He sometimes pushes its application to an extreme, though such instances are perhaps meant in a playful Socratic vein.176
At least, like Ruskin, he understands that extreme specialization must produce narrow and one-sided men, and that progress revolts against its too rigid application.177
He is aware too that the division of labor breaks down in the case of the poor unemployed of the state, since they have no special work.178
# SLAVERY
Plato is not blind to the ethical aspects of the problem of slavery.
In his first healthy state (ὑγιείνη), slavery and war are conspicuously absent, and it is the natural inference that the author believed these to be necessary evils of the more complex state.179
He appreciates the dangers of absolute power, even in private life, and believes that few men can stand the strain.180
He conceives human nature as a unity that defies absolute division into separate classes.181
Though he does not renounce slavery in the Republic, he would limit, it to the barbarians and to those who seem unfit for the higher life.182
It plays a remarkably small part in his first state, and it would seem that his idealism is here struggling against what he feels to be an economic necessity. In the Laws, he frankly accepts the necessity, and puts even agriculture, as well as the other industries, into the hands of slaves.183