The candidates battling for the leadership of the Labour party never stop banging on about ‘social justice’ and ‘equality’. But they never define them. Plato did. In his final work, Laws (c. 350 bc), three men, led by the unnamed ‘Athenian’, discussed general principles behind governance and the law. The Athenian then applied them to the proposed new Cretan city of Magnesia.
Plato defined ‘equality’ as (i) numerical or (ii) proportionate. This gave people what they merited, resulting in justice. So in Magnesia, private land-holdings were abolished and under (i), each household was given exactly the same amount of inalienable, heritable land, whose produce would serve the whole state. But, inevitably, some citizens would arrive with more wealth than others. So divide them into four property classes, and legislate that anyone coming to own more than a certain ratio of their land’s value would hand the surplus to the state.
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