THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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others those who make jewellery for women.’ And a higher happiness was only granted to the Golden Age in so far as people in those days exploited the advantages
of their situation in order to gain higher knowledge. So there is no room for any Saturnalia in Plato's temple state, no carnival of nature, none of art and superfluous
beauty: a thoroughly ruled world arises, the rational structure of a permanent realm. Its people have a Doric toughness, its order remains precisely that of Spartan
aristocratism. Even the holding in common of women and other things (among the upper castes), even this so apparently dangerous similarity of Plato's ideal state to the
anarchy of Cynics and Hedonists stems from the Spartan camp. In Sparta too an elderly man could supply his wife with another man, and an unmarried man could
borrow the wife of his friend; in Sparta too the possession of gold and silver was forbidden the warrior caste, the provisions and tools of others could be shared. The
Gerusia though, Lycurgus' Council of Elders, only provided the framework for the upper caste in Plato's state, the philosophical caste; for even the eldest members of
the Gerusia were not Plato's academicians, quite the opposite. So when Plato called for the Philosopher Ruler, when he taught that the state would not become a good
one until the regents became philosophers or the philosophers became regents, the anti­intellectual model of Sparta is certainly abandoned in this one point, as far as the
content of the framework provided by members of the Gerusia is concerned. But it is noteworthy that even the caste of philosophers in Plato's utopia does not last: the
deeply disappointed work of his old age, the ‘Laws’, wholly does without an aristocracy of education. Instead, in this work the ideal society is posited entirely as a
police state, now incidentally retaining private property and marriage. The ‘Laws’ are instructive as a restrained, and as it were burnt­fingered social utopia; they
content themselves with the design of a second­ or even third­best state. Of course in this diminished ideal, precisely because it is diminished, the growth of reaction is
particularly strong, extending as far as a criminal law against political and particularly cultural innovators; so that it almost seems as if even Plato — who had become
highly conservative as a result of his pessimism — no longer regarded such an ideal of order as — an ideal. However, definition of the state and criticism of the state in
the ‘Republic’, and even more so in the ‘Laws’, are exclusively orientated around the idea of tiered architecture, tiered human architecture.
And what is more, this structure is already supposed to be exactly predetermined in the human predisposition. Man accordingly has three