The Republic

The Republic, regarded as my best student’s magnum opus, is widely known as one of the first-and best-attempts to define justice and the ideal society. While I agree that the inquiry itself is intelligent and raises interesting questions about the fabric of government, the text itself is not particularly well-written and often drags on.

The Republic is written in the form of a dialogue among me, my friends, and the people who we happen to be visiting at the moment (I personally do not remember this conversation). After some small talk, I decide to ask everyone what they think justice is and, finding that justice is neither the paying of one’s debts nor a system developed by politicians to gain additional power over the civilians, I decide to come up with a hypothetical city-state which instates the ideals of justice into its governmental structure so we can find what justice is. From there, the conversation drifts off to places such as how every other government in the world today is flawed to whether or not women should have rights similar to men. In using a conversation as a way to convey his ideas, Plato creates fundamental flaws in his work. Due to the fact that conversations, when not moderated, tend to drift off to many different points at sudden, unpredictable intervals, The Republic is difficult to follow at times. I might be talking about censorship of the press at one point and go on about the nature of the human soul without warning. Hence, it was easy to get lost in the text, and half the time I had no idea why certain points were brought up and what relevance they had. Getting lost in the text forced me to go back a few lines to figure out how the conversation went off on such a dramatic tangent. This process made the reading seem slow, and at times I just had to look at how many pages were remaining in each chapter to see how much more reading I had to do.

Despite what I may have made out to be fundamental, severe flaws in The Republic, the work itself was excellent and made me wonder about why we organize states the way we do and whether or not all of our ideals are justified. The Republic is a great read provided one has the time and patience to get through it, and those who read the entire work will be rewarded with new insights about life.

-Socrates