The Republic of Plato is the greatest and best known of Plato’s works and possibly the most influential work of philosophy and political theory in history.  It consists of ten books of dialogs between Socrates and various Athenians and foreigners that address the question of whether a just man or unjust man achieves the greatest happiness by considering the governance and culture of a series of hypothetical cities.  In A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell identifies three parts to the Republic: the definition of the utopia or ideal state (Books I-V); the definition of the philosopher as ideal ruler (Books VI-VII); the pros and cons of various forms of government (Books VII-X).  He outlines the progressive degeneration that results from the “five regimes” of Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny.

Translator Benjamin Jowett writes in his introduction that “The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary—these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato.”  It is no wonder that The Republic has been a centerpiece of a classical education for centuries.

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