Plato’s Republic is a dramatic example of the way a work of ancient philosophy can become, or cease to be, interesting to think about in contemporary philosophical terms. It is probably the most dramatic example.
For most of the twentieth century, and some of the nineteenth, the Republic has been far and away the best-known work of ancient philosophy. It is probably the only work in ancient philosophy that a large number of people have read. In universities, colleges and schools in many countries it figures in courses in ancient philosophy, in introductory philosophy, in ‘Western Civilization’, in political philosophy and in humanities. If you have to touch on ancient philosophy, or Plato, in any of these courses, the Republic is seen as the obvious work to choose. In modern readings of Plato the Republic is the centrepiece and high point of Plato’s thought, the work which best presents the most important aspects of Plato’s thought.
There is another important point: the Republic is predominantly read in the light of its brief account of an ideal society. Plato there sketches an ideally just society, in which there would be complete division of labour between wealth on the one hand and political power on the other. The rulers would be ‘Guardians’, who would devote their lives to the public good and running the state. Those engaged in what we call economic activity would be excluded from political rule, on the grounds that their way of life narrows them to consider only their own self-interest and makes them unfit to take part in the public arena where what is at stake is the common good. The Guardian class, by contrast, is educated and trained to care primarily for the common good and to sacrifice their own interests to this.
It is often assumed that this ideal political construction is the organizing idea of the book; indeed often the book is introduced as though it were Plato’s chief response to what he thought were political questions of the time. The Republic contains a number of themes. However, commonly what is seen as holding all these together is Plato’s political vision, the idea that only in an ideal state, ruled in the interests of all, can people be virtuous and so happy. Sometimes this ideal of rule by the wise is seen as a reaction to the Athenian culture of democracy in which Plato grew up, and against which he reacted in what is assumed to be an élitist and reactionary spirit. So deeply ingrained is this way of reading the work that, at least in American libraries, the Republic and works about it are shelved in the political science section, rather than the history of philosophy section. The very way we have access to the book suggests the way we should read it. And it is often taken for granted that the book should be taught as a contribution to political thought, with its other aspects as extras.
Plato’s Republic
In the Republic, Plato tries to show that what makes a human life happy is to be found in being a good, virtuous person – something that the person has to achieve for herself, while wealth, status and other things commonly valued are irrelevant to happiness. This challenging thesis is defended by a claim that virtue consists in the proper ordering and structure of the person’s soul, one in which reason rules (see Chapter 1). A properly ordered and so virtuous soul, compared to a properly ordered and so healthy body, brings the person a happy life, while unhappiness results from the breakdown of the soul’s order. The framework of the book consists in Plato’s developing and defending this idea that, contrary to popular belief, happiness is to be found in virtue, the right ordering of the soul, even in the worst possible conditions of poverty and torture.
As a model for the structure of the soul, Plato sketches the structure of an ideal society, with different kinds of people ordered in mutually beneficial ways, ruled by ‘Guardians’ who are devoted to the common good in the way that reason is devoted to the good of the whole person. Plato develops this devotion to the common good to extremes: Guardians will have no family life or private property, and much of their life will be devoted to training in the abstract metaphysical theory of ‘Forms’ (on this see below p. 82). Strikingly, women as well as men will be Guardians – or, as they are sometimes called in view of their exacting philosophical education, ‘philosopher-kings’ (and philosopher-queens, of course).
This imaginative picture of an ideal society is developed further in narrative form in Plato’s story of Atlantis, found in his Timaeus and unfinished Critias. The ideal society, projected back into history, is ranged against the exotic, romantic but corrupt society of Atlantis, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and later sunk there. This story, which Plato never finished, is probably his most influential contribution to literature outside the philosophical tradition.
But should we read the work this way? How else might it be read?
In the ancient world the Republic was read as one of Plato’s dialogues, but by no means as the most important or as central for his thought. When philosophers began to study Plato’s thought systematically, the dialogue they privileged was the Timaeus, a poetically written cosmology. What the Republic was mainly famous for was the idea that ideal rulers would have no private family life, but ‘women and children would be in common’, which was notorious, but was seen as eccentric rather than profound. Plato’s political ideas in the work, while criticized by Aristotle, did not enter the mainstream of ancient political thought, although political ideas in other dialogues, the Statesman and Laws, did.
In the streams of medieval transmission of Plato’s works the Republic was studied in the Islamic tradition, in which it was seen as suggestive of the idea of unified spiritual and secular power in ideal religious leaders. This idea did not develop in the Christian West; a tendency to think in terms of separation of church and state was aided by ignorance of the work until quite late. The work came into prominence at the Renaissance, and Italian thinkers who saw themselves as Platonists thought of it as an ideal Utopian fantasy. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Plato fell into philosophical neglect, and the Republic was regarded as a mere oddity, if it was regarded at all. (See box, p. 82).
Then, in the nineteenth century, Plato had a dramatic change of fortune, rising to the pre-eminence in study of ancient philosophy which he has kept ever since. The story of the rise of Plato in England is especially interesting, since there were three phases, each in response to a different philosophical approach.
The first English translation of the whole of Plato’s works was made in 1804 by Thomas Taylor. Taylor was a self-educated man for whom Plato was a labour of love in a difficult life, so it is painful to have to say that the translations are awful. Taylor saw Plato’s ideas in the framework of Neoplatonism, a later mystical elaboration of some of Plato’s metaphysical ideas, and the result appealed to Romantic writers, but had influence on Wordsworth’s poems rather than on philosophers.