On Justice as Patriotism

"To have family or a city that is one's own implies the distinction between insiders and outsiders; and the outsiders are the potential enemies. Justice as helping friends and harming enemies is a peculiarly political definition of justice, and its dignity stands or falls with the dignity of political life. Every nation has wars and must defend itself; it can only do so if it has citizens who care for it and are willing to kill the citizens of the other nations. If the distinction between friends and enemies, and the inclination to help the former and harm the latter, were obliterated from the heart and mind of man, political life would be impossible" (Bloom, "Interpretive Essay" in The Republic of Plato, p. 318).

Reading Plato will never be out of date. What makes him a classic is the fact that in his work, particularly in his Republic, he tackles most of the issues regarding the problematical nature of politics. The first book of this work opens with a dialogue between Socrates and three other interlocutors discussing the notion of Justice, which will be the object that the entire work will aim at. For Justice seems, at least in Ancient times, the political good par excellence. The three other main characters of this first book are Cephalus, his son Polemarchus and the irate Thrasymachus.

The quoted text refers to Polemarchus argument on what justice means. He arrives at the conclusion (no without being insistently questioned by Socrates) that Justice as the virtue of making good to your friends, and doing wrong to your enemies. Now, independently of Socrates final arguments, I would like to wonder around this notion, because it seems to be the central argument of patriotism. Starting, this concept may strike us as irrational and cruel, because our Western christianized culture of universal peace and fraternity completely contradict such statement. But let us not be misguided by our liberal illusions of how the would ought to be from our moral view, and lets pay attention to what it says about the nature of politics.

It came to my mind that the contemporary political thinker that defend such an argument in similar language is the German jurist Carl Schmitt. He argues that the relation that determines political phenomena is the friend and enemy relationship. That to presume sovereignty from a political community, it must be capable to delimit who are their friends, either by referring by friends the citizens that form the political body or the external allies, and separates them from a common enemy, which for sure refers to other threatening political communities or internal sentiment of treachery. When a polity is unable to define by itself from any other compelling polity, perhaps would that means that the former enjoys no freedom at all and cannot be really called sovereign state. This ideas, summed with the accidental condition that Schmitt belonged to the Nazi Party in Germany, is viewed today with much precaution or skepticism. Apart from all of that, I do think there is something to be concluded from Schmitt's account of the political, as from Polemarchus' argument on Justice. There is something here that is real, and that all ways has been.

The interesting thing about the entire debate of Justice in Plato is that it appears to be totally detached from the notion of Freedom. A feature that today we Westerns consider quintessential, that Freedom is a necessary precondition for any kind of substantive Justice. Justice, in the Classical tradition, doesn't seems to come by the side of Freedom. Maybe because the state of freedom and slavery for the Ancients was more of an accidental condition than the Modern concept of inherent rights.

In any case, a profound lecture of Plato is all ways a good start to think about our conceptions and ideas from a critical perspective; specially when it appears that all that seems to be debatable about politics was already treated somehow by the Ancient Greeks.