Socrates and the Transition problem.
By a ‘transition problem,’' I mean the challenge of how to move from an imperfect status quo to an ideal or vastly improved polity and, in particular, with a population raised under bad institutions (the status quo). There are (at least) three species of the transition problem: the first version turns on the challenge of finding or developing the right sort of people (with the right education or dispositions, etc.) to get us from here to there and then to have the skills and temperament to make the new circumstances work out well. The second version is to create mechanisms such that the incentives of policy-makers line up with the goals to be pursued and/or the true interests of people/constituents and how to get from here (under bad institutions) to there (the institutions with the right mechanisms). The third version is a collective action problem when a population raised under bad institutions may rationally prefer a bad status quo if getting to the better state involves high costs to them. Of course, in practice these three versions can be blended in various ways, and they themselves may be distinguished in further kinds.*
In Book 5 of the Republic, Socrates explicitly introduces a version of a transition problem:
Next, it seems, [I] we must try to discover and point out what it is that is now badly managed in our cities, and [II] that prevents them from being so governed [as we propose], and [III] what is the smallest change that would bring a state to this manner of government, [IV] preferably a change in one thing, if not, then in two, and, failing that, the fewest possible in number and the slightest in potency.—473b (Shorey translation) [Roman numerals added to facilitate discussion]
Socrates identifies three phases here: first, a diagnostic one on the roots of present imperfection/injustice [I]; that aims to find the main causes that blocks change for the better [II]; the simplest path toward the just city or the Kallipolis (III). In addition, he articulates a criterion that governs (III) and, perhaps the removal of (II), that is, one that has fewest major social/institutional changes that are also the least disruptive [viz. IV].
Here, Socrates clearly assumes a tight connection between the causes of what we might call political or structural injustice and the mechanisms that prevent proper governance. This clearly anticipates Rousseau; and Mencius seems to have thought similarly. Views like this presuppose a kind of trickle-down of virtue or justice from the ruling order.
It is worth noting that [IV] is a rather conservative criterion; it exhibits non-trivial status quo bias or path dependence. In addition, is also very unlike modern decision rules that emphasize, say, probability of success in light of possible outcomes (or risk/reward).
That path dependence found in [IV] is actually an effect of the diagnostic phase. In Republic Books 8 and 9, especially, we learn that there are five different kind of polities (reflecting different character types), including many that are hybrids (544d). And so one might expect that each polity would generate a different connection between the source of disorder and what needs to be done to change things.
Somewhat surprising, it seems that Socrates’ proposed mechanisms to resolve the transition problem remain the same in each imperfect status quo. And these involve only two steps: first, philosophers must be made to rule (499b-c): “either city nor polity nor man either will ever be perfected until some chance compels this uncorrupted remnant of philosophers;” And, second, as he notes near the end of Book 7, once in power the philosopher-kings exile everyone over the age of ten and start educating the young (540e/541a).
I want to take these in reverse order. The second mechanism is, while ruthless, not without precedent. We are, unfortunately, all too familiar with ethnic cleansing and separating children from parents. If the status quo is bad enough, it’s not wholly impossible that parents will view the opportunity being offered to their children in favorable terms. (Think of Solomon and the two mothers at 1 Kings 3:16–28.) Greeks certainly were familiar with the bad version of such practices after conquest of a polity (something Socrates inveighs against earlier).
This mechanism also offers solutions to the first and third kind of transition problems. It drastically removes the temptation to stick with the status quo, and it offers a path toward creating a new people that can make a just polity. If one is inclined toward functional interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, one may compare this to the forty years of wandering in the Sinai which effectively removed a people used to bondage.
Of course, putting it like this also puts the spotlight back on Socrates’ first proposed mechanism. Why think there could be philosophers wise enough to rule properly without having been educated in a Kallipolis? There is, in fact, plenty of evidence Socrates thinks a bad education is especially corrupting for would be philosophers (see e.g., 428e ff.) So, this generates a kind of chicken and egg problem for Socrates. This is compounded by the fact that such philosophers have to be compelled to rule, but the people who would understand the need for such force and capable of applying it may not be around.
Socrates himself feels the pull of the problem because he makes really an extraordinary set of claims in light of it:
Once we have expanded time and space without limit pretty much any social configuration that can be coherently though may well indeed be thought possible in some sense. (There are anticipatory hints, here and in Laws III, of Stoic views on eternal return.) Socrates clearly allows non-Greeks to produce possible philosopher-kings (something that inspired medieval Muslim philosophers to suggest that Muhammed fits the bill of a philosopher king, and true religion could provide both a natural education in philosophy, and allow democracies to give rise to philosopher kings).
There is, thus, a formal sense in which Socrates ‘solves’ the first kind of transition problem once one allows that there is no sufficient reason true would-be-philosopher kings couldn’t be born into circumstances that will allow them to shape a polity into existence (see also 592b). But it is also fair to say that that if one wants the answer to a transition problem to be somewhat action guiding this ‘solution’ to it is not especially encouraging.
*See my "Political epistemology: Scheall and Transition Problems” Cosmos & Taxis 9.3 (2021), where I credit Serene Khader for helping me think of it this way.