Republic

Introduction

The Republic is Plato's most famous dialogue and one of his longest. It begins with a question that seems simple: what is justice, and is the just person happier than the unjust? To answer it, Socrates and his companions build a city in words, discussing education, poetry, property, the family, the training of rulers and the claim that philosophers should be kings. With the allegory of the cave, the divided line, the three parts of the soul and the Form of the Good, it has stood for more than two thousand years at the source of Western political philosophy and of thinking about education.