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The excellent or philosophical city is established by the philosopher-king and his officers in order to serve as a path to the happiness of man and mankind, and as a locus of man’s (self-) substantiation (tajawhur). Al-Fārābī’s and Ibn Bājja’s
understanding of justice and equality appears to be based on the principle of geometrical justice or proportionate equality, probably established by Pythagoras. However, in al- Fārābī’s Excellent City, the law of geometrical equality is accompanied by the (originally Stoic) principle of the mutual sympathy and love of its inhabitants to each other, which results from their shared opinions about Good and happiness and their usefulness to each other. The article focuses on the classification of the non-excellent cities, given in al-
Fārābī’s Mabādiʾārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila and Kitāb al-siyāsa al-madaniyya. In
the former, al-Fārābī lists four types of non-excellent cities: the ignorant city (al-
madīna al-jāhiliya), the wicked city (al-madīna al-fāsiqa), the city which has
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deliberately changed its character (al-madīna al-mutabaddala) and the city which has missed the right path (al-madīna al-ḍālla) (MabādiʾV, 15, 15). These types do not have direct analogues in the Republic. In turn, in the Kitāb al-siyāsa almadaniyya,
al-Fārābī deals with the four non-excellent cities discussed in the Republic, treating them as sub-types of the ignorant city. They are discussed in the following order: 1) the oligarchic city, 2) the timocratic city, 3) the tyrannical city, and 4) the democratic city. Hence, we can conclude that, during the composition of the Kitāb al-siyāsa al-madaniyya, al-Fārābī had access to the paraphrase of the
books VIII and IX of the Republic. Furthermore, along with these four sub-types of the ignorant city, al-Fārābī discusses two others – the city of basic necessity and the hedonistic city.
Al-Fārābī’s account of the types of the cities does not reproduce Plato’s conception, according to which the sequence of the regimes or constitutions reflects the increasing corruption of the excellent city, Kallipolis (whence they should be arranged according to the degree of that corruption). Richard Walzer has justly claimed that the changes in the structure of the discussion on the non-excellent cities show us how Plato’s
description of the wrong constitutions was adapted and transmitted in Hellenistic and Roman philosophical schools, whose heir al-Fārābī was. Ibn Bājja in his Tadbīr al-mutawaḥḥid (§148) claims that the decline of the city has its roots in the corruption of the human nature. By doing so, Avempace addresses the issue in a manner which is closer to Plato’s own approach.