The Republic

What is justice? Who should rule? What is knowledge, and how do we acquire it? How should we educate our children, and what kind of life is worth living? Plato asked all of these questions in a single book — and the answers he proposed have shaped Western civilisation for two and a half thousand years.

The Republic is the most influential work of philosophy in the Western tradition. Its Allegory of the Cave — in which ordinary human beings are imagined as prisoners watching shadows on the wall of a cave, mistaking them for reality — is one of philosophy’s most enduring and productive metaphors. Its concept of the philosopher-king — the ruler who has ascended from the cave and seen the Form of the Good — has haunted political thought from Plato’s own time to the present. Its critique of democracy, poetry, and the corruptions of the soul is as uncomfortable today as it was in fourth-century Athens.

Desmond Lee’s translation is the standard English text. To read The Republic is not to learn what Plato thought — it is to learn how to think about what matters most. Published by Penguin Classics.