The best known of Plato's dialogues, "The Republic" applies the principles of philosophy to political affairs. Ostensibly a discussion of the nature of justice, it lays before us Plato's vision of the ideal state, covering a wide range of topics, social, educational, psychological, moral and philosophical. It also includes in the process, some of Plato's most important writing on the nature of reality and the theory of the 'forms'. Plato is critical of Athenian democracy, which had been responsible for the execution of his friend, and teacher, Socrates, and his political ideas, as expressed in "The Republic", started lines of thought which are still relevant today. This translation was first published in 1955 and revised in 1974 and 1987. The translator died in 1993.
"Must we not acknowledge...that in each of us there are the same principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the individual they pass into the State?"
What does it mean to be good? What enables us to distinguish right from wrong? And how should human virtues be translated into a just society? These are the questions that Plato sought to answer in this monumental work of moral and political philosophy, a book surpassed only by the Bible in its formative influence on two thousand years of Western thought.
In the course of its tautly reasoned Socratic dialogues, The Republic accomplishes nothing less than an anatomy of the soul and an exhaustive description of a State that both mirrors and enforces the soul's ideal harmony. The resulting text is at once mystical and elegantly logical and may be read as a template for the societies in which most of us live today.
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