Plato's Republic - outline

Whilst most of world leaders and politicians today approve democracy as the best form of political governance, nonetheless, this political system has never been immune to criticism as well. One of the most famous, and probably the strongest such criticisms, can be found in one of the best known books ever written, by one of the most prominent philosophers and political thinkers through out the Western history, Plato. It is widely acknowledged that Plato’s Republic ‘was probably written before 368 BC when the author was in his fourth to fifth decade’ (http://jme.bmj.com/content/24/4/263.full.pdf) with its title in Greek as ‘Politea, which can be rendered something closer to “forms of government” or perhaps “constitution.”’ (http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/plato). 

Republic is written in ‘the form of a Socratic dialogue which details the workings of Plato’s imagined ideal state (a meritocracy or “philosophocracy”), in so doing defining the imperfections in extant political methods’ (http://cliojournal.wikispaces.com/Plato’s+Critique+of+Democracy). Despite democracy was ‘arguably the greatest achievement of ancient Athens’ (ibid), in Republic, Plato ‘ranks both timocracy and oligarchy as favourable to democracy and maintains that only tyranny is a less preferable form of government’ (ibid). Meanwhile, in his real life, Plato actually lived and witnessed political turmoil and downfall of Athens, from ‘the golden age of Athenian democracy and power – under the rule of Pericles’ (http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/plato) in the second half of the 5th century BCE to the Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 BCE), which ‘resulted in Athens’ defeat and the temporary overthrow of Athenian democracy’ (ibid). In other words, ‘he saw an older, supposedly better, world crumbling around him, and he wanted to understand what had gone wrong and how it could be fixed’ (http://philosophynow.org/issues/90/Platos_Just_State).

For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/platos-republic-with-its-historical-background/