The Radical Ideas of Plato’s Republic: An In-Depth Introduction

We no longer live in a time when col­lege fresh­men get shocked by much of the read­ing mate­r­i­al assigned to them. Coun­ter­in­tu­itive­ly, the texts that do retain their pow­er to dis­turb young minds (pre­sum­ing they can read texts in the first place) tend to skew old — and in one promi­nent case, about 2,400 years old. Even the most super­fi­cial inter­pre­ta­tions of Pla­to’s Repub­lic chal­lenge the polit­i­cal assump­tions held by almost every stu­dent today, at least in the devel­oped West. Many of them hold those assump­tions so deeply that they’ve nev­er artic­u­lat­ed them. Encoun­ter­ing the argu­ments made by Pla­to’s Socrates in favor of a soci­ety ruled by an enlight­ened upper class, tight­ly con­trolled from above in every­thing from the divi­sion of its labor to the con­tent of its art, prompts them to do so.

Or rather, it prompts them to do so in an ide­al edu­ca­tion­al set­ting, but then, Pla­to was ded­i­cat­ed to noth­ing so much as the ide­al. When he casts Socrates as mak­ing the case for the best pos­si­ble rela­tion­ships between ruler, state, and indi­vid­ual, he cre­ates less a how-to man­u­al (as Machi­avel­li did nine­teen cen­turies lat­er, in a bru­tal­ly qua­si-satir­i­cal spir­it) than a means of bet­ter under­stand­ing extant soci­eties by bring­ing their char­ac­ter­is­tics into relief through com­par­i­son.

We may reflex­ive­ly quote Churchill’s remark about mod­ern democ­ra­cy, vul­ner­a­ble as it is to manip­u­la­tion by all man­ner of unsa­vory actors, being “the worst form of Gov­ern­ment except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time,” but we nev­er­the­less flinch from hold­ing it up too close­ly against any kind of ide­al sys­tem.

It’s tempt­ing to declare that we would­n’t want to live in the repub­lic of the Repub­lic. (Some of us may have suc­cumbed to that temp­ta­tion in the polit­i­cal-phi­los­o­phy lec­ture hall.) But a more reflec­tive read­ing reveals a good deal about Pla­to’s time as well as our own. In the 78-minute video above, Jared Hen­der­son takes us through the Socrat­ic dia­logues that pro­pose and refine this Utopia, with its philoso­pher-kings, noble lies, spir­i­tu­al aris­to­crats, breed­ing fes­ti­vals, and guardians trained from the cra­dle. He arrives at cer­tain unfash­ion­able ideas, such as the ulti­mate task of refin­ing one’s own soul and the neces­si­ty of per­suad­ing those imper­vi­ous to phi­los­o­phy with myth. Even those of us who regard our­selves as sophis­ti­cat­ed thinkers, imper­vi­ous to the crude rhetoric of ide­olo­gies and dem­a­gogues, would do well to ask our­selves: how much of that think­ing has been shaped by the sto­ries we’ve heard all our lives?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Did Plato’s Repub­lic Pre­dict the Rise of Don­ald Trump?: A Chill­ing Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Andrew Sul­li­van

Why Socrates Hat­ed Democ­ra­cies: An Ani­mat­ed Case for Why Self-Gov­ern­ment Requires Wis­dom & Edu­ca­tion

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­ma­tions of Plato’s Cave and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” Two Para­bles of the Human Con­di­tion

Plato’s Dia­logue Gor­gias Gets Adapt­ed into a Short Avant-Garde Film

Sev­en Phi­los­o­phy Books for Begin­ners: Where to Start

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.