The Republic is Plato's most comprehensive single work and the foundational text of Western political philosophy — a dialogue in ten books that begins with 'what is justice?' and ends with the soul's choice of its next life.
republic
Plato's encyclopedic dialogue on justice, the soul, education, the ideal city, and the philosophical knowledge required to govern it.
Composed c. 380–375 BCE; precise date contested.
Introduction
The Republic is the most ambitious single work of Plato, the foundational text of Western political philosophy, and one of the most continuously read books in the philosophical tradition. Across ten books and roughly 300 pages of Stephanus pagination, it weaves together a theory of justice, a theory of the soul, a philosophy of education, a metaphysics of the Forms, an account of the philosopher-ruler, a critique of poetry and democracy, and a closing myth of the soul's choice of its next life. Nearly every later work of Western political theory is in some way a response to it.
The dialogue opens with a question — what is justice? — and refuses to settle for any of the conventional answers offered in Book I. Socrates, the protagonist throughout, then proposes that justice in the individual soul will be easier to see if it is first examined writ large, in the structure of a just city. The remainder of the work develops this homology: the structure of the soul and the structure of the city are taken to be the same structure, scaled differently.
Form, length, date, language
The Republic is a dramatic dialogue in ten books, narrated by Socrates and set on the day of a festival in the Athenian port of Piraeus around 410 BCE. The speakers are Socrates, Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, and — for most of the work — Plato's brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. The dialogue is approximately 87,000 words in Greek, the longest of Plato's works after the Laws. It was composed in Plato's middle period, conventionally dated to around 380–375 BCE. The original language is Attic Greek.
Why it was written
The Republic is best read against the trauma of Socrates's trial and execution in 399 BCE. Plato had been about twenty-eight; the question of what kind of political order was needed to prevent such an outcome became one of the organizing problems of his life work. The dialogue offers an answer: a city in which the most rationally capable govern in the interest of the whole, in which philosophical inquiry is supported rather than persecuted, and in which the soul of each citizen is properly ordered.
The work also engages two specific intellectual rivals. The sophist tradition (represented in Book I by Thrasymachus), whose claim that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger Plato treats as the most serious challenge to traditional morality. And the rhetorical and poetic tradition (treated extensively in Books II–III and X), whose moral authority Plato denies on the ground that imitative art appeals to the lower parts of the soul.
Structure and argument
Book I stages three failed accounts of justice (Cephalus: telling the truth and paying debts; Polemarchus: helping friends and harming enemies; Thrasymachus: the advantage of the stronger). Socrates refutes each; the book ends in aporia.
Book II opens with Glaucon and Adeimantus pressing the Thrasymachean challenge in stronger form and demanding that Socrates show justice is choiceworthy in itself, not merely for its rewards. Socrates accepts the challenge and proposes the city-soul method: justice in the city, being larger, will be easier to read than justice in the soul.
Books II–IV construct the just city. The city has three classes — producers, guardians, rulers — corresponding to the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit, reason). Justice in the city is the proper specialization and ordering of these classes; justice in the soul is the analogous ordering, with reason ruling, spirit supporting reason, and appetite kept within its proper role.
Book V develops the doctrines that have most scandalized later readers: equality of women in the guardian class, the abolition of the family among the guardians, and the famous claim that no city will be just until philosophers rule, or rulers philosophize.
Books VI–VII develop the metaphysics and epistemology the philosopher-ruler thesis requires. The Sun, Divided Line, and Cave analogies present the doctrine of the Forms and the ascent from images to genuine knowledge.
Books VIII–IX describe the four defective regimes (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny) and their corresponding defective souls. The tyrannical soul is shown to be the most miserable; this constitutes Plato's argument that justice is choiceworthy in itself.
Book X returns to the critique of poetry begun earlier, then closes with the Myth of Er, a vision of the afterlife in which souls choose their next lives based on the wisdom they have accumulated.
Key passages
- Republic 327a–328c — the opening scene in the Piraeus.
- Republic 338c — Thrasymachus: justice is the advantage of the stronger.
- Republic 357a–368c — Glaucon's challenge.
- Republic 473d — the philosopher-ruler thesis.
- Republic 506e–509c — the analogy of the Sun.
- Republic 509d–511e — the Divided Line.
- Republic 514a–520a — the Allegory of the Cave.
- Republic 595a–608b — the second critique of poetry.
- Republic 614a–621d — the Myth of Er.
These passages are the standard reference points for almost every subsequent treatment of Platonism.
Reception history
In late antiquity the Republic shaped Cicero's De Republica, the Neoplatonist tradition (Plotinus and Proclus produced extensive commentaries), and the early Christian appropriation of Platonic political theology (especially Augustine's City of God, which transforms the just-city argument into the civitas Dei).
Most of the Republic was lost to the medieval Latin West, which had only the Timaeus in partial translation; the work returned with the Renaissance recovery of Greek and the Florentine Platonist movement (Marsilio Ficino's Latin translation, 1484). Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is recognizably indebted to it. Early modern political philosophy engaged the work directly, generally as a foil for liberal contractualism.
The twentieth-century reception was politically charged. Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) read the Republic as a foundational document of totalitarianism; the subsequent debate engaged virtually every major commentator. Leo Strauss's The City and Man (1964) and the Straussian tradition read the work as ironic. The contemporary mainstream reading (Annas, Reeve, Ferrari, Schofield) takes the work seriously as political philosophy without identifying Plato with the totalitarianism Popper saw.
Contemporary engagement
The Republic remains a standard text in undergraduate philosophy and political theory curricula worldwide. Major recent commentaries include Julia Annas's An Introduction to Plato's Republic (1981) and the Cambridge Companion volume edited by G.R.F. Ferrari (2007). The standard English translations (Grube revised by Reeve; Allan Bloom; Paul Shorey for the Loeb; Robin Waterfield for Oxford World's Classics; Christopher Rowe for Penguin) each have substantial readership. Scholarly debates focus on the relation between the city analogy and individual justice, the philosophical adequacy of the tripartite soul, the political feasibility of the kallipolis, and the interpretation of the Sun-Line-Cave sequence as an integrated account of cognition.
Further reading
- Plato — the author
- Platonism — the tradition the work founded
- Socrates — the protagonist
- Dialectic — the method the dialogue enacts
- Virtue — a central topic of Books II–IX
- Aristotle — the student whose Politics responds to it
The most consequential single work of political philosophy in the Western tradition.