Republic (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Plato Read Free Book Online

permitted to indulge themselves with little real restraint. The ultimate effect of democracy is to render political leaders helplessly incapable of true governance, since they are inevitably forced to gratify and flatter the common people, who can turn on them with impunity as soon as they fail to please (see, for example, Gorgias 500a-519c; Republic 6.492a-493d).
    These criticisms run counter to the self-images that most Athenians—and most Greeks—would have nurtured, although the negative assessment of Athenian democracy echoes points made by other upper-class Athenians writing in the fifth and fourth centuries, such as Thucydides, Xenophon, and Isocrates. Plato distinguishes himself, however, by positioning his critique of Athens’ democratic culture within a far broader interrogation of time-honored values and practices that were not specific to Athens. In so doing, he takes aim at the traditional aristocratic ideology cherished by his own social group, which assumed that the well-born and elite few—purportedly endowed with superior intelligence, skill, resources, and “excellence” ( aretê )—possessed a natural and god-given right to power. As Andrea Wilson Nightingale argues (Genres in Dialogue, pp. 55-59), the dialogues time and again expose the ignorance and powerlessness of well-born men who presume and are presumed to be “superior.” Even the gifted and privileged Alcibiades is made to concede the “slavishness” of his desire to “please the crowd” in Symposium 215e-216b.
    Yet the repeated exposes of how elite individuals like Alcibiades fail to be morally and intellectually “superior” do not overturn the basic presumption that, in a given community, only a few individuals are sufficiently gifted to wield political power. Critical as they are of the conduct and attitudes of contemporary elites, the dialogues ultimately validate the principle of elitism. Against the claims of democracy’s pluralist ideology, Plato’s works seek to reenergize traditional aristocratic views of political power as a special responsibility and privilege reserved for the very few. In the process, however, they completely redefine who the “best men” (hoi aristoi) are, and completely reconfigure the meaning of traditional terms for the qualities of those best men—that is, excellence (aretê), wisdom (sophia), courage (andreia), temperance (sophrosynê), and justice (dikaiosynê).
    At its most basic level, Republic is an effort to forge a consistent and meaningful redefinition of “justice” that goes against the grain of much traditional teaching. Readers will see for themselves how its reconfiguration of what is signified by the term goes hand in hand with its argument for an “aristocracy” of men called “philosophers,” whose apprehension of the metaphysical ideas leads them to disdain appearances of all sorts. Their aretê lies in nothing outward, but rests solely in their mature reason and regard for what is beneficial to the soul.
    These thoughts could have been conveyed in any number of ways, and in themselves they do not tell us why Plato chose to write dialogues as opposed to treatises. His choice must have been motivated to some extent by the fact that other members of the Socratic circle were composing dialogues, but there might have been additional reasons for his gravitation toward this versatile form. Certainly the dialogue afforded him great flexibility of expression, and with it he was able to craft attractive alternatives to the very forms of discourse (including poetic genres such as tragedy and epic) that Republic and other works expose as the principal carriers of problematic cultural values.
    Moreover, even though the dialogues are not philosophical discourses in their own right—since such can never take place in writing (compare Phaedrus 274e-278b)—they are plainly models of the kinds of conversations that thoughtful men can have. They are, in some regards, advertisements for