The Republic

What It Is

Ten books of dialogue, some three hundred and fifty pages, written around 375 BC by a man who had watched Athenian democracy lose a war, execute his teacher, and go on congratulating itself. It begins as a conversation about whether it pays to be just. It ends somewhere else entirely.

The method is the point. Socrates and a group of young Athenians, unable to see justice clearly in a single soul, decide to build a city in words where they can see it written larger.

The images everyone half-knows are here, the cave among them. They arrive with far more context, and far more discomfort, than the anthologised versions suggest.

Why It Matters

Whitehead's line about the European philosophical tradition consisting of footnotes to Plato was written with this book in mind. It is the first systematic attempt to ask what a good society would actually require, and it is honest enough to follow the answer wherever it goes, including into places that have horrified its readers for two thousand years.

Karl Popper, writing in 1945 with the ruins in front of him, called it the origin of totalitarianism. Rousseau called it the finest treatise on education ever written. Both had read it carefully. That is the measure of the thing.

The most dangerous possibility is the one Plato leaves open: that the argument is sound. If a just society really does demand what he says it demands, then we do not want what we say we want.

Before You Read

Fifteen to twenty hours, and the hardest book on this list so far. Take a book a sitting over two or three weeks.

Two things make it difficult. The arguments are cumulative, so a concession granted in Book 1 gets spent in Book 9. And the whole edifice rests on an account of reality, laid out in the middle books, that a modern reader will find alien. Slow down there.

Book 10, on poetry, is frequently skimmed and should not be. The argument it makes is put forward by a man who was a poet before he was a philosopher, and it is stranger and more painful than its reputation.

Read the Apology first, so you know who Socrates was and what Athens did about him. The Republic is written by a man who cannot forget it.

Which Translation to Read

• Allan Bloom (Basic Books, second edition 1991) — recommended. The most literal Republic in English, deliberately so. Bloom keeps Plato's awkwardness, his repetitions and his exact vocabulary, on the principle that a translation you have to slow down for is a translation that is not deciding for you. It comes with an interpretive essay of a hundred and thirty pages that is a work of philosophy in its own right. The cost: the English is stiff and sometimes ugly, and Bloom has a strong reading of the dialogue that his notes press on you. Read the essay after the text, and argue with it. View on Amazon →
• G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, 1992). The clearest and cheapest way into the book: accurate, readable, without vanity, and the choice for a reader who wants to get through the argument rather than wrestle it. The cost: the smoothness costs you the strangeness. Plato is knottier than this.
• Tom Griffith, edited by G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 2000). The best English prose of any version, and Ferrari's apparatus is the finest available. Take it if you want to hear the dialogue as a dialogue. The cost: where Bloom leaves the Greek's rough edges standing, Griffith planes them.

Take Bloom to argue with Plato, Griffith to read him, Grube and Reeve to understand him quickly.

The Folio Society's 2005 edition uses Robin Waterfield's translation, with an introduction by A. C. Grayling and engravings by Simon Brett. That is the one to own. It is not the one to study.

Getting the Most From This Book

Watch what Socrates is doing to the people in the room, not only what he is saying. He is talking to young men who are attracted to tyranny and do not know it, and the Republic is partly a demonstration of how to handle such men.

Do not skip the argument you find repellent. The commonest way to read this book badly is to nod along to the parts that sound noble and dismiss the parts that sound monstrous as products of their time. They are the same argument.

Keep a note of the places where you granted Socrates a small point out of politeness, and at the end go back and look at what he built on it. Read the introduction afterwards, without exception.