Plato's dialogue, written around 375 BCE, begins with the question of what justice is and whether the just life is better than the unjust one, and answers it by constructing an ideal city in speech on the argument that justice will be easier to see at that scale.
The city divides into three classes, producers, guardians and rulers, corresponding to three parts of the soul, appetite, spirit and reason, and justice consists in each part performing its own function without interfering with the others. The rulers are philosopher-kings, selected through an extended educational programme and holding no private property, on the argument that people who want power should not have it and that private interest corrupts public judgment.
The central books contain the three images: the sun, which explains the form of the good; the divided line, which sets out degrees of knowledge from images through belief to reasoning and understanding; and the cave, in which prisoners take shadows for reality and the person who escapes and returns is not believed. Book eight describes the degeneration of regimes from aristocracy through timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny, with the mechanism of each transition specified. His account of democracy producing tyranny through the excess of freedom is the most cited passage in political theory.
The proposals are genuinely disturbing, including censorship of poetry, the abolition of the family among guardians, eugenic breeding and the noble lie. Popper attacked the work as the origin of totalitarian thinking. Readers should note that Socratic dialogue may present positions to be examined rather than endorsed, which remains disputed. Translations differ considerably.
Readers who want the foundational text on justice, knowledge and political degeneration, prepared for proposals that are genuinely objectionable.
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