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Plato: The Republic

Philosophy asks big questions in careful steps. This page is a short introduction to Plato's Republic. It is general education. It is not advice for your own situation, and it is not therapy. It is a short orientation and does not settle scholarly debates.

The central question

The Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for the question. Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the start of Book Two.

A good city

To answer it, Socrates sketches a good city. He reasons that a good city would be just, and that defining justice as a virtue of a city would help define justice as a virtue of a human being.

Three parts of the soul

According to the Republic, every human soul has three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite.

How the argument unfolds

At the end of Book Four, Socrates characterizes justice as a personal virtue. He is then challenged to defend features of the good city in Books Five through Seven. In Books Eight and Nine he delivers three "proofs" that it is always better to be just than unjust. In Book Ten he questions the poets' claims to represent the truth and offers a new myth.

Ethics and politics

The center of the Republic is a contribution to ethics: what the virtue justice is and why a person should be just. Because Socrates links personal justice to justice in the city, it is also a work of political philosophy.

Sources

This page draws on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic" (first published Apr 1, 2003; substantive revision Sep 12, 2017) at plato.stanford.edu. The link goes to the organization's own site.

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