Republic

The most influential book in Western philosophy, and one of the strangest. It begins with a dinner-party question about whether honesty pays and ends by abolishing the family, exiling the poets and describing the human condition as chained prisoners watching shadows. Almost every later argument about justice, education, art or political authority is somewhere in conversation with it, including the arguments that reject it entirely.

Date: c. 375 BC
Author: Plato
Region: Athens
Language: Ancient Greek

The translation record

1763 English, Harry Spens First complete English version Attested
1871 English, Benjamin Jowett Public domain; still the most reprinted Attested
1992 English, Grube, rev. Reeve Standard teaching text; in copyright Attested

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
Form: Dialogue
Method: Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
Transmission: Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
Standing: Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Years to the reply: 40 years

Continuously copied, taught and argued with for twenty-four centuries; one of the very few philosophical works never lost to any tradition that had it.

What the book says

A conversation that starts as a question about honesty and ends as a complete account of the soul, the state, knowledge and art. Socrates is asked why anyone should be just if they could get away with being unjust, and the challenge is put at full strength: imagine a ring that makes you invisible, and a just man believed by everyone to be wicked. Rather than answer directly, Socrates proposes building a city in speech, on the grounds that justice will be easier to see written large. The city divides into three classes - producers, soldiers, rulers - and is just when each does its own work. Then he turns the picture back on the individual: the soul also has three parts, reason, spirit and appetite, and justice is the same arrangement inside one person. Along the way the rulers are to be philosophers, women are to be educated and to rule alongside men, families and property are abolished for the guardian class, and the poets are expelled. At the centre stand three images: the sun, the divided line, and the cave, where prisoners chained facing a wall take the shadows for the whole of reality. The last book returns to poetry, and the dialogue closes with a myth of judgement after death.

What it argues

That justice is not a contract we keep because we are watched, but a condition of the soul in which its parts stand in the right relation, and that this condition is good for the person who has it whether or not anyone ever finds out. The political construction is instrumental to that claim: the city is built so the same structure can be seen at a size the eye can take in. From this follows the rule of those who know rather than those who are chosen, since on Plato's account governing is a skill with an object, and the object - the Good - is available only to those who have made the ascent out of the cave.

What answered it

Aristotle answers in Politics Book Two, and the objections are practical and hard to shake: a city so unified it thinks with one mind has stopped being a city; property held in common is property nobody looks after; abolishing families does not extend affection to everyone but dilutes it to nothing. Later replies come from every direction - Cicero rewrites the form, Augustine takes the two cities and turns them theological, and in the twentieth century Popper reads the book as the origin of the closed society, an argument answered in turn by a generation of Plato scholars.

How it argues

As a conversation, which does philosophical work no treatise could. Objections are voiced by people with names and tempers, and Thrasymachus' case for injustice is put so well in Book One that readers have argued for centuries about whether the rest of the dialogue really answers it. Where argument runs out, Plato switches to images - the sun, the line, the cave, the myth of Er - and the images have proved more durable than the proofs. Whether that is a strength or an evasion is one of the oldest questions about the book.

The moment

Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War, endured oligarchic terror, restored its democracy and then executed Socrates in 399. Plato was about thirty. The Republic is written by a man who watched the city he belonged to kill the most obviously good person he knew, by a legal procedure, with a majority vote. The argument that political authority should rest on knowledge rather than numbers is not an abstraction in that context, and neither is the hostility to persuasion as a public art.

How it travelled

Never lost. The Republic went from the Academy to the Neoplatonists to Byzantium in an unbroken line of copying, and reached the Latin West through Arabic before the Greek returned with Byzantine scholars in the fifteenth century. Ficino's Latin Plato of 1484 put the whole corpus into European hands, and the Republic has been in print continuously ever since. Its history is the opposite of Parmenides': not a text recovered in pieces, but one that no generation has been without.

The strongest objection

That the city it builds is a tyranny, and that the argument requires it to be. If only those who have seen the Good may rule, and the ruled cannot check the rulers because checking would require the knowledge they lack, then there is no position from which the arrangement can be criticised from below - which is what a closed society means. Popper pressed this hardest and overstated it; the scholarly replies have shown he read the text as a manifesto rather than as an argument, but they have not made the difficulty disappear. The noble lie remains in the text, and it is Plato's own device.

Why read it

Because it is the book the subject argues with, and because the argument is genuinely open. The cave, the ring of Gyges and the three-part soul are the common property of educated speech, and reading them in place shows how much more careful and less confident the original is than the summaries. It is also, in stretches, extremely good writing.

Where to read it

First printed: 1513
First in English: 1763
Digitised: Yes

The Greek text rests on manuscripts descending from a ninth-century archetype; Slings' 2003 Oxford Classical Text is standard.

Jowett's Victorian English is public domain and still widely reprinted, though its register is far from Plato's. Grube-Reeve, Bloom and Waterfield are in copyright.

Where it stands

Live in the strongest sense. It is the standard first text of the discipline, and its arguments about expertise and authority, censorship, and whether justice pays are all actively contested rather than historically curious.

On quoting this book

The Greek is public domain; the readable modern English is not, and Jowett's version is too loose to quote as Plato. No passage is quoted.

Contested

Whether Plato meant the city as a proposal or as a device for looking at the soul is disputed, and the answer changes what the book is. Book One's earlier and possibly separate composition is widely accepted but not proven. The status of the Form of the Good is unsettled: the dialogue calls it beyond being and declines to define it. The abolition of the family and the expulsion of the poets are read variously as serious policy, as ironic, and as reductio. And the question of how far Socrates here is the historical man rather than a mouthpiece has no agreed answer.