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1-Page Summary of The Republic

Men behave justly because they’re good people, and doing the right thing is a good thing to do. It’s not due to fear of punishment or a desire for reward. In fact, these things are irrelevant when it comes to being a good person. We should all strive to be good people who do the right thing because it’s what we were born to do—it’s in our nature as human beings.

Plato’s strategy in The Republic is to first identify justice as a societal concept, and then show how individual justice corresponds to that. In Books II, III, and IV of Plato’s work, he defines political justice as being right with one another in society. Justice is achieved when there are three main classes: producers (craftsmen, farmers), auxiliaries (warriors), and guardians (rulers). Each class must play its role well so that the whole society can be just.

At the end of Book IV, Plato tries to show that individual justice mirrors political justice. He claims that the soul of every individual has a three part structure analagous to the three classes of a society. There is a rational part of the soul, which seeks after truth and is responsible for our philosophical inclinations; a spirited part of the soul, which desires honor and is responsible for our feelings of anger and indignation; and an appetitive part of the soul, which lusts after all sorts of things, but money most of all (since money must be used to fulfill any other base desire). The just individual can be defined in analogy with the just society; he achieves harmony between his parts so they are not at war with one another. In this way—and only in this way—can we achieve true happiness since it means living according to virtue rather than vice.

The three classes of society parallel the three parts of the soul. The producers are dominated by their appetites, which make them desire money and pleasure. The warriors are controlled by their spirits, which makes them courageous. Finally, the rulers strive for wisdom and control themselves with reason. Books V through VII focus on the ruler who is a philosopher king.

Plato explains that there are two realms: the visible and intelligible. The visible realm is what we can see, while the intelligible realm contains abstract things such as goodness, beauty, redness, and sweetness. These abstractions are eternal and unchanging truths that we grasp with our minds.

Only philosophers can truly know anything. In order to become a good ruler, they must know the Form of the Good, which is the source of knowledge, truth and beauty. Plato cannot describe this Form directly but claims that it is to the intelligible realm what the sun is to our visible world. The philosopher’s soul moves from one stage in cognition (represented by a line) through our visible world into an understanding of the Forms and ultimately grasps the Form of Goodness itself. Education should not be about filling your mind with facts; instead it should teach you how to think critically so that when you’re presented with information or ideas, you can decide whether or not they’re true based on their own merits rather than being influenced by other factors such as peer pressure or societal expectations.

Philosophers are the only men who possess knowledge and also the most just. Their souls, more than others, aim to fulfill rational desires. After comparing the philosopher king to the worst type of man—the tyrant, ruled by his non-rational appetites—Plato claims that justice is worthwhile for its own sake. In Book IX he presents three arguments for concluding that it is desirable to be just: firstly, he sketches a psychological portrait of a tyrant in order to prove that injustice tortures a man’s psyche; secondly he argues that each of the three main character types—money-loving people, honor-loving people and truth-loving people—have their own conceptions of pleasure and thus their own conception of what makes life worth living; but since they have never experienced all three pleasures themselves they can’t judge which one is best; thirdly Plato tries to demonstrate that philosophical pleasure is really pleasure at all while other pleasures are nothing more than cessation of pain.