The Republic’s City and Its Others

Plato’s Republic is set in an Athens where non-Greeks are seen as enemies, and the noble lie encourages citizens to view themselves as blood-relations, creating a community relieved of the need to engage with otherness. Despite this, the dialogue uses the foreigner to define its population and posits the foreigner as the first reader, for whose subjectivity the new civic order’s merits disappear. However, this foreigner differs from the classic Greek version, with Plato’s Republic redefining it as one who is not knowing instead of the one not known. Foreignness, in this context, works as a category for understanding anyone who fails to appreciate the regime of knowledge. Polemarchus and Thrasymachus, as the foreign auditors within the Republic, are silenced early on but later ask about the city from an outsider’s perspective. Their question registers a fear of mother-son incest among the guardians, evoking the tyrant. The dialogue excludes outsiders because they will never see the city as it sees itself. Nevertheless, the Republic, by casting its people as foreign whenever their knowledge fails, fixes itself as indistinguishable from tyranny, even in the minds of its own citizens.