The Republic

Plato’s Republic (Greek Politeia, “the constitution”, “the regime”) is the most influential work of political philosophy ever written and, with the Symposium, the most read of his dialogues. In ten books it asks what justice (dikaiosynē) is and whether the just person is happier than the unjust — and, to answer, builds an imaginary city in speech, in which justice can be seen “writ large”, and then reads the same structure back into the individual soul. On the way it presents, in three famous images, the most daring metaphysics of the ancient world: the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave (The Allegory of the Cave). It proposes an aristocracy of philosopher-kings, the abolition of private property and family among the guardians, equal education for women, the censorship of poetry, and a long programme of study that lifts the mind from shadows to the Form of the Good. It ends with the myth of Er, the soldier who returned from the dead to describe the judgement of souls. Whether it is a blueprint, a satire, a thought-experiment, or a mirror for the soul is still disputed; what is certain is that every later political theorist — Aristotle, Augustine, More, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Popper, Rawls — wrote in its shadow.

Setting and form

The Piraeus, around 421 BCE

The dramatic date is probably about 421 BCE, during a lull in the Peloponnesian War, and the scene is the house of Cephalus, a wealthy resident alien, in the Piraeus, Athens’s port. Socrates has gone down the night before “to pray to the goddess” and see the new festival of the Thracian goddess Bendis, and is detained by Polemarchus — “Do you see how many of us there are?” “Yes.” “Then either prove stronger than these men, or stay here.” “Is there not another alternative — that we persuade you to let us go?” “Could you persuade us if we won’t listen?” The exchange foreshadows the whole book: persuasion against force. Socrates is persuaded to stay for a torch race on horseback and an all-night conversation.

The company includes Plato’s own brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who will carry the argument; the orator Thrasymachus; Lysias, the speechwriter; and Cephalus’s son Polemarchus. Several of them — Polemarchus, Lysias’s family — will suffer under the oligarchic terror of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 BCE; Socrates himself will be tried and executed by the restored democracy in 399. The reader, knowing this, hears every argument against a darkening backdrop.

The whole dialogue is narrated by Socrates in the first person the day after, a device that lets Plato give the book an unusual unity and Socrates an unusual authority. Greek politeia means more than “republic”: it is the way of life of a city, its whole constitution, character and culture.

The order of the book

The ten books fall into five movements:

1. Book I — a Socratic dialogue that fails: what is justice? (Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus).
2. Books II–IV — the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus; the founding of the city; the education of the guardians; the four virtues; the three parts of the soul.
3. Books V–VII — the “three waves”: women and children, the philosopher-king; the Sun, Line and Cave; the curriculum of the philosopher.
4. Books VIII–IX — the decline of regimes (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny) and of the souls that match them; the proof that the just life is happiest.
5. Book X — the second attack on poetry; the immortality of the soul; the Myth of Er.

Book I: what is justice?

Cephalus and Polemarchus

The old man Cephalus, asked what old age is like, says that it brings freedom from the tyranny of desire — “like being released from a raging and savage master” — and that wealth helps because it makes it easier to be just: to pay one’s debts to gods and men. Socrates asks: is justice simply telling the truth and paying what one owes? Suppose a friend lends you weapons and then goes mad and asks for them back: justice cannot require returning them. Cephalus, cheerful, leaves to attend to the sacrifice, and hands the argument to his son.

Polemarchus quotes the poet Simonides: justice is giving each what is owed — helping friends and harming enemies. Socrates presses: who is best at helping friends and harming enemies in sickness? The doctor. In war? The general. In peace, what is the just man good for? Safekeeping money — that is, justice is useful only when money is useless. And can it be just to harm anyone? Harming makes a person worse as a person, and can the just make people unjust? “It is never just to harm anyone.” Polemarchus accepts it. The definition collapses: justice is not a craft of doing good to friends and harm to enemies.

Thrasymachus

At this point Thrasymachus bursts in “like a wild beast about to tear us to pieces”, and demands to know what Socrates is doing “talking such nonsense”, refusing to answer and only refuting others. He offers his own thesis: “justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.” In each city the rulers make laws in their own interest — democracies democratic laws, tyrannies tyrannical ones — and call it “just” for the ruled to obey. Justice is therefore obedience to the rulers’ advantage; injustice, on a large enough scale, pays better and is nobler. Tyranny, the greatest injustice, makes the tyrant “most happy”, and those who suffer it most wretched.

Socrates replies in stages. Rulers sometimes err about their own interest — so is justice obeying what is actually or only what is thought to be in their interest? And every craft aims at the good of its subject, not of the craftsman as such: the doctor, as doctor, seeks the patient’s health; the shepherd, as shepherd, the flock’s welfare; the ruler, as ruler, the good of the ruled. Why then must rulers be paid? Precisely because the craft of ruling benefits others, not the ruler: so they are given wages, honour, or the fear of being ruled by someone worse. Thrasymachus then asserts that the unjust man is wise and good, the just a simpleton. Socrates argues that the unjust man cannot act with others — even a gang of thieves needs justice among themselves to achieve anything — and that injustice produces faction and hatred. Finally, each thing has a function (ergon) and an excellence (aretē): the eye’s function is seeing and its excellence sharp sight; the soul’s function is to live, to deliberate and to rule, and its excellence is justice; so the just soul lives well and is happy. Thrasymachus, blushing — Plato notes that for the first time he saw him blush — sulkily concedes, but Socrates admits that the argument is incomplete: he has not yet said what justice is, “like a glutton who snatches at every dish without first enjoying the previous one”.

Books II–IV: the city in speech

The challenge of Glaucon

Glaucon is not satisfied. He wants Socrates to show that justice is good in itself and not merely for its consequences. He renews Thrasymachus’s challenge in its strongest form, as a three-part theory of the “common view” of justice. Justice is (1) a compromise between what is best — to do wrong with impunity — and what is worst — to suffer wrong with no power of revenge; (2) practised unwillingly, out of weakness; and (3) preferable to injustice only because of the reputation it brings.

He illustrates with the Ring of Gyges. Gyges, a shepherd of the king of Lydia, finds a ring that makes its wearer invisible. He uses it to seduce the queen, kill the king and seize the throne. Would anyone, Glaucon asks, keep his hands off what is not his, if he could take with impunity? “No one is just willingly, but only under compulsion.” To judge justice itself, we must separate it from its rewards: imagine a perfectly unjust man with a reputation for perfect justice, and a perfectly just man with a reputation for injustice, whipped, racked, blinded and impaled. Which is happier?

Adeimantus adds that parents, poets and teachers praise justice only for what it brings — honours, wealth, good marriages, the favour of the gods — and that the poets also say the gods can be bought off by sacrifices. Nobody praises justice itself. “Show us what each does to its possessor, by its own power, in the soul.”

Building the city

Socrates proposes an analogy: justice can be seen in a city as in an individual, and since a city is larger, it is easier to read — “like reading small letters from far away: if someone told us we could read the same letters larger elsewhere, it would be a godsend.” So they will found a city in speech and watch justice emerge.

A city arises because no one is self-sufficient and each needs many things; therefore people gather and specialise, one person doing one job well — the principle that each should do the one thing for which he is naturally suited (ta hautou prattein, “to do one’s own”). The first “city of pigs”, as Glaucon scornfully calls it — farmers, builders, weavers, cobblers, merchants, living simply on barley and wine and figs — is healthy but has no luxuries. Glaucon demands relishes and couches, perfumes and courtesans, gold and ivory; and so the city “swells” into a “feverish” one, which needs more land, hence an army, hence guardians (phylakes). The guardians’ nature must combine the gentleness of a friend and the spirit of a dog: like a well-bred watchdog, fierce to enemies and gentle to those he knows — a “philosophic” animal who distinguishes friend from foe by knowledge.

The education of the guardians

Guardians receive a long education in “music” (poetry, music, culture) and “gymnastics”. Plato’s treatment of poetry is notorious. The stories of Homer and Hesiod depict gods who lie, quarrel, commit adultery and castrate their fathers; heroes who weep and wail and fear death; these are false and harmful to the young, and must be censored. God is good, and the cause only of good; he does not change; he does not deceive. Poetry that imitates ignoble characters makes the imitator ignoble; and so on to rules on rhythm and mode (the Phrygian and Dorian are allowed, the languid Lydian banned), and on art and architecture, which should convey grace and harmony.

Every citizen is told a “noble lie” or “myth of the metals”: that all are born of the earth, brothers, but the god mixed gold in those fit to rule, silver in the auxiliaries, bronze and iron in farmers and craftsmen; and that an oracle says the city will perish if guarded by iron or bronze. Social mobility is allowed by nature: children of gold may be born to bronze, and are to be promoted.

The guardians’ way of life

The guardians must own no private property, no gold or silver, live in common barracks and eat at common mess, “so that they will not tear the city apart by calling different things ‘mine’”. The aim is not the happiness of one class but of the whole city: “we are not trying to make any one group especially happy, but the city as a whole.”

The four virtues

Having founded a good city, Socrates looks for justice in it. A perfectly good city will have four virtues: wisdom (sophia) — the knowledge of the rulers, how the city as a whole should conduct itself; courage (andreia) — the preservation, by the auxiliaries, of right belief about what is to be feared; moderation or temperance (sōphrosynē) — the agreement of all classes about who should rule, a kind of harmony; and, by elimination, justice (dikaiosynē): “that each person must perform the one function in the city for which his nature is best suited” — “doing one’s own and not meddling with what is another’s”. Justice is what makes the other three possible and preserves them. A city is unjust when the classes interfere: when the producing class, rich and puffed up, tries to rule, or the auxiliaries usurp the guardians.

The tripartite soul

Is the individual just in the same way? Socrates first argues that the soul has three parts, since the same thing cannot do or suffer opposite things in the same respect and in relation to the same object. A thirsty person may refuse to drink — so there must be something that urges and something that forbids: appetite (epithymia) and reason (logos). And a third, spirit (thymos): the part that feels anger and indignation, as when Leontius, passing the place of execution, wants to look at the corpses, and, struggling against his appetite, curses his eyes: “Look, you wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight!” Spirit sides with reason against appetite. The three parts correspond to the three classes: reason to the rulers, spirit to the auxiliaries, appetite to the producers.

So justice in the soul is parallel: each part doing its own work: reason ruling, with wisdom and foresight on behalf of the whole soul; spirit obeying and supporting reason; and appetite, the largest part, kept within bounds. The just person is “one, entirely temperate and harmonious”, “having bound together the three parts like the three terms of a musical scale”. Injustice is “a kind of civil war” among the parts. Justice is therefore to the soul what health is to the body — the natural order of its parts — and no one thinks it profitable to live with a body in ruins, or a soul. That, in a first sketch, answers Glaucon: justice is good in itself, as the health of the soul.

Books V–VII: the three waves

The first wave: women

Polemarchus, Adeimantus and Thrasymachus force Socrates to expand on the community of women and children among the guardians. Socrates faces “three waves”, each threatening to drown the argument in laughter. The first: women guardians should receive the same education and do the same work as men, for the difference between the sexes is as relevant to ruling as the difference between bald and long-haired men is to cobbling. Women should train naked in the gymnasium with men — the Greeks found this scandalous. “There is no occupation of the city’s administrators that belongs to woman because she is a woman or to man because he is a man.” Plato adds that women are generally weaker, but there are natural differences among individuals, not between the sexes as classes: this makes the Republic a unique work in ancient thought.

The second wave: families

The second: wives and children shall be in common. Marriages will be arranged by lot — in reality rigged by the rulers, who will breed the best with the best — in sacred festivals; children will be taken from their mothers at birth and raised in common nurseries, so that no parent knows his child, and every older person is father or mother to all younger ones. The aim is unity: a city is most one when everyone says “mine” and “not mine” of the same things, when the whole is like a single body in which a pain in a finger is felt as the pain of the person.

The third wave: philosopher-kings

The third wave is the greatest: the philosopher-king. “Unless philosophers rule as kings in the cities, or those now called kings and rulers genuinely and adequately philosophise, and political power and philosophy coincide in the same place… there will be no end to the troubles of cities, or, I think, of humankind” (473c–d). To explain what a philosopher is, Socrates distinguishes lovers of sights and sounds — who love beautiful things but cannot see Beauty itself — from philosophers, who love the truth, the Form. The former live in opinion (doxa), the latter in knowledge (epistēmē). Opinion concerns what is between being and not-being: beautiful things which are also ugly, just acts which are also unjust. Knowledge is of what is: the Forms (The Forms).

The philosophers are not useless, as people say; they are like the sailors and the ship (488a–489a): the ship’s owner is a large, strong, deaf, short-sighted man with poor seamanship; the sailors quarrel over the helm, each claiming to steer though none has learned the art; they drug the owner, take control, feast, and call the true navigator, who studies the seasons, the sky, the stars and winds, a stargazer and a good-for-nothing. This is the democratic city and its attitude to the philosopher.

The Sun, the Line and the Cave

How is a philosopher to be educated? What is the highest subject of study? Not pleasure, nor even knowledge, but the Good (to agathon), the object of the “greatest study”. Socrates refuses to say what the Good is, but gives an image — the Sun (506d–509c). As the sun, in the visible world, gives objects visibility and the eye the power to see, and also brings generation and growth, so the Good, in the intelligible world, gives the Forms their intelligibility and the mind the power to know, and also their very being — “beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power” (epekeina tēs ousias).

The Divided Line (509d–511e) maps the whole of reality and our states of mind. Take a line divided into two unequal sections, the visible and the intelligible, each subdivided in the same ratio. The visible: images (shadows, reflections), apprehended by imagination (eikasia); and visible things (animals, plants, artefacts), apprehended by belief (pistis). The intelligible: mathematical objects, studied by thought (dianoia), which uses visible diagrams and assumes hypotheses; and the Forms, grasped by understanding (noēsis), which treats hypotheses as stepping stones up to an “unhypothetical first principle”, the Good, and then descends again.

The Cave (514a–521b) dramatises it. See The Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners, chained from childhood in an underground cave, face a wall on which they see shadows of artefacts carried past a fire behind them; they take the shadows for reality. One is freed and forced to turn around, to look at the fire, and then to climb out into daylight; pained and dazzled, he gradually sees shadows and reflections, then things themselves, then the night sky, and finally the sun. Pitying his fellow prisoners, he returns to the cave to free them; but his eyes, accustomed to light, see poorly in the dark, and he is ridiculed; “if they could lay hands on the man who tried to free and lead them up, they would kill him” — a clear allusion to Socrates. The philosopher-kings, who have seen the Good, must be compelled to return and rule: they would rather “spend their time in the upper world”, but justice requires that they repay their upbringing by governing. Those who rule best are those who least want to rule.

The philosopher’s curriculum

Education is “not putting sight into blind eyes” but turning the whole soul around (periagōgē) towards the light. The curriculum for the guardians who will be rulers: arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy and harmonics, each studied not for practical use but to draw the mind from the changing to the unchanging; and finally dialectic, the study of the Forms by question and answer, begun only at thirty, after ten years of mathematics, and pursued until fifty. At fifty, those who have excelled see the Good itself and take turns ruling, spending the rest of their time in philosophy.

Books VIII–IX: the decline of regimes

Socrates now traces how the ideal city (aristocracy, rule of the best) degenerates, and how each regime has a matching kind of soul.

1. Timocracy (rule of honour): when the guardians are no longer chosen well, rulers fall into a love of honour and war, and secretly acquire wealth; modelled on Sparta. The timocratic man is ambitious and spirited, the son of a good father overlooked by his mother.
2. Oligarchy (rule of wealth): money becomes the criterion of rule, the city divides into rich and poor “living in the same place and plotting against each other”. The oligarchic man is a hoarder, restrained by fear rather than virtue — a “squalid, money-grubbing” figure.
3. Democracy (rule of the people): the poor revolt, kill or exile the rich, and share power by lot. It is “a pleasant, anarchic, colourful form of government which distributes a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike”. It is a bazaar of constitutions; the freedom it prizes becomes licence; fathers fear their sons, teachers their pupils; even horses and donkeys “march along with the freedom and dignity of the free”, bumping into anyone who does not give way. The democratic man lives from day to day, indulging every desire in turn — “drinking and playing the flute today, dieting tomorrow, exercising, then idling, then philosophising”.
4. Tyranny: the extreme of freedom produces extreme slavery. The people’s champion, defending the poor against the rich, turns on everyone, eliminates rivals, wages wars to keep the people needy and obedient, and ends as a tyrant, a wolf in human form, surrounded by bodyguards and flatterers, afraid of his own people.

The tyrannical soul is ruled by a “monstrous passion”: lust and unlawful desires, the kind that wake in dreams of incest, murder and forbidden food. Even in private life he is the most wretched of men: a slave to his own desires, never free, fearful, suspicious, friendless, “like a man sick in body ruling over others” instead of himself.

Three proofs that the just life is happiest

Book IX gives three arguments that the just are happier than the unjust, answering Glaucon:

1. The argument from the ordering of the soul and the city: the tyrant is the unhappiest of men, since both his city and his soul are enslaved, full of fear and unfulfilled desire. The king over himself — the philosophic man — is happiest. Socrates calculates, with mock precision, that the king lives 729 times more pleasantly than the tyrant (the cube of the square of three).
2. The argument from the three kinds of pleasure: each part of the soul has its own pleasures — appetite those of gain, spirit those of honour, reason those of learning — and each praises its own. Who is the best judge? The one with experience of all three. The philosopher has tasted the others, but the others have not tasted the pleasures of knowledge; so his verdict is authoritative.
3. The argument from the reality of pleasures: many pleasures of the body are only the relief of pain, the neutral state mistaken for pleasure; the pleasures of knowledge, filling the soul with what truly is, are purer and more real.

The book ends with the image of the soul as a composite creature: a many-headed beast (appetite), a lion (spirit), and a small human being (reason) all grown together inside a human form. To be just is to let the human being tame the beast, with the lion as ally; to do injustice is to starve the human being and feed the beast. The just city is “a pattern laid up in heaven” for whoever wishes to see it and found himself upon it; “whether it exists anywhere or will ever exist is of no importance”.

Book X: poetry and the Myth of Er

The second attack on poetry

Having argued for his psychology, Socrates returns to poetry, now with a metaphysical argument. A bed exists as a Form (made by God), as a carpenter’s artefact, and as a painter’s picture; the painter imitates the appearance of the carpenter’s bed, which is itself an imitation of the Form: so the painter is “third from the truth”. Poets and painters imitate appearances, not reality; they know nothing of the subjects they portray (Homer never ran a city or won a war); and they appeal to the lowest part of the soul, stirring the appetites and pity and fear that reason, in life, restrains. Tragedy makes us weep at what we should be ashamed to weep for. Only hymns to the gods and praise of good men may enter the city — unless poetry’s defenders can show that it is not only pleasant but beneficial. Thus began the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry”. Plato, a poet of genius, the greatest writer of dramatic dialogue, was himself the target of his own argument; many readers think he knew it.

The immortality of the soul

Socrates argues that the soul is immortal because every thing is destroyed by its own characteristic evil — the body by disease, grain by blight, wood by rot — and the soul’s evils, injustice and ignorance, do not destroy it: wicked people do not die of wickedness. What is not destroyed by its own evil cannot be destroyed by another’s. The number of souls is thus constant. Seen without the barnacles of embodiment, like the sea-god Glaucus, the soul would be recognised as a lover of wisdom, “reaching for the divine and immortal”.

The rewards of justice

Socrates then restores to the just man the rewards he had set aside for the sake of argument: the good opinion of men, honours, and above all the gods’ favour in life and after death.

The Myth of Er

The Republic closes with a myth. Er, son of Armenius, a soldier slain in battle, was found on the twelfth day, on his funeral pyre, to be alive, and told what he had seen. His soul travelled with others to a place with two openings in the earth and two in heaven, where judges sat, sending the just upward to the right and the unjust downward to the left, each carrying a record of their deeds. After a thousand years of reward or punishment, the souls gather in a meadow, and then travel to the Spindle of Necessity, with the Fates — Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos — and the Sirens singing the music of the spheres. There each soul chooses its next life from a heap of “lots” laid before them, with a spokesman proclaiming: “The blame belongs to the one who chooses; god is blameless.” The first to choose, who had lived a well-ordered life in a well-ordered city but without philosophy, chooses the greatest tyranny, and discovers too late that it involves eating his own children. Orpheus chooses the life of a swan; Ajax that of a lion; Agamemnon that of an eagle; Thersites the buffoon takes an ape; and Odysseus, last, takes the life of an obscure private man — and finds it a great bargain. The souls then drink from the River of Forgetfulness; Er is not allowed to drink and awakes on the pyre.

The moral: “We shall hold ever to the upward path and practise justice with wisdom in every way, so that we may be friends to ourselves and to the gods, both while we remain here and when we win the prizes of justice, like victors in the games, and so that we may fare well both here and in the thousand-year journey we have described.”

Interpretations

Plato’s politics

The ideal city has been read in opposite ways. Aristotle (Politics II) criticised the unity of the city as destructive of its plurality (“a city is not a household”), the community of property and wives as impractical and productive of neglect (“what is common to the greatest number gets the least care”). Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), wrote in the shadow of totalitarianism and made Plato the founder of the totalitarian tradition: a closed, hierarchical, censoring, eugenic state ruled by an elite, in which the individual is merely a part. Others, from Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom to Iris Murdoch, argue that the city is not a political programme but a psychological allegory — “justice writ large” — and that Plato knows its impossibility (“it is of no importance whether it exists”). In the Laws, Plato’s last work, he offers a less ideal, more law-governed state. Julia Annas has argued that the Republic is primarily a work of ethics; Bernard Williams that the analogy between city and soul is its fatal weakness.

Justice

The book’s central argument — that justice is the harmony of the soul’s three parts — has been criticised since antiquity. Does it show that the just person will pay his debts, refrain from theft, and keep his word? Is the “justice” of Book IV the same as ordinary justice, i.e. concerned with relations between persons? Plato’s reply is that the person with a well-ordered soul will not want to do those things, since they are all expressions of disorder. Modern readers still debate whether this is an answer or an evasion.

The Forms and the Good

The central books place the theory of Forms at the heart of politics: only those who know the Forms can rule. See The Forms and Platonism. The “Good” has been read as God, the One, a principle of value, or the unity of all knowledge.

Influence

Aristotle answered the Republic in the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics. Cicero wrote his own De Re Publica in its image. Augustine’s City of God contrasts the earthly city with the heavenly; Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) takes up the shared property; Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel wrote in dialogue with it. Al-Fārābī and Averroes commented on it in the Islamic world, turning the philosopher-king into the prophet-legislator. Marx and the utopian socialists inherited its communism of goods. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) is a modern descendant: justice as the structure of society chosen from behind a “veil of ignorance”. Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” is usually supported by this book. In literature, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (whose guardians are bred and conditioned), Ursula Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood have all rewritten it; in film, The Matrix is a Cave.

The Republic in conversation

Three lines will serve almost any discussion. On power: Glaucon’s ring — would you be just if no one could ever find out? On reform: the ship of fools, the sailors quarrelling over the helm while the navigator is called a stargazer. And on knowledge: the Cave — education is not stuffing information into empty heads but turning the soul around to face the light.