Intrinsic value of Socrates Cycle

Zeitgeist Zero Hour:

Intrinsic Value and Limitations of Socrates Cycle

Originally published June 24, 2019
Last edited June 30, 2019
By Michio Suginoo

Introduction

Western Civilisation starts from just kingship/aristocracy, then travels through timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, then finally degenerates into tyranny to complete its one life cycle. This is a notion of the constitutional (political regime) cycle formulated by Plato’s fictional Socrates in his masterpiece, ‘the Republic’, —call it Socrates Cycle. [click here for a summary on Socrates Cycle: Thus spoke Socrates] As a footnote, in this reading, we call the fictional figure interchangeably Socrates or Plato going forward.

Against Socrates Cycle, Aristotle presented his alternative view. While Socrates Cycle presents only one single path, Aristotle, presenting a variety of historical evidences, articulated that constitutional change would be a contingent and particular process and could produce any of multiple paths depending on the given circumstances, thus, would not necessarily replicate one single generalised path. Based on his survey of 158 constitutions of his time, Aristotle shaped his rich empirical knowledge and insights on constitutional changes.

When we see regime-by-regime base change of constitutional transformations, history favours Aristotle’s contingent particularity view against Socrates Cycle. Is Socrates Cycle merely a political fantasy of Socrates? Or does it have any intrinsic value?

Against Aristotle’s criticisms, I would defend the underlying intrinsic value of Socrates Cycle. Socrates’ dialectic discourse brilliantly captured “inherently corrupting” [1] nature of social moral order (psyche): in a big picture, along the social moral decay, civilisation can disintegrate from within, even without external threat. In his discourse, he illuminated how political order is shaped and destroyed by the transformation of social moral order. In this light, I would argue, the intrinsic value of Socrates Cycle is paramount.

At the same time, I also highly admire Aristotle’s insight in reminding us of the contingent and particular nature of our reality. Simply put, in Aristotelean perspective, being manifests itself in contingent particularity.

In Aristotle’s term, Socrates, by presenting only one single path, only illustrated one actualisation of potential universe, thus excluded multitude of other potential alternatives. In a way, it is a sort of one-single-scenario-base simulation. Nevertheless, its underlying scenario is a very special one, Socrates’ narrative of a natural (uninterrupted endogenous) moral decay of civilisation, particularly Ancient Western Civilisation. In his dialectic simulation, he populated his constitutional cycle as an incarnation of the single passage of Socratesian natural (uninterrupted endogenous) decay of social moral order. Although on appearance Socrates Cycle is a political regime cycle, it is a manifestation of the natural decay of social moral order—simply put, in its very substance, it is an uninterrupted endogenous cycle of Zeitgeist. As a footnote, this reading uses the following terms interchangeably—the soul, psyche, and moral order; and social moral order of an epoch and Zeitgeist.

Why did he choose this particular scenario out of all potentialities? In my view, with his profound insight of political instability in the ancient Greek history, Socrates (or Plato) might well have been deeply concerned with one primary cause of the political instability, moral decay—e.g. embezzlement, bribery, and illegitimate use of violence. In this light, he would naturally have become preoccupied with formulating his caveats on moral decay and demonstrated the most likely consequences of his hypothetical natural (uninterrupted endogenous) decay in social moral order on political order. In other words, his warning would be: if we let social moral order decay unmanaged, constitutional order could degenerate in accordance with Socrates Cycle. On this presumption, I would submit that he brilliantly achieved his specific goal. In other words, to achieve his goal, he did not need to expand his discourse to cover all the potential paths of the universe—that would be unproductive to begin with.

Socrates and Aristotle: complementary and confrontational

Despite the contrasting differences between these two intellects (click the link for the Comparison between Socrates v.s. Aristotle), I tend to see that their thoughts are in some respects complementary than confrontational for our analysis on the subject. That is to say, while Aristotle raises our consciousness in capturing the contingent particular nature of our reality, Socrates unveils his view of imperative nature of social moral decay. Of course, that is not to say, these two are absolutely complementary; in some respects, they disagree fundamentally and cannot reconcile each other.

Since this reading does not go over Socrates’ discourse of his constitutional cycle itself, if you would like to have its overview, please visit my content on its summary through the link here: (Socrates' Constitutional Cycle )

Section 1: Limitations of Socrates Cycle

When we understand the specific scope and the limitations of Socrates’ arguments, we can benefit from the intrinsic value of Socrates Cycle. This reading intends to illuminate this point.

First, let’s go over the limitations of Socrates Cycle.

It is an endogenous cyclical model that traces only one single path that populates only five prototype constitutions. In other words, it does not capture the following factors:

contingent factors: Since it is one single model, it casts a notion of deterministic model, thus, does not incorporate uncertainty into its architecture.
exogenous factors: Since it is an endogenous model, it ignores exogenous factors, such as geopolitical events and natural disasters.
evolutionary factors: Since it is a fixed cyclical model, it does not take into account of evolution such as innovations.
particularities: Since it only populates five prototype forms of political order, it does not capture other forms of constitutional arrangement, such as their variants, republic and other mixed forms of constitutions.

Another important point, regarding the limitation of the model, is that it is only concerned with the ancient Western Civilisation. Non-Western Civilisation is out of the scope of this discourse.

A Single-Scenario Simulation: failure to reflect contingent factors

As a recapitulation, in his discourse, Socrates illustrated an uninterrupted endogenous social moral decay through civilisation life in five phases (epochs/generations); at each generation, he portrayed its own distinct soul of the epoch, Zeitgeist, then, populated a distinct prototype constitution (political regimes) as an incarnation of Zeitgeist. The resulting chain of constitutions shapes Socrates Cycle--just kingship, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.

He presented it as if it were a natural (uninterrupted endogenous) passage of decay in social moral order and its incarnation, political order—almost as if it were the imperative law of gravity, as rain falling directly from the sky into the sea by the force of gravity. Nevertheless, rain can also fall from the sky to the top of a mountain, then run through its landscapes (rivers, lakes, caves) to arrive at the sea. Rain can take different paths depending on the landscape that it runs through (contingent particularity); but it will still flow from the highest place to the lowest place dictated by the imperative cause of gravity. Along this analogy, Socrates only illuminated imperative consequences manifested by the natural decay of the soul.

In doing so, first, he crafted a perfect soul, call it the Socratesian soul. Then, he let it decay uninterruptedly in five phases, or five distinct epochs. At every epoch, he profiled its corresponding decayed soul, of Zeitgeist, then, populated a distinct constitution as an incarnation of the specific soul of the generation.

Overall, this process generates five pure forms of constitutional arrangement to form Socrates Cycle: just kingship/aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny in chronological order. ("Socrates' Constitutional Cycle") It is definitely only one actualisation of many potential paths; but, as already mentioned in the introduction section, it is a special path which illustrates Socratesian natural (uninterrupted endogenous) moral decay of civilisation. In reality, the soul might decay with some external interruptions. Thus, its actual path of the transformation of social psyche would be contingent and particular, rather than imperative as Socrates illustrated. On the top of that, there are more variables than the decay in social moral order that would affect the process of actualising constitutional order.

Nevertheless, the essence of Socrates Cycle is his caveat that “the desire for power corrupts and, more than that, destroys” (Lane, 2007, p. xi) and it destroys constitutional order. In other words, if we leave social moral decay unmanaged, it could cause a series of adverse political instability and cause regime shift in constitutional arrangement. Socrates Cycle is a manifestation of its underlying endogenous cycle of Zeitgeist.

Endogenous Model: failure to reflect exogenous factors

Since it is an endogenous model, it does not take into account of exogenous factors.

An endogenous model, by definition, would have poor explanatory power for any subject which is susceptible to exogenous factors. In this light, when we consider geopolitical factors, one of exogenous factors, most states except hegemonic powerhouses are susceptible to geopolitical development in general. A hegemonic powerhouse can instigate their geopolitical strategies on other periphery states (such a case must be considered an endogenous development for the powerhouse) and possess superior pre-eminence in addressing exogenous geopolitical developments instigated by other states. That is not to say that they are free from exogenic causes.

Overall, in order to examine its intrinsic value, the use of Socrates Cycle might be restrained to the strongest hegemonic powerhouses of time, but not applied to periphery states.

As a historical precedence, the Roman Republic, the hegemonic powerhouse of her time, gravitated toward, if not exactly replicated, Socrates Cycle. This is to be discussed in another chapter going forward.

Failure to reflect evolutionary factor

In addition, it does not take into account of evolutionary factors such as institutional innovations. Needless to say, future evolutionary causes cannot be reliably identified a priori thus, by definition, cannot be incorporated into any model in advance in general. Needless to say, speculations or forecast over future evolutionary developments may be also incorporated into the analysis. That, however, would be a matter of feasibility of the modification and reliability of all the assumptions.

How about historical evolution which has unfolded since the time of Socrates? In retrospect, we can still incorporate historical evolutionary by-products into our analysis in using Socrates Cycle.

Now, let’s take a look at an example of historical institutional innovations. The form of democratic constitutional arrangement has transformed significantly since the ancient Athenian democracy.

In the classical Athens, democracy meant direct democracy, which operated through direct participation in deliberative and judiciary processes in governance. Government positions were allocated in turn by random lot. The lot system eliminated the risk of corruption in the process of appointing officers: no ordinary one could manipulate the result of the lot; on the other hand, the election process can be manipulated through either bribery or favouritism.

The Athenian style direct participation democracy by lot in turn was operated in the size of its free citizen body in an order of 50,000 – 60,000 in 430 BCE before the Peloponnesian War, while after the war 22,000 - 31,000. (Cartledge, 2016, p. 224)

“A smaller citizen body after the ravages of the Peloponnesian War meant also a smaller pool from which to draw members of the Council of 500, whose service was restricted to a maximum of two annual—and not consecutive—terms per fully adult lifetime (thirty years old and above). Most Athenians will have had to serve on the Council in the Fourth century simply in order to fill the set deme and tribal quotas.” (Cartledge, 2016, p. 224)

Naturally, as the number of citizens increases, it loses its effectiveness in guaranteeing direct participation: some people cannot have an opportunity to serve in the government during their lifetime. The larger the size of citizens, the more people cannot participate in governance. In addition, a full participation of the Athenian style democracy cannot be guaranteed in a geographically widely spread state: its citizens at remote areas would find difficulty in spending time and financial resource to travel to participate in the deliberative and judiciary processes. There is a limit in the geographical area as well as in the size of the citizen body, in which the Athenian style direct democracy can effectively operate.

The ever-expanding scale of the territory and the free citizen body of the Roman Republic definitely demanded a democratic system drastically different from Athenian democracy. Not only in number, but also in the geographical area of the coverage of its citizen body did the Roman Republic far exceed the Athenians.

In the Roman Republic, their most democratic constitutional achievement was a representative democratic system in the form of a mixed constitution, which allows elements of kingship (Consul), oligarchy (the Senate), and representative democracy (Tribunes and Assemblies) to co-exist and check and balance one another. Some intellects in antiquity—e.g. Cicero, Posidonius of Rhodes, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus—suggested that the Roman Republic sort of democratised the Spartan constitution for their own purpose to create their own (Rawson, 1969, pp. 104-105). Cut a long story short, in principle, they incorporated a stringent check and balance mechanism into their constitutional machinery. Nevertheless, in reality, the Roman election system gradually became infested by bribery and favourisism that perverted its voting process a priori.

Our contemporary democratic achievements are in multiple forms, but might be encapsulated in one simple term, liberal representative democracy: e.g. parliamentary representative system and presidential representative system. One notable difference from these two ancestors presented above is that our contemporary liberal democracy embraces human rights and civil rights of its own citizens in principle: in practice, whether it is practiced or not is a different matter.

Overall, Socrates Cycle is a product of Socrates’ retrospective reflection. These historical evolutions that has evolved since Socrates' death needs to be incorporated into our analysis along with Socrates Cycle.

Failure to reflect particularity

As mentioned earlier, Socrates only contemplated five pure forms of constitutional arrangement. In reality, there were more variations in constitutional arrangement than these five kinds in his time. He himself seemed to have acknowledged on this point, but also have defended the robustness of his analysis rationalising that these five pure forms serve as the basic prototypes. He seemed to suggest us to treat the rest of constitutional arrangements as variants or some combinations of these prototypes.

Utopian Setting of Kallipolis

Socrates started his constitutional (political regime) cycle with his utopian ‘just kingship/aristocracy’ that he calls Kallipolis. He imposed divine transcendental moral imperatives on the ruling class, Philosopher King and his auxiliaries. Its construct appears to most of our contemporary minds merely his political fantasy of neverland. This factor might need to be replaced with more realistic substitute. For a summary of Kallopolis, please visit my content through the link here: Socrates’ Constitutional Cycle.

For example, we can replace it with a more mundane form of kingship/aristocracy. In other words, instead of the divine incarnation of Kallipolis and Philosopher King, we can contemplate humanly ‘legitimate kingship/aristocracy’ which is legitimately entrusted by society. It would still demand a just governance, thus the pursuit of the common good.

All that said, despite many differences, Socrates’ narrative of Kallipolis and Philosopher King is reminiscent of the Tibetan society during the de-fact independence period between 1912 and the exile of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in 1959. Both societies imposed stringent restraints and intensive and extensive educations on the ruling classes; they also demanded all their citizens of self-discipline. Since Tibetan society does not belong to Western Civilisation, this comparison might be irrelevant. Hereby, I intended to present my speculation in order to provoke the imagination of the readers in contemplating the possibility of Kallipolis in our mundane real world: no more, no less.

Timocracy

His second regime, timocracy, contemplates a perverted aristocratic militaristic regime and reflects Socrates’ understanding of Spartan constitution. For a summary of Timocracy, please visit my content through the link here: (Socrates’ Constitutional Cycle)

We need to assess whether Sparta constitutes a prototype part of civilisation cycle or is merely a product of historical accident. We might contemplate as a substitute a more general form of perverted aristocratic regime, which also subsumes Spartan type variants.

Overall, with some understanding on its limitations, we can still benefit from the intrinsic value of Socrates Cycle within its scope. We can expand its use by additionally incorporating evolutionary and exogenous factors into our analysis and appropriately making realistic adjustments.

Section 2: Intrinsic Values and Suggested Use of Socrates Cycle

Many essential points are already presented above regarding the intrinsic value of Socrates Cycle. So, here, I would like to recapitulate these points:

Intrinsic values of Socrates' Cycle

In sum, Socrates Cycle is not a good accurate prediction model of political regime transformation, but a single-scenario-based simulation. And the underlying scenario is a special case that traces Socratesian natural (uninterrupted endogenous) decay of social moral order in a civilizational scale. And more importantly, the very intrinsic value of his discourse is his illustration of social moral order of each epoch, Zeitgeist. And Socrates Cycle is a manifestation of its underlying cycle of Zeitgeist.

It appears to me, Socrates formulated his caveats by demonstrating adverse consequences that his own hypothetical natural (uninterrupted endogenous) moral decay could bring to political order.

The intrinsic value of Socrates Cycle can be summarised in the following list:

it hypothetically traces a natural (uninterrupted endogenous) decay process of social moral order, the Socratesian soul, through one life cycle of civilisation in five epochs/generations.
it portrays Zeitgeist (psyche) of each epoch/generation.
it populates five prototype forms of constitutional order, each of which represents a constitutional incarnation of the psyche of the corresponding epoch/generation.

Suggested Use

The limitations of Socrates Cycle (SC) define the scope of its use. The list below suggests gudelines for potential use of the model.

to reflect it on the most dominant hegemonic powerhouses of time in Western Civilization; but to avoid its use on periphery states and any state of non-Western Civilisation.
to aim at mapping the current social psyche on SC: to locate its corresponding phase of SC and contemplate its prospective direction; then to compare the current political order versus the corresponding prototype constitution of the current psyche of SC.
to capture the endogenous political development of Western hegemonic powerhouses in the context of 2).
to separately incorporate evolutionary factors—such as institutional innovations as well as other types of innovations—in analysis.
to separately incorporate exogenous factors—such as geopolitical development—into analysis.
to separately incorporate contingent factors into analysis.
to separately incorporate particularities into analysis.
to replace Socrates’ unrealistic and historically uncommon scenarios with more realistic and historically common ones.
to reflect particularities of given constitutional order: Socrates contemplated only five prototype forms of constitutional order.

Notes

Note 1: Plato (or Socrates) concluded “that neither democracy nor oligarchy, nor ay other existing order, could achieve happiness or political stability for its citizens, because all of them were founded on the inherently corrupting desire for power.” (Lane, 2007, p. xii)

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References

Cartledge, P. (2016). Democracy, a life. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Lane, M. (2007). the Introduction of "Plato, the Republic". London: Penguin Books, Ltd.
Lee, D. (2007). the Republic (Opening Note). In Plato, Plato, the Republic. London: Penguin Books, Ltd.
Plato. (1997). The Republic. In J. M. Cooper, Plato Complete Works (G. Grube, & C. Reeve, Trans., pp. 971-1123). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Plato. (2007). the Republic. (D. Lee, & M. Lane, Trans.) London: Penguin Books, Ltd.
Plato. (2012). Republic. (C. Rowe, Trans.) London, England: Penguin Books, Ltd.
Plato. (2012). The Republic. (T. Griffith, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rawson, E. (1969). The Spartan tradition in European thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zeitgeist Zero Hour:Intrinsic Value and Limitations of Socrates Cycle