The Republic
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 543 passages
Cite this work
- APAPlato. (n.d.). The Republic. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/the-republic
- MLAPlato. The Republic. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/the-republic.
- ChicagoPlato. The Republic. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/the-republic.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
A dialogue about what justice is that ends up designing an entire city in order to see justice writ large, and that sets out along the way the theory of forms, the allegory of the cave and a complete programme of education.
Context and history
Written around 375 BC, in an Athens defeated in the Peloponnesian War and some twenty-five years after the city had condemned Socrates to death. That execution hangs over the whole book: it is where Plato's distrust of democracy begins. It is the work that has set the vocabulary of Western political philosophy for twenty-four centuries, and also the most disputed: each generation has read into it a utopia or a warning, according to its needs.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. And now why do you not praise me? But of course you won’t. Let me first understand you, I replied. Justice, as you say, is the interest of the stronger. What, Thrasymachus, is the meaning of this? You cannot mean to say that because Polydamas, the pancratiast, is stronger than we are, and finds the eating of beef conducive to his bodily strength, that to eat beef is therefore equally for our good who are weaker than he is, and right and just for us? That’s abominable of you, Socrates; you take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument. Not at all, my good sir, I said; I am trying to understand them; and I wish that you would be a little clearer. Well, he said, have you never heard that forms of government differ; there are tyrannies, and there are democracies, and there are aristocracies? Yes, I know. And the government is the ruling power in each state? Certainly. And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger. Now I understand you, I said; and whether you are right or not I will try to discover. But let me remark, that in defining justice you have yourself used the word ‘interest’ which you forbade me to use.…