The Republic — Commentary

In brief

Plato wrote the Republic around 375 BC, in his fifties, about a generation after Athens had put Socrates to death. It is a conversation in ten books, told from start to finish by Socrates, in a rich foreigner’s house at the Piraeus on the night of a new festival. Someone asks what justice is. Two of Plato’s brothers then press the question to its hardest form: if you could do wrong and never be found out, would there be any reason not to?

The answer takes well over a hundred thousand words of English and passes through a city ruled by philosophers, with no private families among its rulers, an official lie, censored poetry, and the most famous image in Western philosophy. The Greek title, Politeia, means something like constitution; “Republic” comes through Cicero’s Latin and misleads.

The argument

Plato’s starting point is the case against justice, and he states it better than its defenders do. In Book I Thrasymachus bursts in with “I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger”, and Socrates beats him with some rather cheap arguments, until “I saw what I had never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing”. Plato knows the win is not enough. At the start of Book II Glaucon takes the argument up himself: people praise justice only because they are too weak to get away with injustice. Give the just man and the unjust man each a ring of invisibility, and “no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice”.

The Ring of Gyges sets the terms for all that follows. Socrates must show that justice is good for its owner with every reward stripped away. He proposes to read it in a large thing first, as you might read large letters before small ones, and builds a city of three classes, just when each does its own work. By Book IV he has found the same three parts in the soul: reason, spirit and appetite. The just man “sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself”.

So justice turns out to be a kind of health, and asking whether it pays is like asking whether it pays to have a working body. The oldest objection is that Glaucon asked about not stealing and Socrates replies about inner order. Book IX tries to close the gap with the tyrant, who can do anything and is the most enslaved man alive. Book X returns to the challenge by name: “Let a man do what is just, whether he have the ring of Gyges or not”.

The shape of the book

Scholars cite the book by Stephanus numbers: a reference such as 514a points to a page and section of the Geneva edition of 1578. The argument is an arc with a long detour.

Books I and II: the challenge. Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus each fail to define justice, then Glaucon and Adeimantus restate the case against it.
Books II to IV: the city. A simple city that Glaucon dismisses as “a city of pigs”, then a luxurious one that needs an army, then guardians, their education, and at 414b the lie that holds the classes together.
Books V to VII: the detour. Socrates is about to move on when his friends stop him, and in Book V he must face three “waves” of ridicule: women among the rulers, no families, and philosopher kings. Knowledge then has to be explained, which brings the Sun (507b to 509c), the Line (509d to 511e) and the Cave (514a to 520a).
Books VIII and IX: the decline. The good city decays through timocracy and oligarchy to democracy and tyranny, with a type of man to match each one.
Book X: the ending. Poetry is attacked again, and the book closes on a story, the Myth of Er (614b to the end).

The voice

Socrates narrates all of it, so everything reaches us through a man remembering his own cleverness. The opening words are “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus”, and the Greek verb for going down comes back in Book VII when the freed philosophers are told that each “must go down to the general underground abode”. Book V happens only because Socrates’ friends will not let him skip wives and children.

Socrates is also evasive at the crucial point. Asked in Book VI what the good is, he says he cannot say, and offers instead “the child of the good”, the sun, which does for sight what the good does for thought. Every ruler is to spend a lifetime learning a thing the book declines to state, which is either a confession or a dare.

The Line, the Cave and the way back

The Cave works so well that readers tend to stop at the wrong moment. “Behold! human beings” chained underground, watching shadows. “They are strange prisoners”, says Glaucon, and Socrates replies: “Like ourselves.” One gets out, is dazzled, and at last sees the sun. It restates the Line, “a line which has been cut into two unequal parts” that runs from shadows through things and mathematics up to the Forms. Socrates calls it a picture of education, which does not put knowledge in: “the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already”, and has to be turned around.

Then comes the part usually left out. The philosopher does not want to go back, and he must be made to. A city where people are eager to rule will be badly governed, so the only fit rulers are people who would prefer to do something else. The freed man whom the prisoners would kill if they could catch him can only be Socrates, and the whole book sits in the shadow of that death.

Does Plato mean the city?

Three answers are on offer. The first says that the city is only a large-print image of the soul, and that nothing political is being recommended. Book IX ends in that spirit: “In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it”, and whether such a city ever exists “is no matter”. The second, from Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, is that the city is deliberately absurd, a lesson in the limits of politics. The first step towards the city is sending away “all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old”. The third, Popper’s, says that he means every word.

My view is that Plato means it, as a standard and not a programme, and that the first two answers avoid what he wrote. An allegory of the soul has no need of breeding schedules, or of “some ingenious kind of lots” rigged so that the worse guardians blame their luck and not the rulers. Socrates says the scheme is “although difficult not impossible”. Aristotle, who spent twenty years in Plato’s school, takes it as a real proposal and argues against it in Book II of the Politics. Above all there is the Laws, Plato’s last work, where the speaker settles for a second-best city and says that the first and highest form remains the one in which friends have all things in common, wives and property included. He had changed his mind about what could be done and not about what would be best.

What Book V does say, and the literal readers skip, is that the ideal is a measure: a painter is no worse for painting a perfect man who never lived, and it was drawn “that we might have an ideal” and “not with any view of showing that they could exist in fact”. So he wants it and does not expect it, and he states its price without flinching. That is harder to accept than the ironic Plato or the fascist one: a very intelligent man, who had seen his relatives Critias and Charmides among the Thirty and his teacher condemned by the restored democracy, thought this was what taking justice seriously would cost.

Popper’s attack

Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies was written during the Second World War and published in 1945. Its first volume, The Spell of Plato, argued that fear of change led Plato to a totalitarian caste state, and that the humane Socrates had been betrayed by his pupil. Popper called the book a “topical political manifesto”, which claims too much, since a manifesto does not say that it is no matter whether its programme is carried out. Ronald Levinson answered at length in In Defense of Plato, and Popper replied in later editions. Popper also treats a class system with promotion and demotion as if it were simply hereditary.

All the same, Popper asks the right question. Plato asks who should rule. Popper asks how to arrange things so that bad rulers can do little damage, and on that the Republic has no answer at all. Its rulers cannot be voted out, and they are to lie to everyone: “just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city”. Infants of the inferior are “put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be”. Every defence of Plato assumes that the philosophers will be what the book says. His own attempt to educate a tyrant in Sicily suggests how that goes, though the main source, the Seventh Letter, is of disputed authorship.

Women, the family and the poets

Book V’s first wave is less startling on inspection. Women are to be trained and to rule alongside men, because “the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also”. The sentence continues “but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man”, so the argument is about function and not about equal worth, and it applies only to the guardians. The second wave abolishes the family among them: “no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent”, on the theory that private love splits a city. Aristotle’s reply, that what is common to many gets the least care, has never been bettered.

Poetry gets two attacks. Books II and III censor Homer for showing gods who lie and heroes who weep. Book X goes deeper: the poet is “thrice removed from the king and from the truth”, and his real offence is that he feeds the part of us that reason should govern, so only “hymns to the gods and praises of famous men” may stay. Socrates half apologises, calling it “an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry”. Er, a soldier who revives on his pyre, tells how the dead choose their next lives, where Odysseus, drawing the last lot, looks for “the life of a private man who had no cares”. The moral comes from the Interpreter: “the responsibility is with the chooser”. The writer who banished storytellers trusted a story with his last word.

The people

Socrates

Socrates was executed in 399 BC, and this one is Plato’s creation, with far more doctrine than the questioner of the shorter dialogues.

Glaucon and Adeimantus

Glaucon and Adeimantus were Plato’s brothers, sons of Ariston, and they do most of the talking after Book I. Plato gives his own family the best case against his own teacher.

Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus of Chalcedon was a real teacher of rhetoric. Having roared in Book I, he stays and listens.

Cephalus and his sons

Cephalus, the rich old host, says that he is glad to have “escaped from a mad and furious master”, as Sophocles said of desire, then goes off to his sacrifices before the argument gets hard. Plato’s first readers knew what came next: in 404 the Thirty seized this family’s property and made Polemarchus drink hemlock, and his brother Lysias, silent here, barely escaped. A dialogue about justice is set among future victims of a regime that included Plato’s kin.

Readers and afterlives

Fragments of the book survive in Egyptian papyri, and a version in Coptic, much altered, was found among the Nag Hammadi books in 1945. Cicero wrote his own De re publica in imitation and closed it with the Dream of Scipio, his answer to Er. Averroes, who had no access to Aristotle’s Politics, wrote a commentary on the Republic instead, keeping both the censorship and the equality of women, and using Arab history for his examples. Thomas More took common property and the absence of privacy to his Utopia.

Benjamin Jowett made it central at Victorian Oxford, teaching at Balliol for decades and sending pupils on to high office.

How to read it

Use the free text with care. Jowett’s version is complete, with all ten books, and his prose is handsome and clear. It is also a Victorian gentleman’s Plato, smoother and more elevated than the Greek. He writes “royal lie” for what is now called the noble lie, and “den” for the Cave. His text gives Gyges himself the ring, where modern readings give it to an ancestor of Gyges. The Gutenberg file adds problems of its own: nearly half of it is Jowett’s introduction and analysis, so use the book links here to skip it; it has no Stephanus numbers, so you cannot follow scholarly references; and notes such as “(Laws)” sit in the middle of what Socrates says.
Buy a modern version for study. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, 1992), is a standard classroom text, and Reeve’s own translation (Hackett, 2004) is newer. Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1968) aims at literal exactness, and adds an interpretive essay on the ironic side. Tom Griffith, edited by G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge, 2000), is in a political thought series and reads easily. Desmond Lee (Penguin, 1955) is the long-established Penguin. Paul Shorey’s Loeb is free on Perseus with the Stephanus numbers.
Read Book I as a play. Then read Glaucon’s speech twice.
Hold on through Books VIII and IX. They are the most worldly part. Democracy is “a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike”, and anyone who has lived in one will wince.