The four regimes, and how cities decline

Even the just city, Socrates says, will not last forever. The guardians will eventually miscalculate the breeding of the next generation; iron and bronze souls will sneak in; the rulers will lose the unity that held the city together. From there it falls — and the falls follow a sequence. There are exactly four corrupt regimes, in descending order, each worse than the last.

First, timocracy: rule by men who love honor more than truth. The guardians get greedy and start hoarding; the philosophical study is lost; courage and competition replace wisdom as the highest virtues. The timocratic man is ambitious, stiff, suspicious of his own appetites — like Sparta. Then oligarchy: rule by the rich. Property qualifications for office; the city splits into two cities, the rich and the poor, sharing a name but not a project. The oligarchic man is acquisitive, calculating, pinched.

Then democracy. The poor rise up, kill or banish the rich, distribute power equally, and live by the principle that every appetite is honored equally with every other appetite. Plato is famously unkind to democracy here — he calls it sweet, and means it as a complaint. The democratic city has no rulers, only personalities. Each person does as he pleases. There are no fixed virtues. Plato saw it as the regime of maximum disorder before tyranny — and he was right that tyranny would eventually emerge from it. Book Eight ends with that emergence beginning. The democracy, drunk on freedom, makes a man who promises to give everyone everything they want.