In the Library
The Republic
Plato, 375 BCE
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Benjamin Jowett (1871)
- Original
- Original grc
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 118k words
£1.99
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Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Republic
A book everyone files under political philosophy that is really a tense late-night argument among friends about whether being a good person is worth it, and whether anyone would stay honest if they could get away with anything.
The reputation of The Republic is that it is a dense treatise on the ideal state, the founding document of political theory, the kind of thing you are handed in a course on great books and expected to revere from a respectful distance. That description is not wrong so much as it buries the thing that actually keeps you reading. What you are walking into is a heated, often funny, sometimes genuinely tense conversation among real people who interrupt and lose their tempers and refuse to be satisfied, and the famous ideal city is built in the middle of it almost as a thought experiment to settle a much more personal quarrel.
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About the book
Imagine a ring that makes you invisible. Glaucon sets it on the table early and asks the only question that matters: stripped of every reward, with no chance of being caught, would you still choose to be just, or is decency merely the price we pay for fear? Socrates refuses the easy answer and instead builds an entire city in speech, hoping to find justice written large enough to read, mapping the soul's three voices (reason, spirit, appetite) onto three classes until justice reveals itself as a kind of inner health and injustice a sickness its sufferer cannot feel. At the book's heart waits the Allegory of the Cave, where prisoners chained since birth take shadows on a wall for the whole world, and the one who escapes finds the climb toward the sun so blinding the others would kill him before they would follow. By the end, the tyrant who seems to have seized everything carries the most ruined soul in the city. A quarrel about fairness has become the first true map of the human interior.