The Republic by Plato

The Republic by Plato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am reading Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World and pausing to read any of the books mentioned that I have not already read. In this case, I had read most of The Republic before but couldn't remember it so I went back and read the whole thing.

Great Books didn't give me a lot of help in analyzing or dealing with The Republic so I listened to a library audiobook course about The Republic. This definitely helped in understanding all the confusing arguments Socrates makes.

Plato describes Socrates engaging in a dialogue with Glaucon and numerous other Athenians and non-citizens about a number of topics. The first part is about justice and it mostly matches up to a modern (even Christian) conception of justice. Justice is not about the force of the powerful. It's about the soul, goodness towards even enemies, and the rights of weak.

The next part is about the perfect society, but not really, because Plato didn't believe in a modern-day Western conception of legal equality based on human rights. To his credit, his perfect society is feminist- women can do whatever men can do except things requiring a lot of physical strength. Unfortunately, his society is also based on eugenics, hierarchy with little opportunity for social movement, communist, and without families. To modern ears his perfect society sounds like the perfect Young Adult Dystopian Novel; a cross between The Giver and Allegiant. According to my audiobook course, this Socrates's conception of the perfect society is the direct result of Athen's recent defeat to Sparta. Many of the aspects are either taken from Spartan society or a "correction" of something in Athenian society that Socrates perceives to be at fault for Athen's loss.

Socrates also wanted philosopher kings. As such, the book is also about Socrates's conception of making philosophy a fixed study in the way that math and geometry have fixed answers. Which is certainly an interesting concept. Philosophy (at least popular philosophy) has moved so far away from that idea that the idea of real answers in ethics and philosophy is very appealing.

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