  The charge of “utopianism” would apply well to the first city  Socrates describes. This city resembles a basic economic model since  Socrates uses it in theorizing how a set of people could efficiently  satisfy their necessary appetitive desires (Schofield 1993). At the center of his  model is a principle of specialization: each person should perform  just the task to which he is best suited. But Socrates’ model makes  no provision for reason’s rule, and he later insists that no one can  have orderly appetitive attitudes unless they are ruled by reason  (esp. 590c–d; cf. 586a–b). So the first city cannot exist, by the  lights of the Republic’s account of human nature (Barney 2001). It is a  nowhere-utopia, and thus not an ideal-utopia.