# The Republic [[Plato]]'s masterwork (c. 380 BCE) — a dialogue, narrated by [[Socrates]], that begins with the question "what is justice?" and ends having built an ideal city, a theory of the soul, a metaphysics (the Forms, the Cave), a program of education, and the [[Western canon]]'s most influential critique of democracy. ## The argument Justice in the soul mirrors justice in the city: three parts (reason, spirit, appetite) rightly ordered when reason rules. The just city orders its three classes the same way — guardians (philosopher-rulers), auxiliaries (soldiers), producers — each doing its own work. Knowledge of the Good, figured in the **Cave allegory**, qualifies the philosopher to rule; the famous paradox follows: no rest from ills until philosophers are kings. Book VIII's regime cycle — aristocracy decaying through timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy into **tyranny** — contains the indictment the right still quotes: democracy as the charming, anarchic regime whose excess of liberty breeds the demagogue and ends in despotism. ## Why it matters for this KB *The Republic* is the master citation of anti-democratic political thought. The philosopher-king is the ancestor of every rule-by-the-competent program from [[Technocracy]] to [[Neoreaction]]'s CEO-sovereign; the democracy-to-tyranny sequence is the proof-text for [[Caesarism]] talk and the "decadent republic needs a strongman" frame (see [[Antiquity in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]); the **noble lie** (the myth of metals justifying the class order) is the locus classicus for elite myth-making — [[Leo Strauss]]'s esoteric reading of it shaped [[Straussianism]]'s whole approach, and [[Allan Bloom]]'s literal translation (1968) is the standard Straussian text. The right reads selectively here too: Plato's communism of property and family among the guardians, and the city's inclusion of women rulers, rarely survive the citation. ## See also - [[Plato]] / [[Socrates]] — author and narrator - [[Political Philosophy]] — the branch it founded - [[Straussianism]] / [[Allan Bloom]] — the reading that politicized it - [[Caesarism]] — the modern use of Book VIII