The Republic

The Library Essay

Justice, Written Large Enough to Read

Plato's Republic, composed around 375 before Christ, begins with a question about justice in one man and answers it by building a city in speech, on the grounds that justice is easier to read in large letters. Out of that construction come the ideas Europe has argued with ever since, the philosopher rulers, the noble lie, the divided soul, and the cave whose prisoners mistake shadows for the world.

It is the founding book of political philosophy and still its most disputed; every century finds its own utopia or its own warning in it. Desmond Lee's Penguin Classics translation, first made in 1955 and since revised, presents the dialogue as living argument rather than monument, which is how Socrates conducts it.