Plato's Republic for Seekers

Dear reader — it starts as one and ends up being a book about the inside of your own head. The Republic (Greek: Politeia, roughly "the constitution" or "the way a city is governed") is a dialogue in ten books, written by Plato around 375 BCE. Socrates narrates the whole conversation himself, the morning after it happened. It starts with a simple question, what is justice and is it worth having, and goes through a city, a soul, a cave, and a story about what happens after death.

The Guy And His Athens

Plato was born in Athens around 428 or 427 BCE into an aristocratic family and died around 348 or 347 BCE. As a young man he watched Athens lose the Peloponnesian War, live under the brutal rule of the Thirty Tyrants (two of whom, Critias and Charmides, were his relatives), and then execute his teacher Socrates. The Republic reads partly as his answer to that: if a city executes its wisest citizen, what would a city that deserved him look like?

It opens with a casual walk: "I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess." The famous line comes later: "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, cities will never have rest."

Book I And II: Three Bad Answers And One Challenge

Cephalus, an old wealthy man, says justice is telling the truth and paying your debts. His son Polemarchus says it's helping friends and harming enemies. Then Thrasymachus, a professional teacher of rhetoric, breaks in angrily: "I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. And now why do you not praise me? But of course you won't."

Glaucon takes up his side to force Socrates to do better. People practice justice only because they fear being caught, he says, and tells the story of Gyges, a shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible, seduces the queen, kills the king, and takes the throne. "No man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice." If the just man and the unjust man each had one, would they act any differently?

Socrates can't see justice clearly in one person, so he proposes to look in a city, where it's larger and easier to read, like a short-sighted person asked to read small letters from a distance who finds the same letters written larger somewhere else. He and his friends build a city from nothing, starting with the simplest needs: food, housing.

Books II To V: The City In Speech

Three classes. The rulers (the guardians in the strict sense) govern. The auxiliaries defend the city. The producers, farmers, craftspeople and traders, supply the material needs. Justice in the city is each class doing its own work and not meddling with another: "any meddling of one with another, or the change of one into another, is the greatest harm to the State."

To make citizens care for the city and each other, Socrates proposes a founding story, the Noble Lie: they're all brothers and sisters born from the earth, and what they remember as upbringing was a dream. He calls it a lie, and he's visibly embarrassed telling it.

Education is music and poetry for the soul and gymnastics for the body, and the stories children hear get screened, since "the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing." Homer and Hesiod's stories of gods who lie, quarrel, and misbehave have to go.

In Book V Socrates is pushed to defend three proposals he compares to waves that might drown him. First, women of the guardian class get the same education and work as men. Second, the guardians have no private families, and children are raised in common. Third, philosophers must rule. That last is the line quoted above.

Book IV: The Soul Has Three Parts

Back to the individual. The soul, Socrates argues, has three parts: reason, which thinks and seeks truth; spirit, which feels anger, pride and honor; and appetite, which wants food, drink, sex, and money. The argument rests on the idea that one thing can't be pulled in two opposite directions at once. And he uses a story: Leontius, coming up from the Piraeus, saw dead bodies lying at the place of execution. He wanted to look and was disgusted, and for a while covered his eyes, then finally ran to the corpses and said to his eyes, "Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight." Appetite and spirit, fighting.

The four classical virtues in the city: wisdom belongs to the rulers; courage to the auxiliaries; moderation is the agreement of all the classes about who should rule. And justice in a person is the same arrangement as in the city. Reason rules, spirit backs reason, appetite stays in its place. "The just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others, — he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master." Justice isn't about outward actions at all. It's inward. A just person is at peace with themselves, so injustice is a kind of sickness.

Books VI And VII: The Philosopher And The Good

Adeimantus objects that in practice philosophers are either useless or strange. Socrates answers with the Ship of State. The owner is strong but a little deaf and short-sighted and poor at navigation. The sailors quarrel over who should steer, none has learned the art, and they treat anyone who actually knows how as a stargazer and useless. The point is that the real navigator looks like a fool to the crew.

He declines to say directly what the Good is and gives an image: the Good is to the world of thought what the sun is to the visible world, the source of light and the power to see. Then a divided line with four segments, from shadows of things up to understanding. "In the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort."

And the Cave. Prisoners chained in an underground den since childhood, facing a wall. Behind them a fire and a raised walkway where people carry statues and objects, casting shadows. The prisoners take the shadows for reality. If one is freed and dragged up into sunlight, he's blinded and confused, and only slowly adjusts. When he goes back down, he can't see in the dark and the others think the trip ruined him.

Socrates adds a condition. The philosopher who's seen the Good would rather stay in the sun and study, but the city requires him to go back down and rule. "Each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark." The best rulers are the ones who don't want power.

Books VIII And IX: How Cities Go Bad

A ladder of decline. The ideal city, rule by the wise, is aristocracy. When its rulers lose their grip on the good it becomes timocracy, rule by the honor-loving and military. Then oligarchy, rule by the wealthy; then democracy, rule by the many; finally tyranny. Each regime has a matching kind of person.

In his account democracy is the regime of freedom, where everyone does as they please, and the democratic person is a bundle of passing desires. Its defect is it can't tell desires worth following from ones that aren't. "The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery." Tyranny grows out of it.

Book IX returns to the opening question. Glaucon said the unjust man with a good reputation would be happiest. Socrates argues the reverse. The tyrant has the most power and is ruled by his worst desires, afraid of everyone, unable to trust anyone: "the most miserable of States," and its tyrant the same.

Book X: Poets And The Afterlife

He comes back to the poets with a harder objection. Imitative art, including painting and tragedy, produces copies of copies. A painter paints a bed, which is itself an imitation of the Form of the bed, so the painting is three removes from what's real. Worse, tragic poetry feeds the part of the soul that should be ruled. "There is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry."

It ends with a story. Er, a soldier from Pamphylia, was killed in battle and came back to life on his funeral pyre twelve days later and reported what he'd seen. Souls are judged, spend a thousand years being rewarded or punished, and then choose their next lives from a set of samples laid out before them. "Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser — God is justified."

Blueprint, Warning, Or Thought Experiment

Some readers take the Republic as a serious proposal for how a city should be run. Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), read it as a charter for totalitarianism and blamed Plato. Others read it as a thought experiment about the soul, using the city as a metaphor. The text itself leaves a hint: "In heaven there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact..." I think that tells you what he cares about, and I'm not going to claim to know more than that.

To read it: the quotations here are Benjamin Jowett's 1871 translation, free on Project Gutenberg, Victorian and easy to find. Most readers do better with a modern translation for a first go. It's long, around 300 pages in most editions. The argument advances through short questions and answers, so treat it as a conversation among people with their own motives, not just a series of claims. Many of the best moments are in the interruptions.