X + 

What is the business of the Guardian? How does Plato’s ideal statesman differ from Julius Caesar or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt? + 

The business of the Guardian is to manufacture liberty. The petty laws, regulations, and reforms with which the ordinary statesman occupies himself had nothing to do, in Plato’s mind, with the essential business of the ruler. So Plato expressly foregoes making laws to regulate marketing, the affairs of industry, graft, bribery, theft, and so forth; and he leaves these matters with the curt indication that men can be left to themselves to devise on a voluntary basis the rules of the game for the different occupations; and that it is not the business of the Guardian to meddle in such matters. In a well-founded state, a great number of minor maladjustments would simply fall out of existence; whilst in any other state, all the tinkering and reforming in the world is quite powerless to amend its organic defects. Those make-believe statesmen who try their hand at legislation and “are always fancying that by reforming they will make an end of the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind,” do not know that in reality they are trying to cut away the heads of a hydra. + 

The real concern of the Guardians is with the essential constitution of the state. The means that they employ to perfect this constitution are breeding, vocational selection, and education. “If once a republic is set a-going, it proceeds happily, increasing as a circle. And whilst good education and nurture are preserved, they produce good geniuses; and good geniuses, partaking of such education, produce still better than the former, as well in other respects, as with reference to propagation, as in the case of other animals.” All the activities of the Republic are to be patterned after the utopia which the Guardians see with their inward eye. So gradually the community becomes a living unity; and it exhibits the health of that which is organically sound. + 