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.

LRB 7 August 2003 | PDF Download