The Republic. Revenge Written in Ten Books

Before we talk about the book, let us talk about its author. He is not a statue in a museum. He is a man with blood and body and reputation.

"Plato" is not his real name. His real name is Aristocles, after his grandfather. "Plato" is a nickname, meaning broad-shouldered or broad-faced. A wrestling coach gave it to him. As a young man Plato wrestled at the Isthmian Games. He was an athlete. Some sources say he could have competed at Olympia had he not gone to philosophy.

He was from a family every Athenian knew. His mother descended from Solon, the lawgiver who gave Athens its first constitution. His father descended from Codrus, the last king of Athens. His brothers — Glaucon and Adimantus — are influential young men who appear as interlocutors in the Republic. His uncle was Critias, leader of the Thirty Tyrants. Another relative — Charmides — was one of the Thirty, also killed in the coup.

Picture this. You are a young man in Athens. Your family has just run a coup. This is not some distant inheritance — it was last year. The coup was put down by the democrats, and the restored regime has just tried your teacher — the man who has been more than a father to you since childhood. They tried him. They killed him.

What do you do? You have a choice. You can try to take revenge politically. You can leave. You can fall silent.

Plato did a fourth thing.

Plato himself in the Seventh Letter (a document of disputed authenticity — but even if a forgery, a forgery written by a student who knew the master's mind) explains his trajectory. In rough English:

"In my youth I felt as every young man in my circle does. As soon as I should be my own master, I would go into politics. The first opportunity came quickly: the overthrow of the democracy and the rule of the Thirty. Some of them were my close relations, and they invited me to join. I waited, as a young man waits, to see what they would do. What they did was monstrous. The old government, which in my imagination had been corrupt, now looked golden by comparison. Among other cruelties they sent my friend and teacher Socrates, along with several others, to arrest a citizen known to be loyal to democracy, in order to bring him to his death. Their purpose was to implicate him in their crimes. Socrates refused. The whole of their rule I came to loathe.

The democracy returned. Many of the returning men were better. But among the powerful were the men who charged my friend Socrates with impiety, condemned him, and killed him.

Considering all this, and watching the men in politics, and reviewing the laws and customs, I came to feel that the harder I looked the harder it was to govern a city. For nothing can be done without loyal friends, and these were not to be found among old acquaintances. New friends were not easily made. I was overwhelmed by the spectacle of a general breakdown. In the end I concluded: every existing state is badly governed.

I was compelled to say that only the right philosophy enables one to discern what is just in the state and in the life of the individual. Evils will not cease until either true philosophers gain political power, or the rulers of states truly take to philosophy."

This is the most important autobiographical passage in ancient philosophy. In it is laid out the program of the rest of Plato's life. He never once changed it.

Plato takes the next step. Around 387 BCE, returning from his travels in Italy and Sicily, he buys a grove outside the walls of Athens. The grove is sacred to the hero Academus. There Plato founds a school. He names it for the grove: the Academy.

Understand how provocative this is. It is a school outside the polis. Plato is in effect telling the Athenians: your education — your orators, your grammarians, your sophists — is of no interest to me. I am building my own. In mine there will be mathematics, astronomy, dialectic, the art of right asking. Over the entrance, the later tradition reports, was the inscription: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."

This is not a school. This is a counter-institution. The polis has its orators — the Academy will have its dialecticians. The polis has its assemblies — the Academy will have its symposia. The polis trains politicians — the Academy trains philosophers. The polis killed one Socrates — the Academy will breed new ones by the dozen.

And the Academy works. Among its students is Aristotle, who will arrive twenty years later and stay twenty. Among its graduates are politicians, lawgivers, ambassadors. Plato himself will go to Syracuse three times to try to turn the tyrant Dionysius into a philosopher-king. He will fail three times. Once he will be sold into slavery; friends will ransom him. But the Academy will remain. And it will last nine hundred years.

Nine centuries. That is longer than the Roman Empire. Longer than any medieval state. Plato founded one of the longest-lived institutions in Western civilizational history — as a side-effect of his inability to make peace with the death of his teacher.

The Republic is not a treatise. It is a screenplay. An imagined dinner at the house of Cephalus, a wealthy resident alien, in the Piraeus. Socrates is talking. First to old Cephalus about justice; then to his son Polemarchus; and then — and here the drama really begins — to Thrasymachus, a sophist who breaks off the polite discussion with a snarl and says: "I will tell you what justice is. It is the interest of the stronger."

This is the moment the Republic comes alive. Thrasymachus is Plato's best argument against Plato. Everything the cynic ever wanted to say about morality and politics, he says — clearly, shamelessly, in fury. The laws are the tool of the strong. Morality is a mask. Just people are dupes being used. The unjust live better, and everyone knows it.

Socrates fights back — but only halfway. Plato deliberately does not let Socrates finish off Thrasymachus in Book I. Because he wants you, the reader, to feel how attractive the cynical position is. Book I is a trap set for the intelligent cynical reader. Plato wants him. If after ten books you can still believe Thrasymachus, Plato has no use for you. If you have begun to feel Socrates take you — he has you.

Plato's brothers, Glaucon and Adimantus, in Book II restate Thrasymachus's case even harder. Imagine, they say, two men. One is perfectly just, but everyone thinks him unjust — and he suffers every punishment. The other is perfectly unjust, but everyone thinks him just — and he receives every honor. Which is the happier man? This question keeps Plato working for the remaining nine books.

Socrates' reply — and this is so characteristic of Plato — is not a theory but an experiment. "Let us build a city. In speech. We'll see how it comes out. And then look into it as into a mirror — to see justice in large letters — and then look from it into the human soul, where justice is in small letters."

This is the most astonishing move in the whole book. Plato says: I will not define justice. I will construct it. Like an engineer.

First, the minimal city. Farmer, potter, carpenter, shoemaker. All calm. Glaucon says: "this is a city of pigs, without luxury." Socrates agrees to add luxury. But then the city needs the territory of its neighbors. Then it needs an army. Then it needs guardians.

And here the real Republic begins. Who are the guardians? How are they raised? What may they know, believe, love, eat, sleep with? Plato regulates everything. Music — only two modes, the rest banned. Poetry — Homer must be censored, because he portrays the gods unworthily. No families — the guardians live in common, the children are common, no one knows whose son he is. No property. Men and women are equal in education, in training, in war.

This part scandalized antiquity. Plato says that women can be guardians on the same footing as men. They train naked, like the men. They fight, like the men. This is not incidental — and not "progressive." It is reasoned. If justice begins in the soul, and the soul is the same in both sexes, then nothing in the construction of the city should discriminate by sex. Aristotle, by the way, will categorically disagree fifty years later.

And then — Book V. Glaucon throws the challenge at Socrates: "When will this city actually appear?"

And Socrates replies, in the most famous sentence in the book: "Unless either philosophers become kings in our cities, or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of political power and philosophy in the same person — there will be no end, my dear Glaucon, to the troubles of cities, nor, I think, of the human race."

This is the man whose uncle had just run the terror, thirty years after his teacher had been killed by the democrats, talking. It is not a wish. It is a program for the total rebuilding of political reality.

In Book VII Plato draws the most famous image in Western philosophy.

Imagine, says Socrates, a cave. In it are prisoners chained from childhood. They cannot turn their heads. Before them is a wall. Behind them is a fire, and between the fire and them runs a road along which people carry statues of animals and men. The prisoners see only the shadows of these statues on the wall. They are certain that the shadows are reality. They discuss the shadows. They argue about the shadows. They give the shadows names. They celebrate the prisoner who best predicts which shadow will come next.

Now suppose one prisoner is freed. His head is turned. He sees the fire. He is blinded. It hurts. He wants the shadows back. He is dragged upward. He sees the statues. He does not believe in them. He is dragged out of the cave into the light. The light burns his eyes. He cries out. But slowly his eyes adjust. First he sees shadows on the ground, then reflections in water, then the things themselves. At last — he sees the sun.

Now he must go back. It is an order. He descends back into the cave. His eyes are now adjusted to sunlight, so in the cave's darkness he sees nothing at first. The prisoners laugh at him: "You went up and came back ruined. You can no longer even predict the next shadow."

"And if he were to try to free them," says Socrates, "they would kill him."

Plato is as clear here as glass. He is writing about Socrates. About a man who saw the sun and came back to Athens trying to free the prisoners. Athens killed him.

The cave is not a metaphor for cognition. It is a political diagnosis. Almost all human beings live chained to shadows. A few break loose. These few — the philosophers — are obliged to come back. And when they come back, they are hated. Because they spoil the game.

Read Book VII from 514a to 521b. Thirty pages. The most important thirty pages of Western political thought.

Books VIII–IX are a political act of cruelty. Plato describes five forms of government and their inevitable chain of decay.

1. Aristocracy — rule of the best. The ideal city. 2. Timocracy — rule of honor. Sparta. The army rules. Already in decline. 3. Oligarchy — rule of wealth. The city splits into rich and poor. War between them is inevitable. 4. Democracy — the people rise up, throw out the oligarchs, proclaim equality. Plato describes democracy this way: "Each man does as he pleases. This city is like the finest coat — full of variegated colors, attractive to women and children." Plato does not pretend democracy is ugly. It is beautiful. But — he says — there is no inward backbone to it. Desires rage. Everyone is equal. Nobody can be made to do what he does not want. Students despise teachers. Sons despise fathers. Slaves despise masters. Animals despise men. (Yes, Plato seriously says that in a democracy dogs become impudent.) 5. Tyranny — out of democracy comes the tyrant. He appears as "the protector of the people." He demands bodyguards. He begins executing the rich. He asks for money. He sends the young men into war so they will not revolt. He is the extreme form of the thing democracy defined itself against.

Here Plato makes his most scandalous move: democracy is the second-to-last political order. Just before tyranny. Democracy produces tyranny by internal logic.

This is written in Athens, a democratic city defeated in war by oligarchic Sparta, having survived an oligarchic coup, returning to democracy, and having just killed Plato's teacher. This is not a theoretical classification. It is a death-strike.

Is Plato right? That is a different question. Hegel agrees. Tocqueville partly agrees. Many democratic theorists have answered. But the argument stands. It still stands.

Here we need one more turn. Because the Republic is not only revenge. If we leave it at the level of "Plato got mad," we miss the deepest thing.

Leo Strauss, in The City and Man, read the Republic differently. On his reading, the whole city built in the book is deliberately impossible. Why men and women together? Because it goes against the nature of human jealousy. Why no family? Because it goes against the nature of human love for one's own children. Why philosophers rule? Because philosophers above all else do not want to rule. Plato knows all of this. And he shows it.

What is he doing, then? He is showing: a truly just city requires conditions that do not exist. This is not a wish, not a utopia, not "let's try it." It is a proof of impossibility. Plato builds the ideal city in order to burn it. To show: all real cities — and Athens most of all — are not accidentally corrupt. They are corrupt by the very nature of the political.

From which it follows: the philosopher can never be an ordinary citizen. The philosopher either hides ("takes shelter under a wall in a storm," as Socrates says in Book VI), or leaves the city (as Plato did with the Academy), or is killed (as Socrates was).

The Republic is simultaneously revenge, theory, and tragedy. Revenge — because the democracy that killed Socrates has been given its exact appraisal. Theory — because a complete architecture of justice and of decay has been built. Tragedy — because at the heart of the book Plato admits: this architecture will not be built. Because human beings are human beings.

Plato is not naive. He does not believe his republic will be founded. He lays down, in unsurpassed prose, a paradigm — a standard against which everything can now be measured. And this standard will last two and a half thousand years.

Plato lived to eighty. He outlived everyone who tried Socrates. He outlived the democratic purges. He outlived the defeat of Athens by Macedonia. He lived long enough to see his student Aristotle begin teaching at the Academy, and then — Aristotle left and founded his own school.

In his last years he wrote The Laws — a second attempt to draft a political order. This is a different book, more cautious, more measured, closer to what could actually be implemented. Not "philosopher-kings" but a Nocturnal Council — wise men gathering before dawn to debate the laws. Not a utopia but a compromise city.

This too matters. Plato did not freeze in one place. He moved. He was alive. He let his own thought grow older.

But the Republic never left his desk. To the last day it was on it. He was editing it.

They say he died at a banquet, of exhaustion. They say he was found with a hair-comb in his hand — he had been about to comb. They say on the table next to him lay a book open at the first lines of the Republic. This may be myth. It may be truth. Either way, it is the best legend of a philosopher's death in history.

Athens killed Socrates. Plato killed Athens. Not literally, of course. But two centuries later, when the Greeks needed words to talk about justice, the soul, beauty, the good — they did not turn to the Athenian constitution or to Solon's laws. They turned to Plato. The polis became a city among others, a province of Rome, a province of the Ottomans, a museum. Plato became the sun this kind of thinking still rotates around.

"The whole of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato," said Alfred North Whitehead.

He was right. Page after page. To this day.