The Republic

Written around 375 BCE, Plato's Republic is one of the founding texts of Western philosophy: a wide-ranging Socratic dialogue that begins with a deceptively simple question — what is justice? — and expands into an inquiry touching almost every branch of philosophy. To examine justice in the individual soul, Socrates and his interlocutors construct an imaginary ideal city, the Kallipolis, and in doing so consider education, politics, art, gender, family, and the nature of knowledge itself.

Along the way the dialogue develops some of the most influential ideas in intellectual history: the tripartite division of the soul, the theory of the Forms, the notorious proposal that philosophers should rule as kings, and the Allegory of the Cave — Plato's image of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality, and of the painful ascent toward true understanding.

At once a work of political theory, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, The Republic has been argued with, taught, and reinterpreted for nearly two and a half thousand years. It remains a demanding but foundational encounter with the questions of how we should live and how a society should be ordered.