Key Texts · Philosophical work · dialogue
Politeia (Πολιτεία) · by Plato · c. 375 BCE · Ancient Greek
Plato's Republic is a dialogue that sets out to answer a single question — what is justice, and is the just life better than the unjust one? — and in pursuing it builds a sweeping vision of the soul, the ideal state, knowledge, and reality itself. It is among the most influential works in the history of philosophy.
Author: Plato (c. 428–348 BCE)
Written: c. 375 BCE
Original language: Ancient Greek
Form: Philosophical dialogue, narrated by Socrates
Branches: Political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology
The dialogue asks whether justice is worth having for its own sake. To find out, Socrates and his companions build an imaginary city 'in speech,' reasoning that justice will be easier to see written large in a community than in a single person. The result ranges across education, politics, the structure of the soul, the nature of knowledge, and the famous Theory of Forms.
This work is a good place to meet several core ideas: Theory of Forms, justified true belief, and the branches of ethics and metaphysics.
Plato wrote in the difficult decades after Athens' defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, a period of political turmoil in which Athenian democracy had been overthrown and restored. Most decisively, in 399 BCE the restored democracy tried and executed his teacher Socrates on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. These experiences left Plato deeply skeptical of unguided popular rule and convinced that political power should rest with those who genuinely possess knowledge. Like most of his works, the Republic is written as a conversation, with Socrates as the leading voice.
Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was an Athenian of aristocratic background, a student of Socrates, and the founder of the Academy, often called the first university of the Western world; among his own students was Aristotle. The Republic belongs to his 'middle period,' in which he moves beyond simply recording Socratic questioning to develop his own positive doctrines, above all the Theory of Forms. You can read more on the Plato page.
The work is traditionally divided into ten books. The movement of the whole is roughly:
The dialogue opens with a question: what is justice, and is the just person better off than the unjust one? To answer it, Socrates proposes to look for justice 'written large' in an entire city before looking for it in the individual. He sketches an ideal city divided into three classes — producers, soldiers or 'guardians,' and ruling philosopher-kings — and argues that the soul likewise has three parts: appetite, spirit, and reason. Justice, in both city and soul, is the condition in which each part performs its proper role under the guidance of reason. Along the way the work introduces some of philosophy's most famous images, including the Allegory of the Cave and the Theory of Forms, the view that the changing things we perceive are imperfect copies of perfect, unchanging realities grasped by reason.
Justice, Plato argues, is not merely instrumentally valuable — good for the reputation and rewards it brings — but good in itself. A thing is just when each of its parts performs its proper role in harmony under the guidance of reason, and this is true of both a city and a soul. The just person, in whom reason governs spirit and appetite, is therefore the most harmonious and genuinely happiest, while the unjust person is internally disordered and worse off, no matter how things may appear from outside. It follows that the best-ordered society is one led by those who know the Good — the philosopher-rulers.
The Theory of Forms. Behind the changing world our senses show us, Plato holds, lies a realm of perfect, eternal Forms — Justice itself, Beauty itself, and above all the Form of the Good. These are what is most truly real, and genuine knowledge is knowledge of them, grasped by reason rather than perception. The three great images of Books VI–VII (the Sun, the Divided Line, and the Cave) all dramatise the ascent from the world of appearances to this world of true being.
The tripartite soul. Reason seeks truth and should rule; spirit is the seat of drive, courage, and indignation; appetite craves food, drink, and other bodily satisfactions. Justice in the individual is the well-ordered soul in which reason rules, spirit supports it, and appetite obeys.
Philosopher-rulers. Because only those who know the Good can order a city wisely, Plato argues the rulers should be philosophers, rigorously educated and, strikingly, reluctant to rule — for those who least crave power are least likely to abuse it.
The passage below is the opening of the Allegory of the Cave (Book VII), Plato's image for the ascent of the soul from illusion to knowledge. It is given in Benjamin Jowett's translation, which is in the public domain.
And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
I see.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
Plato, The Republic, Book VII, trans. Benjamin Jowett (public domain). Read the complete work at Project Gutenberg, or this book at the Internet Classics Archive.
The Republic has been argued with ever since it was written. Aristotle, Plato's own student, criticised the proposed abolition of private property and family among the guardians as unworkable and contrary to human nature. Modern readers have worried that the ideal city is authoritarian — famously, the philosopher Karl Popper attacked it as a blueprint for a closed, totalitarian society, though many scholars regard that reading as overstated. Others question the city–soul analogy itself, asking whether a just state and a just person really share one structure. These disputes are part of why the work remains a living text rather than a museum piece.
The Republic helped define political philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics as fields, and its images and arguments — the Cave, the philosopher-king, the divided soul, the Theory of Forms — have echoed through two and a half thousand years of thought. Whitehead's remark that European philosophy is 'a series of footnotes to Plato' is felt nowhere more strongly than here.
Questions to think or write about:
Plato. The Republic. c. 375 BCE. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497.