  Nonetheless, Socrates has much to say in Books Eight and Nine about the individual character of various defective regimes. He organizes his account to emphasize appetite’s corrupting power, showing how each defective regime can, through the corruption of the rulers’ appetites, devolve into a still worse one (Hitz 2010, Johnstone 2011). In the timocracy, for example, nothing checks the rulers from taking money to be a badge of honor and feeding their appetites, which grow in private until they cannot be hidden anymore. The account is thus deeply informed by psychology. It does not purport to be an account of what has happened (despite Aristotle’s treatment of it in Politics V 12), any more than Books Two through Seven purport to give an historical account of an ideal city’s genesis. It is not, for all that, ahistorical, for Plato’s concerns about corruption are clearly informed by his experiences and his understanding of history. The account, psychologically and historically informed, does not offer any hint of psychological or historical determinism. Socrates does not identify the transitions from one defective regime to the next as inevitable, and he explicitly allows for transitions other than the ones he highlights. This is just one story one could tell about defective regimes. But this particular story is valuable as a morality tale: it highlights the defective regimes’ vulnerability to the corruption of the rulers’ appetites.