret from everyone but the rulers, if the herd of guardians is to be completely free of strife.”[29]
In other words, the lottery is rigged from the outset, to match the brightest and most beautiful specimens with each other. The prom kings get to mate (temporarily of course) with the prom queens, to generate the master race. Evidently, even within the guardian class there are winners and losers. The dark secret is that the losers’ children will disappear quietly in the state nursery, the refuse of the genetic competition.
[26] Plato Republic V, 473c-d.
[27] Plato Republic III, 414b-415c.
[28] Hesiod Works and Days 109-201.
[29] Plato Republic V, 459d-e.