Thrasymachus and the Order of Pleonexia

Throughout the Platonic corpus, one finds that Socrates spends much of his time engaged in dialectic with the sophists. Among the most famous of these characters is Thrasymachus, the character who dominates the first book of The Republic. Thrasymachus’s world view is a topic of heated disagreement among scholars. Many different interpretations have been proposed, some at complete odds with others. In this paper I will briefly explain some of these interpretations, and then advance my own. I believe that Thrasymachus’s doctrine is driven by the primacy of self-interest (pleonexia). This pleonexia is not seen as a vice, but is in fact the predominant force that guides human existence. This creates an order in which the strongest thrive and the weak die off, which is the way Thrasymachus believes things should be according to the ways of the universe. Thrasymachus goes beyond inconsistency, descriptive observation, legalism, and amoralism; he is an immoralist. Before turning to my own exegesis, it is useful to look at what others have been saying about Thrasymachus. One view that has been put forward is that Thrasymachus in fact makes no consistent argument. Joseph Maguire is the most notable proponent of this interpretation. He narrows down Thrasymachus’s doctrine to contain three propositions regarding justice: the advantage of the stronger, obedience to laws, and the good of another (Maguire 143). The crux of his argument is that the third statement cannot be reconciled with the first two. “Clearly,” Maguire points out, “. . . ‘the advantage of the stronger’ . . . is not compatible with (3) ‘justice is another’s advantage’, unless ‘another’ is defined as the ruler . . . But this would leave us with the same problem we already had; viz., that