Socrates goes down to the harbour for a festival, gets stopped in the street on his way home, and is pressed into an argument he cannot walk away from. It starts with a question a man could ask in a bar: is justice actually worth anything to someone who could get away with injustice? Answering it takes ten books.
To find out what justice looks like in one man, Socrates builds a whole city where everyone can see it. He decides who guards it and how they are raised, what music and poetry they are allowed to hear, who gets to rule and why it should be the people who least want the job. Then he takes the city back apart, tracing how it rots from aristocracy into oligarchy, into democracy, into tyranny, and what kind of man each of those produces.
Almost everything the West argues about started here. The cave and the prisoners who mistake shadows for the world. The philosopher king. The noble lie. The ring of Gyges, which turns a man invisible, and the only question that matters afterward: what does he do when nobody can see him?
Plato watched his own city vote to execute his teacher. He never wrote a word in his own voice about it. He wrote this instead.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of Benjamin Jowett's translation, the version that carried the Republic into English and has been quoted ever since, complete in all ten Books, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 350 pages. The Persons of the Dialogue stand where Plato put them, facing the opening line. Jowett's ninety thousand word introduction does not: this edition prints the dialogue and gets out of its way. No apparatus talking over the argument, no analysis telling you what you are about to read.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
E-Book: instant download, delivered to your email at purchase.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
