The Avdéevs were a well-to-do family, and the old man had some savings hidden away; but hewould on no account have consented to touch what he had laid by. Now, however, his old woman, havingheard him mention their younger son, made up her mind again to ask him to send him at least a roubleafter selling the oats. This she did. As soon as the young people had gone to work for the proprietor, andthe old folk were left alone together, she persuaded him to send Peter a rouble out of the oats-money.

"Serógin..." said Avdéev, moving his eyes with difficulty towards Serógin, "will you write? . . . Wellthen, write so: 'Your son,' say, 'Peter, has given orders that you should live long. 1 He envied hisbrother'. . . I told you about that to-day ... 'and now he is himself glad. Don't worry him. Let him live.God grant it him. I am glad!' Write that."Having said this he was long silent, with his eyes fixed on Panóv."And did you find your pipe?" he suddenly asked. Panóv did not reply."Your pipe ... your pipe! I mean, have you found it?" Avdéev repeated."It was in my bag.""That's right!... Well, and now give me a candle.... I am going to die," said Avdéev.Just then Poltorátsky came in to inquire after his soldier."How goes it, my lad! Badly?" said he.Avdéev closed his eyes and shook his head negatively. His broad-cheeked face was pale and stern. Hedid not reply, but again said to Panóv,—"Bring a candle... I am going to die."A wax taper was placed in his hand, but his fingers would not bend, so it was placed between them,and was held up for him.Poltorátsky went away, and five minutes later the orderly put his ear to Avdeev's heart and said that allwas over

"What a number of souls the damned fellow has destroyed! And now see what a fuss they will make ofhim!"

When his comrades approached him he was lying prone, holding his wounded stomach with bothhands, and rocking himself with a rhythmic motion, moaned softly. He belonged to Poltoratsky'scompany, and Poltorátsky, seeing a group of soldiers collected, rode up to them.

"What do you want?" cried Hadji Murád. "Do you wish to take me!. . . Take me, then!" and he raisedhis rifle. The men from the aoul stopped, and Hadji Murád, rifle in hand, rode down into the ravine. Themounted men followed him, but did not draw any nearer. When Hadji Murád had crossed to the otherside of the ravine, the men shouted to him that he should hear what they had to say. In reply he fired hisrifle and put his horse to a gallop. When he reined it in, his pursuers were no longer within hearing, andthe crowing of the cocks could also no longer be heard; only the murmur of the water in the forestsounded more distinctly, and now and then came the cry of an owl. The black wall of forest appearedquite close. It was in this forest that his murids awaited him

"I always agree to everything," replied the Adjutant, very pleased that the Princess—who couldnot play at all—was now going to play against him

In the Caucasus in those days each company chose men to manage its own commissariat. Theyreceived 6 roubles 50 kopeks a month per man1 from the treasury, and catered for the company. Theyplanted cabbages, made hay, had their own carts, and prided themselves on their well-fed horses. Thecompany's money was kept in a chest, of which the commander had the key; and it often happened thathe borrowed from the chest. This had just happened again, and that was what the soldiers were talkingabout. The morose soldier, Nikítin, wished to demand an account from the commander, while Panóvand Avdéev considered it unnecessary

There will be oats to buy and boots to get towards spring. The money will be wanted, and what if he'spocketed it?" insisted the dissatisfied one.

adji Murád, repeating the customary "Selaam aleikum!" uncovered hisface. "Aleikum, selaam!" said the old man, recognizing Hadji Murád and smiling with his toothless mouth;and rising up on his thin legs, he began thrusting his feet into the wooden-heeled slippers that stood bythe chimney. Then he leisurely slipped his arms into the sleeves of his crumpled sheepskin, and goingto the ladder that leant against the roof, he descended backwards. While he dressed, and as he climbeddown, he kept shaking his head on its thin, shrivelled sunburnt neck, and mumbling something with histoothless mouth. As soon as he reached the ground he hospitably seized Hadji Muráďs bridle and rightstirrup; but the strong, active murid who accompanied Hadji Murád had quickly dismounted and, mo-tioning the old man aside, took his place. Hadji Murád also dismounted and, walking with a slightlimp, entered under the veranda. A boy of fifteen, coming quickly out of the door, met him andwonderingly fixed his sparkling eyes, black as ripe sloes, on the new arrivals.

On a cold November evening Hadji Murád1 rode into Makhket, a hostile Chechen aoul,2 that was filledwith the scented smoke of burning kizyák3 and that lay some fifteen miles from Russian territory. Thestrained chant of the muezzin had just ceased, and through the clear mountain air, impregnated withkizyák smoke, above the lowing of the cattle and the bleating of the sheep that were dispersing amongthe sáklyas4 (which were crowded together like the cells of a honeycomb), could be clearly heard theguttural voices of disputing men, and sounds of women's and children's voices rising from near thefountain below

ustralian aborigines say"the smell of the white man is killing us." I

Often when the radical voice speaks about domination we are speaking tothose who dominate.

d. We fear those who speak about us who do not speak to us andwith u

am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginalitywhich is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses assite of resistance - as location of radical openness and p

Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial foroppressed, exploited, colonised people. If

ne lives. As such I was not speakinggive up or surrender as part of moving instays in, clings to even because it nourishethe possibility of radical perspective fralternative

There were laws to ensure our return.ished. Living as we did - on the edge -reality. We looked both from the outsideour attention on the centre as well as omode of seeing reminded us of the exismade up of both margin and centre. Ourawareness of the separation between maacknowledgement that we we

ts a counter language. Wcoloniser's tongue it has undergone a trancha

I am waiting for them to stop talkingscribing how important it is to be ableimportant what we speak about but hoabout the "other" is also a mask, an oppspace where our words would be if we wewer

formed white folks. Everywour voices, to co-opt and undermine them. Mnever "arrive" or "can't stay". Back in thoseourselves in despair, drowning in nihilismevery post-modern mod

She did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she hadlearned it somewhere, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” She did not say itwith the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed,but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fear. This made mecolder and more murderous than ever. I felt I had to do something withmy hands. I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neckbetween my hands.

She began to cry the moment we entered the room and she saw himlying there, all shriveled and still, like a little black monkey. The great,gleaming apparatus which fed him and would have compelled him to bestill even if he had been able to move brought to mind, not beneficence,but torture; the tubes entering his arm made me think of pictures I hadseen when a child, of Gulliver, tied down by the pygmies on that island.My aunt wept and wept, there was a whistling sound in my father’sthroat; nothing was said; he could not spea

I had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on horseback,on corners, everywhere, always two by two.

And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil poisedincongruously over her pad, and repeated the formula: “... don’t serveNegroes here.

. And it did begin to work on mymind, of course; I began to be afraid to go anywhere and to compensatefor this I went places to which I really should not have gone and where,God knows, I had no desire to be

I acted in New Jersey as I had alwaysacted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself—I had to actthat way—with results that were, simply, unbelievable

She was really a very sweet and generouswoman and went to a great deal of trouble to be of help to us,particularly during one awful winter

I began to wonder what it couldhave felt like for such a man to have had nine children whom he couldbarely feed. He used to make little jokes about our poverty, which never,of course, seemed very funny to us; they could not have seemed veryfunny to him, either, or else our all too feeble response to them wouldnever have caused such rages

I think—he was very black—with his blackness and hisbeauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did notknow that he was beautiful.

He had been born in New Orleans and had been a quite young manthere during the time that Louis Armstrong, a boy, was running errandsfor the dives and honky-tonks of what was always presented to me asone of the most wicked of cities—to this day, whenever I think of NewOrleans, I also helplessly think of Sodom and Gomorrah

As we can see from these cases, the w itch-hunt grew in a social environm ent wherethe “better sorts” were living in constant fear o f the “lower classes,” w ho could certainly be expected to harbor evil thoughts because in this period they were losingeverything they had.

O ne finds the same pattern in the case o f the women w ho were “presented” tocourt at Chelmsford, W indsor and Osyth. M other Waterhouse, hanged at Chelmsford in1566, was a “very poor woman,” described as begging for some cake or butter and “fallingout” with many o f her neighbors (Rosen 1969:76—82). Elizabeth Stile, M other Devell,M other Margaret and M other D utton, executed at W indsor in 1579, were also poor widows; M other Margaret lived in the almshouse, like their alleged leader M other Seder, andall o f them w ent around begging and presumably taking revenge w hen denied, (ibid.:83—91). O n being refused some old yeast, Elizabeth Francis, one o f the Chelmsfordwitches, cursed a neighbor w ho later developed a great pain in her head. M otherStaunton suspiciously murmured, going away, w hen denied yeast by a neighbor, uponwhich the neighbor’s child fell vehemendy sick (ibid.: 96). Ursula Kemp, hanged at Osythin 1582, made one Grace lame after being denied some cheese; she also caused a swellingin the bottom o f Agnes Letherdale’s child after the latter denied her some scouring sand.Alice Newman plagued Johnson, the Collector for the poor, to death after he refused172

T he political nature o f the w itch-hunt is further demonstrated by the fact thatboth Catholic and Protestant nations, at war against each other in every other respect,joined arms and shared arguments to persecute witches. Thus, it is no exaggeration toclaim that the witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nationstates, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification. For, crossing all boundaries, the w itch-hunt spread from France and Italy toGermany, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and Sweden

W itch-hunting also took hold in Africa, where it survives today as a key instrumento f division in many countries especially those once implicated in the slave trade, likeNigeria and Southern Africa. Here, too, witch-hunting has accompanied the decline in thestatus o f women brought about by the rise o f capitalism and the intensifying struggle forresources which, in recent years, has been aggravated by the imposition o f the neo-liberalagenda. As a consequence o f the life-and-death competition for vanishing resources, scoreso f women — generally old and p o o r— have been hunted down in the 1990s in Northern'Transvaal, where seventy were burned just in the first four months o f1994 (Diario de Mexico:1994). W itch-hunts have also been reported in Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, in the 1980sand 1990s, concomitant with the imposition by the International Monetary Fund and theWorld Bank o f the policy o f structural adjustment which has led to a new round o f enclosures, and caused an unprecedented impoverishment among the population.

W itch-hunting in America continued in waves through the end o f the 17th century,when the persistence o f demographic decline and increased political and economic security on the side o f the colonial power-structure combined to put an end to the perse-cution.Thus, in the same region that had witnessed the great anti-idolatry campaigns o fthe 16th and 17th centuries, by the 18th, the Inquisition had renounced any attempts toinfluence the moral and religious beliefs o f the population, apparently estimating thatthey could no longer pose a danger to colonial rale

As for its claims, we can observe that the history o f Europe before the Conquestis sufficient proof that the Europeans did not have to cross the oceans to find the will toexterminate those standing in their way. It is also possible to account for the chronologyo f the w itch-hunt in Europe w ithout resorting to the New World impact hypothesis,since the decades between the 1560s and 1620s saw a widespread impoverishment andsocial dislocations throughout most o f western Europe

s. But the Christian notion o f the devil was unknown to them.Nevertheless, by the 17th century, under the impact o f torture, intense persecution, and“forced acculturation” the Andean women arrested, mostly old and poor, were accusingthemselves o f the same crimes with which women were being charged in the Europeanwitch trials: pacts and copulation w ith the devil, prescribing herbal remedies, using ointments, flying through the air, making wax images

By persecuting women as witches, then, the Spaniards targeted both the practitioners o f the old religion and the instigators o f anti-colonial revolt, while attempting toredefine “the spheres o f activity in w hich indigenous wom en could participate

. W hile in the 1550s people could openly acknowledge theirs and theircommunity’s attachment to the traditional religion, by the 1650s the crimes o f whichthey were accused revolved around “witchcraft,” a practice now presuming a secretivebehavior, and they increasingly resembled the accusations made against witches inEurope. In the campaign launched in 1660, in the Huarochiri area, for instance, “thecrimes uncovered by the authorities... dealt w ith curing, finding lost goods, and otherforms o f w hat m ight be generally called village ‘witchcraft’.’

The threat posed by the Taquionqos was a serious one since, by calling for a pan-Andean unification o f the huacas, the movement marked the beginning o f a new senseo f identity capable o f overcoming the divisions connected with the traditional organization o f the ayullus (family unit). In Stern’s words, it marked the first time that the people o f the Andes began to think o f themselves as one people, as “Indians” (Stern 1982:59) and, in fact, the movement spread widely, reaching “as far north as Lima, as far eastas Cuzco, and over the high puna o f the South to La Paz in contemporary Bolivia(Spalding 1984:246)

The need to squeeze more work from the aboriginal populations largely derivedfrom the situation at home where the Spanish Crown was literally floating on the Americanbullion, which bought food and goods no longer produced in Spain. In addition, the plundered wealth financed the Crown’s European territorial expansion

From then on, reproductive crimes featured prominently in the trials. By the 17thcentury witches were accused o f conspiring to destroy the generative power o f humansand animals, o f procuring abortions, and o f belonging to an infanticidal sect devoted tokilling children o r offering them to the devil. In the popular imagination as well, thewitch came to be associated w ith a lecherous old woman, hostile to new life, w ho fedupon infant flesh o r used children’s bodies to make her magical potions — a stereotypelater popularized by children’s books

There is no need, however, for such agnosticism, nor do we have to decide whetherthe witch hunters truly believed in the charges which they leveled against their victimso r cynically used them as instruments o f social repression. I f we consider the historicalcontext in which the w itch-hunt occurred, the gender and class o f the accused, and theeffects o f the persecution, then we must conclude that w itch-hunting in Europe was anattack on w om en’s resistance to the spread o f capitalist relations and the power thatwomen had gained by virtue o f their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and theirability to heal

The witch-hunt was also the first persecution in Europe that made use o f a multi-media propaganda to generate a mass psychosis among the population

Yet, the dimensions o f the massacreshould have raised some suspicions, as hundreds o f thousands o f w om en were burned,hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries.

Feminists were quick to recognize that hundreds o f thousandso f women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruelest tortures unlessthey posed a challenge to the power structure.

The great medical passion o f the time, the analysis of excrements — from whichmanifold deductions were drawn on the psychological tendencies o f the individual(vices, virtues) (Hunt 1970:143—46) —• is also to be traced back to this conception o fthe body as a receptacle o f filth and hidden dangers. Clearly, this obsession with humanexcrements reflected in part the disgust that the middle class was beginning to feel forthe non-productive aspects o f the body — a disgust inevitably accentuated in an urbanenvironment where excrements posed a logistic problem, in addition to appearing aspure wast

The great medical passion o f the time, the analysis of excrements — from whichmanifold deductions were drawn on the psychological tendencies o f the in

B ut the definition o f a new relation w ith the body did not remain at a purely ideological level. Many practices began to appear in daily life to signal the deep transformations occurring in this domain: the use o f cutlery, the development o f shame w ith respectto nakedness, the advent o f “manners” that attempted to regulate how one laughed,walked, sneezed, how one should behave at the table, and to what extent one could sing,joke, play (Elias 1978:129

Yet, the struggle against this “great beast” was not solely directed against the “lowersort o f people.” It was also interiorized by the dominant classes in the batde they wagedagainst their own “natural state.” As we have seen, no less than Prospero, the bourgeoisietoo had to recognize that “ [t]his thing o f darkness is mine,” that is, that Caliban was parto f itse

A significant element in this context was the condemnation as malefidum o f abortion and contraception, which consigned the female body — the uterus reduced to amachine for the reproduction o f labor — into the hands o f the state and the medicalprofessio

The incompatibility o f magic w ith the capitalist work-discipline and the requirement of social control is one o f the reasons why a campaign o f terror was launched againstit by the state — a terror applauded w ithout reservations by many w ho are presentlyconsidered among the founders o f scientific rationalism: Jean Bodin, Mersenne, themechanical philosopher and member o f the Royal Society Richard Boyle, and N ew ton’steacher, Isaac Barr

Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalization o f work, since magic appeared as an illicit form o f power and an instrument to obtainwhat one wanted without work, that is, a refusal o f work in action. “Magic kills industry,”lamented Francis Bacon, admitting that nothing repelled him so m uch as the assumptionthat one could obtain results w ith a few idle expedients, rather than with the sweat o f one’sbrow (Bacon 1870:38

W hat died was the concept o f the body as a receptacle o f magical powers that hadprevailed in the medieval wo

In Mechanical Philosophy we perceive a new bourgeois spirit that calculates,classifies, makes distinctions, and degrades the body only in order to rationalize its faculties, aiming not just at intensifying its subjection but at maximizing its social utility(Ibid.: 137-38). Far from renouncing the body,mechanical theorists seek to conceptualize it in ways that make its operations intelligible and controllable.Thus the sense o f pride(rather than commiseration) w ith which Descartes insists that “this machine” (as he persistently calls the body in the Treatise o f Man) is just an automaton, and its death is nomore to be m ourned than the breaking o f a

But while the body emerged as the main protagonist in the philosophical andmedical scenes, a striking feature o f these investigations is the degraded conception theyformed o f it. T he anatomy “theatre” 13 discloses to the public eye a disenchanted, desecrated body, which only in principle can be conceived as the site o f the soul, but actually is treated as a separate reality (Galzigna 1978:163-64).14To the eye o f the anatomistthe body is a factory, as shown by the tide that AndreasVesalius gave to his epochal workon the “dissecting industry”: De humani corporisfabrica (1543). In Mechanical Philosophy,the body is described by analogy w ith the machine, often with emphasis on its inertia.T he body is conceived as brute matter, wholly divorced from any rational qualities: itdoes not know, does not want, does not feel. T he body is a pure “collection o f m embers” Descartes claims in his 1634 Discourse on Method (1973,Vol. 1 ,152). H e is echoedby Nicholas Malebranche who, in the Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion (1688),raises the crucial question “Can a body think?” to prompdy answer,“N o, beyond a doubt,for all the modifications o f such an extension consist only in certain relations o f distance;and it is obvious that such relations are not perceptions, reasonings, pleasures, desires, feelings, in a word, thoughts” (Popkin 1966: 280). For Hobbes, as well, the body is a conglomerate o f mechanical motions that, lacking autonomous power, operates on the basiso f an external causation, in a play o f attractions and aversions where everything is regulated as in an autom aton (Leviathan Part I, ChapterVI

T h e answer here is that an im portant factor in the devaluation o f w om en’s laborwas the campaign that craft workers m ounted, starting in the late 15th century, toexclude female workers from their work-shops, presumably to protect themselvesfrom the assaults o f the capitalist merchants who were employing women at cheaperrates

Exemplary o f this trend was the family o f the cottage workers in the putting-outsystem. Far from shunning marriage and family-making, male cottage workers dependedon it, for a wife could “help” them w ith the work they would do for the merchants,while caring for their physical needs, and providing them w ith children, w ho from anearly age could be employed at the loom o r in some subsidiary occupation. Thus, evenin times o f population decline, cottage workers apparently continued to multiply; theirfamilies were so large that a contemporary 17*-century Austrian, looking at those living in his village, described them as packed in their homes like sparrows on a rafter.Whatstands out in this type o f arrangement is that though the wife worked side-by-side w ithher husband, she too producing for the market, it was the husband w ho now receivedher wage. This was true also for other female workers once they married. In England “amarried m an.. .was legally entided to his wife’s earnings” even w hen the jo b she did wasnursing or breast-feeding. Thus, w hen a parish employed women to do this kind o f job,the records “frequendy hid (their) presence as workers” registering the payment madein the m en’s names. “W hether the payment was made to the husband o r to the wifedepended on the whim o f the clerk”

Nevertheless — though the housework done by proletarian wom en was reducedto a minimum, and proletarian wom en had always to work for the market — w ithin theworking-class community o f the transition period we already see the emergence o f thesexual division o f labor that was to becom e typical o f the capitalist organization o f work.At its center was an increasing differentiation between male and female labor, as the tasksperformed by wom en and m en became m ore diversified and, above all, became the carriers o f different social relations.

Women were accused o f being unreasonable, vain, wild, wasteful. Especially blamedwas the female tongue, seen as an instrument o f insubordination. But the main female villain was the disobedient wife, who, together w ith the “scold,” the “witch,” and the “w hore”was the favorite target o f dramatists, popular w riters, and moralists

So closely integrated were the lives o f the enslaved laborers in America and wagedlaborers in Europe that in the Caribbean islands, where slaves were given plots o f land(“provision grounds”) to cultivate for their own use, how m uch land was allotted tothem, and how m uch time was given to them to cultivate it, varied in proportion to theprice o f sugar on the world-market (Morrissey 1989: 51—59) — plausibly determinedby the dynamics o f workers’ wages and workers’ struggle over reproduction.It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the integration o f slave labor inthe production o f the European waged proletariat created a community o f interestsbetween European workers and the metropolitan capitalists, presumably cemented bytheir com m on desire for cheap im ported goods

As Mary C ondren has pointed out in The Serpent and the Goddess (1989), a study o fthe penetration o f Christianity into Celtic Ireland, the C hurch’s attempt to regulatesexual behavior had a long history in Europe. From a very early period (afterChristianity became a state religion in the 4th century), the clergy recognized thepower that sexual desire gave women over men, and persistently tried to exorcise it byidentifying holiness w ith avoidance o f wom en and sex. Expelling women from anym om ent o f the liturgy and from the administration o f the sacraments; trying to usurpw om en’s life-giving, magical powers by adopting a feminine dress; and making sexuality an object o f shame — all these were the means by which a patriarchal caste triedto break the power o f wom en and erotic attraction. In this process, “sexuality wasinvested w ith a new significance.... [It] became a subject for confession, where theminutest details o f one’s most intimate bodily functions became a topic for discussion”and where “the different aspects o f sex were split apart into thought, word, intention,involuntary urges, and actual deeds o f sex to form a science o f sexuality” (Condren1989: 86—87).

As women gained more autonomy, their presence in social life began to be recordedmore frequently: in the sermons o f the priests w ho scolded their indiscipline (Casagrande1978); in the records o f the tribunals where they went to denounce those who abused them(S. C ohn 1981); in the city ordinances regulating prostitution (Henriques 1966); amongthe thousands o f non-combatants w ho followed the armies (Hacker 1981); and above all,in the new popular movements, especially that o f the heretics

But in the city, w om en’ssubordination to male tutelage was reduced, as they could now live alone, or w ith theirchildren as heads o f families, or could form new communities, often sharing theirdwellings w ith other women. W hile usually the poorest members o f urban society, intime women gained access to many occupations that later would be considered malejobs. In the medieval towns, women worked as smiths, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, hat-makers, ale-brewers, wool-carders, and retailers (Shahar 1983: 189—200; King1991:64—67).“In Frankfurt, there were approximately 200 occupations in which womenparticipated between 1300 and 1500” (Williams and Echols 2000: 53). In England, seventy-two out o f eighty-five guilds included women among their members. Some guilds,including silk-making, were dominated by them; in others, female employment was ashigh as that o f m en.14 By the 14* century, women were also becoming schoolteachersas well as doctors and surgeons, and were beginning to compete w ith university-trainedmen, gaining at times a high reputation. Sixteen female doctors — among them severalJewish women specialized in surgery or eye therapy — were hired in the 14* centuryby the municipality o f Frankfurt which, like other city administrations, offered its population a system o f public health-care. Female doctors, as well as midwives or sagefemmes,were dominant in obstetrics, either in the pay o f city governments or supporting themselves w ith the compensation they received from their patients. After the Caesarian cutwas introduced in the 13* century, female obstetrics were the only ones who practicedit (Opitz 1996:370-71)

It was the lord w ho commanded w om en’s w ork and social relations, deciding,for instance, w hether a widow should rem arry and w ho should be her spouse, in someareas even claiming the ius primae noctis — the right to sleep w ith a serf’s wife on herwedding night

T he authority o f male serfs over their female relatives was further limited by the fact that the land was generally given to the family unit, and wom en notonly worked on it but could dispose o f the products o f their labor, and did n o t haveto depend on their husbands for support. T h e partnership o f the wife in land possession was so well understood in England that “ [w]hen a villein couple m arried it wascom m on for the m an to com e and tu rn the land back to the lord, taking it again inboth his name and that o f his w ife

Then it would be appropriate, Glaucon, to prescribe this sub-ject in our legislation and to persuade those who are going to take part inwhat is most important in the city to go in for calculation and take it up,not as laymen do, but staying with it until they reach the point at whichthey see the nature of the numbers by means of understanding itself; notlike tradesmen and retailers, caring about it for the sake of buying and sell-ing, but for the sake of war and for ease in turning the soul itself aroundfrom becoming to truth and being

G LAUCON: But surely the visual perception of it has just that feature, sincewe do see the same thing as one and as an unlimited number at the sametime.S OCRATES: Then if this is true of the number one, won’t it also be true ofall numbers?

. But if beggars—people hungry for private goods oftheir own—go into public life, thinking that the good is there for the seiz-ing, then such a city is impossible

You see, in it alone the truly rich will rule—thosewho are rich not in gold, but in the wealth the happy must have: namely, agood and rational life

n’t it also probable, then—indeed, doesn’t it follow necessar-ily from what was said before—that uneducated people who have no expe-rience of true reality will never adequately govern a city, and neither willpeople who have been allowed to spend their whole lives in education. Theformer fail because they do not have a single goal in life at which all theiractions, public and private, inevitably aim; the latter because they wouldrefuse to act, thinking they had emigrated, while still alive, to the Isles ofthe Blessed.