Individual and Polis in Plato’s Republic

Abstract

Two views of Plato’s politics in the Republic predominate in the literature. Political organicism is the view that the polis is an organism and implies that individual happiness is defined by an individual’s contribution to the polis’s good. Individualism is the view that the polis is reducible to individuals, which implies that the polis’s good is nothing but individual happiness aggregated. This article develops a middle-of-the-road view called weak organicism, which qualifies Plato’s organicism and includes a Platonic account of the mereological relations of the polis. These relations imply that individuals as such are not structurally dependent on the whole polis, thereby making conceptual space for Plato’s expressly stated thesis that the polis’s good is over and above individual happiness without necessarily implying that individual happiness is reducible to the polis’s good, which the literature generally supposes to be a corollary of political organicism.