The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic is a worthy new contribution to the long-running series of Cambridge Companions, and is eminently suited to guide students, whether graduates or advanced undergraduates, through this intimidating text while at the same time introducing them to significant contemporary disputes in its interpretation. The one thing it lacks is any account of the history of the dialogue's reception, admittedly a daunting task in the average thirty page length of the articles. It lacks little else, however, reflecting the dialogue's extraordinary breadth in essays treating of the ethical, political, metaphysical, psychological, aesthetic, rhetorical and eschatological concerns taken up in it. As such, the book is an antidote to simplistic notions of the Republic's significance. There is, simply speaking, no area of philosophical interest upon which the Republic has nothing to say.

A masterwork both in form and content, the Republic appears to have been, more than any other of his works, the receptacle into which Plato poured as much of his philosophical project as could be accommodated in a single piece; indeed, it is reported that he was undertaking revisions upon the text at the time of his death, many years after its initial composition. In the Republic, Plato's hero Socrates, like a philosophical Heracles, plumbs the depths and scales the heights of the world in thought. Socrates' companions in this odyssey are Plato's own brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, whose distinctive characters play a crucial role in the unfolding of the Republic's narrative. And a narrative it is, philosophy's first epic, its first novel. David O'Connor explores the Republic's Homeric allusions in Chap. 3, "Rewriting the Poets in Plato's Characters," while Plato's critique of tragic drama is incisively analyzed by Jessica Moss in Chap. 15, "What is Imitative Poetry and Why Is It Bad?". A possibility never raised by Moss, however, is that Plato might wish us, not to substitute his own dialogues for Euripides, but to displace the passive experience of dramaturgy by our own disputations about the things that matter to us and the meaning of the experiences of our own lives.

Paul Yunis, in "The Protreptic Rhetoric of the Republic," (Chap. 1 in the Companion) places the Republic in the context of the rise of "popular" prose literature in Greece beginning in the late fifth century B.C.E. Although their consumers necessarily belonged to the upper class for the most part, Yunis argues that the new prose works were not directed to them by virtue of their "social, economic, or professional status," but in regard to their "moral and political status," because they were "individuals who were responsible for both their personal welfare and common affairs, who had choices to make, individually and collectively … Whoever the readers actually were, they were addressed not as aristocrats or upper-class gentry, but as autonomous, thinking individuals," (11). Plato's dialogues render philosophy radically more accessible to a popular audience than the didactic writings of earlier philosophers, privileging the process of inquiring after the Good over the results. Many have seen in this aspect of the dialogues a Plato who withholds his results from the masses in order to reserve them for a select few, when the process may have been more important to him all along. Plato's famous lecture on the Good, a notorious flop, was, after all, delivered openly in public despite apparently containing all the most arcane results of his research, and not before an elite circle of sympathetic 'initiates'.

This also raises the issue, repeatedly taken up by the authors in this volume, of the degree to which we misinterpret the Republic when we read the imaginary "Callipolis" of the dialogue as an "utopia" (on Callipolis as a "paradigm" in the strict sense, see in particular Chap. 9, "The Utopian Character of Plato's Ideal City," by Donald Morrison). Upon closer analysis, Plato's imaginary polity looks more like a geometrical construction. Searching for the meaning of justice in the soul, Socrates ventures that studying the nature of justice in states will be easier, because polities are like souls writ large. If there is a utopia in the dialogue, it is the first city Socrates proposes, scorned by his interlocutors as a "city of pigs" because its inhabitants live simply and hence within the means that their roughly equitable division of labor can supply. Here Plato's brother Glaucon, in particular, embodies the tendency in human nature to yearn for luxuries beyond the simple, healthy pleasures of the "pigs". Supplying these luxuries will create injustice inside the state and in its external relations. Socrates proceeds to fashion Callipolis in response to this, as it were, popular demand, and far from regarding it as ideal, Socrates characterizes it as "fevered". It is, in a sense, the sort of city people were already living in, only in Callipolis, the city's chronic problems are combated, instead of simply being allowed to fester as the city slides toward disaster. Callipolis is like a projection of the measures that will be necessary if certain aspects of human nature are to be accommodated while preserving the city's overall integrity.

Socrates' three most radical proposals for Callipolis involve the education and training in common of men and women; the abolition of the family in any conventional sense; and rule by philosopher-experts. Paul Ludwig, in Chap. 8, "Eros in the Republic," puts the sexual legislation of Callipolis in historical context. The goal of the sexual legislation in Callipolis, Ludwig argues, is essentially "to transform eros politically … treating heterosexual eros in conscious imitation of the way actual cities in the Greek world treated homosexual eros," (210). It is worth noting that in the "city of pigs" people "will feast with their children … not begetting offspring beyond their means lest they fall into poverty or war," (372b), but that in the "fevered" city, the family has become a breeding ground for injustice. The fevered city requires such extraordinary solidarity in order to keep from flying apart that any source of partiality must be abolished, at least for the "guardian" class upon which the city depends for its survival.

In a certain regard, we stand on the other side of the "waves" that Socrates expects to inundate his listeners with incredulity and put an end to any serious consideration of Callipolis' possibility. Educating men and women in common is no longer strange to us. We have not dissolved the family, but we can easily fail to appreciate just how different an institution it is than the families of Plato's world, and how much closer to being an organ of the state. Similarly, to be ruled by philosophers sounds both fanciful and ill-advised, but we take for granted that any successful government will draw upon a level of expertise far beyond that which governments in the ancient world could. We also take for granted a sophisticated balancing of written constitutions, legislation, and judicial review which gives reason–not of the highest sort, but not of the lowest either–a much larger share in governance than was the case in antiquity.  

Callipolis does not finally resolve the problem of being a "fevered" city, however; it only stabilizes the situation for a time. Socrates recognizes that eventually its "ideal" regime will fail, and give way to one of the familiar forms of government–oligarchy, democracy, tyranny–under the pressure of the same tendencies that necessitated it in the first place. In this way, the analogy between the city and the soul gives way to an account of their reciprocal interaction. The unjust society is a matter first and foremost of individual psychic disorder; hence there are for Plato oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical character-types that lend themselves to the formation of distinctive types of political dysfunction. Politeia, the Greek title of the dialogue, as Norbert Blössner remarks in Chap. 13 ("The City-Soul Analogy"),

is not a concept that can be reduced to its constitutional aspect … what is in question is not the rule of law and the rights of citizens but rather the behavior and attitude proper to those citizens, their justice; and these are attributes of individuals rather than of a political system. (369)

It is not a matter here of collective responsibility, but of reciprocal causality. The intemperate desires and erroneous beliefs of individuals foster a vicious social order, which is itself the cause of further unruly passions and stunted thought in the body politic; Richard Parry, in Chap. 14, "The Unhappy Tyrant and the Craft of Inner Rule," makes a close study of Plato's account of the psychological dimensions of the unjust society. As Blössner points out, this psychological focus means that "[w]hat in a political or historical analysis would be the nub of things is mostly peripheral to the Republic."

The target of Socrates' critique is not the political system: he is not condemning the fact that single individuals or the entire citizen body are in charge, nor that the city is ruled by soldiers, or by the rich, or by the poor … He denounces the false values and goals of individuals, not the defects of political systems. (370)

More provocatively, one could argue that for Plato a sufficiently virtuous citizenry could allow justice to flourish in a democracy, an oligarchy, or even a tyranny, at least for a time.

We cannot say with certainty whether the inhabitants of the "city of pigs" ever do philosophy; Socrates only mentions them "drinking of their wine … singing hymns to the Gods in pleasant fellowship," (Rep. 372b) (Morrison, for his part, argues that it will be "a city full of philosophers," indeed, a city in which all the inhabitants are like Socrates (252f)). Christopher Rowe, in "The Place of the Republic in Plato's Political Thought" (Chap. 2 in the Companion), suggests that in the myth Plato recounts in the Politicus of alternating ages ruled by Cronus and by Zeus, people wouldn't need philosophy in the age of Cronus: "[T]he role of philosophy is ultimately to help us make choices, and apparently there are no choices, or no hard choices, to be made under Cronus," (33; to which compare Yunis' remarks quoted above about people "with choices to make"). The only hope for a lasting state of justice, however, in the age of Zeus, after humans have renounced the porcine life, seems to lie in the citizens' progress in acquiring the wisdom which will make the extravagantly artificial and ultimately unsustainable mechanisms of control in the "ideal" city unnecessary. If people are to pass through the "fever" of injustice both personal and collective and come out the other side, they will need philosophy. This recognition sets the stage for the metaphysical reflections in the latter part of the dialogue.

The Companion's chapters on the high metaphysics of the Republic are to be congratulated for resisting the tendency to mystification. Nicholas Denyer's "Sun and Line: The Role of the Good" (Chap. 11) attempts a straightforward explanation of the Good as the principle of teleology, beginning from the teleological reflection upon artifacts (an insightful discussion about the design of kettles), with the goal being "a teleological explanation of mathematical Forms," (307). Denyer's results in the latter regard are less than satisfactory, insofar as the promised explanation is, finally, on the basis of aesthetic considerations–"mathematical Forms are as they are because of a certain sort of orderly beauty that this makes possible," (ibid.)–whereas we can imagine that Plato probably hoped for something a little closer to the "novel axiomatization" Denyer rejects (306). Even if Plato was not in actual possession of such an axiomatization, one can hardly imagine that he would have rejected one if offered.

More ambitious is Mitchell Miller's "Beginning the 'Longer Way'," (Chap. 12), which seeks to ground the dialectic of the Forms and the Good more securely within the five mathematical studies which form its "preamble" or "prelude" (Rep. 531d). Miller's essay is itself but a preamble to a larger project which it would be unfair to judge on the basis of this contribution alone. It raises the question, however, of just what sort of propaedeutic Plato intends the mathematical studies to be. For Miller, they constitute a "conversion" of the soul which not only "lead us gradually from experience oriented by the sensible to experience oriented by the intelligible," (320) but more importantly "turns back–but within the medium of pure intelligibility–to the sensible," (321). Thus "the 'conversion' should be understood as a process not just of departure but, rather, of departure that is also return," in which "even as we come to understand 'being' in its irreducible difference from and priority to 'becoming', we also come to understand it as the very being of that which becomes," (322). Miller cleverly sees in this "return" a way of addressing one of the vexed issues with regard to the Republic, namely the reason why philosophers should consent to govern the city, or why it is not unjust to compel them to. For David Sedley (Chap. 10, "Philosophy, the Forms, and the Art of Ruling") the philosopher consents to rule lest they be ruled by worse people; for Miller, by contrast, it is part of the understanding the philosopher has acquired of the nature of the Good that "[p]erfection as such … is indeterminate; in and of itself, it transcends any specific way of being determined. But what is indeterminate requires, for its own being, that it be determined," (337) and thus "the Good is at work as a giving–and, in that it reemerges under some determinate aspect in what it gives, it is at work as a giving of itself," (338).

The philosopher's "descent" or katabasis, the affirmation of which by Socrates opens the dialogue–"I went down [katabên] yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration," (Rep. 327a)–overflows the bounds of the analogy between city and soul. The analogy concerns the relationship between discrete forms within the soul, but in the descent, the person is whole. Accordingly, in the Republic's eschatological climax, the "Myth of Er", Plato widens the perspective in order to place individual souls and social relations in a context transcending a single lifetime. Here the individual soul has an integrity that makes its tripartition in the earlier discussions seem purely heuristic; Stephen Halliwell notes in his chapter on the myth (Chap. 16, "The Life-and-Death Journey of the Soul: Myth of Er") how "Er's account oscillates between talk of 'souls' … and talk of persons," (461). All the talk previously about the dominance of appetitive, spirited or calculative forms in the soul seems, from the perspective of Er's narrative, merely a somewhat coarse-grained attempt to conceptualize what are in reality utterly peculiar and idiosyncratic dispositions inseparable from each individual's unique personal history. This at once helps to explain the complex and often obscure motivations behind the choices people make in life, as well as suggesting, beyond the resources of rational argument, that we may have a stake in the welfare of the world that, though transcending our person as we presently know it, is still personal. The vision of the afterlife in the Myth of Er, in which our next life depends in part on our prudent choice, in part on chance, situates us in a manner akin to the "Original Position" in Rawls' A Theory of Justice: not knowing which lives we shall have to choose among, we will strive in life to have done something, however small, to create the worldly conditions that will make all the future choices more palatable, as well as the conditions in ourselves to enable us to choose wisely among the options the "lottery" shall present. The editor of this volume, G. R. F. Ferrari, in his own contribution (Chap. 7, "The Three-Part Soul") seems to have discerned the principle which informs all the Republic's considerations of rule in the soul and in the city alike when he remarks,

If reason is going to have to rule … it is going to rule right. Why? Because when it comes to this problem, as with any problem, it wants to know the best answer; because it desires to understand … The rational part is not seeking to prevail but to understand. (198)

In accord with this principle, we should not be surprised if Plato, rather than looking down upon us complacently from the superior vantage point of a project accomplished, waiting for us to catch up, is instead still working it out down here among us.

© 2007 Edward Butler

Edward Butler received his Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research for his dissertation, "The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus."

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