The Republic

Overview

Ten books, one evening, one house in Piraeus. Socrates has gone down to the harbour for a festival and is physically prevented from leaving by a group of young men who want to argue. What begins as a polite question from an old man about whether wealth makes dying easier becomes, over a single night, a complete account of the soul, an educational system, a theory of knowledge, a history of political decline and a judgement on poetry.

Two features of the construction matter from the start. First, it is a dialogue and not a treatise, so every claim comes with a speaker, a mood and an audience. Socrates adjusts his arguments to Glaucon, who is spirited and competitive, and to Adeimantus, who worries about what people will say. Second, the city is explicitly a device. Socrates proposes to look at justice in a city because a city is bigger and the letters will be easier to read. Whether he ever actually recommends building it is one of the live questions of the book.

The conversation is narrated by Socrates himself, in the past tense, to an unnamed listener. You are always hearing his version.

The argument

Book 1 works through three definitions and destroys each. Cephalus assumes justice is paying what you owe. Polemarchus makes it helping friends and harming enemies. Thrasymachus makes it the advantage of whoever holds power, and adds that the just man is a sucker. Socrates wins the exchange on points, and Book 2 opens with Glaucon complaining that the victory was rhetorical. He restates the case for injustice at full strength, with the ring of Gyges, and demands a defence of justice that ignores reputation entirely: show that the just man on the rack is happier than the unjust man honoured by everyone.

Books 2 to 4 build the city. It starts as an economy of shoemakers and farmers, acquires soldiers when it starts wanting more land, and needs an education to make those soldiers gentle to their own people and dangerous to everyone else. That education involves censoring the stories told about gods and heroes. The finished city has three classes and is held together by a noble falsehood about where its citizens came from. Justice appears as each class minding its own business, and the soul is then given three matching parts: reason, spirit and appetite.

Book 5 is interrupted. Pressed on what having things in common means, Socrates proposes that guardian women receive the same education and hold the same offices as men, that families be abolished for that class, and that children be raised without knowing their parents. Then comes the harder claim: no such city until philosophers rule.

Books 6 and 7 justify that by explaining what a philosopher knows. The sun, the divided line and the cave are three versions of one distinction between the visible and the intelligible, and above everything sits the good, which Socrates declines to define directly. The syllabus that follows runs from arithmetic to dialectic and ends around the age of fifty.

Books 8 and 9 come back down. The good city decays into rule by honour, then by wealth, then by the many, then by one man, and each regime gets a matching character type. The tyrant is shown as the least free person alive, a man enslaved by his own appetites and afraid to leave his house. Three separate arguments are then offered that the just life is more pleasant.

Book 10 renews the attack on poetry and closes with the myth of Er, in which souls between lives choose their next one and cannot blame anyone else for the choice.

How to read it

Read Book 1 as drama, not doctrine. It sets up the problem and shows you Socrates losing his temper, which is useful information.

The single most important passage for holding the book together is Glaucon’s challenge in Book 2. Everything after it is an attempt to answer a very specific question, and readers who forget the question drift into treating the city as a policy proposal.

Watch for jokes and for Socrates backing off. He calls the community of women and children a wave he may drown in. He says the good is beyond his power to describe and offers an image instead. He admits the city exists only in speech. These moves are not modesty formulas; they are where Plato marks the limits of the argument.

If you are short of time, read 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9. Book 10 is worth the extra hour for the myth alone.

The two standard misreadings are worth naming. One treats the book as Plato’s political programme, which requires ignoring how much of it Socrates disowns. The other treats it as pure irony, which requires ignoring how carefully the educational sections are worked out.

Questions it raises

• Is justice in the soul really the same thing as justice in a city, or is the analogy doing work it cannot support?
• Can a city founded on a deliberate falsehood about its citizens’ origins be called just?
• Socrates gives guardian women the same education as men and abolishes their families. Is this an argument about sex or about property?
• If the good cannot be stated, in what sense do the philosophers know it?
• Why does a book that defends justice as its own reward end with a myth about rewards and punishments after death?
• Is the exile of the poets a consequence of Plato’s argument, or a confession about how much power he thinks poetry has?