Alan Ryan on Republic (Plato)

“Plato's Republic is a treatise on justice, written as a dialogue between Socrates and some of his upper-class Athenian friends. Socrates was impressed by the way decent and upright fathers were disgraced by the pride and ambition of their sons.”

“Almost all accounts of the history of political thinking begin with Plato. This is a paradox, because Plato’s political thought is Antipolitical. Readers of his Republic see that in the polis of Plato’s imagination, there is no politics, and are puzzled; but throughout European history there has been a current of thought that seeks the resolution of the conflicts that “ordinary politics” resolves in the creation of a such a degree of social harmony that the conflicts which everyday politics resolves have simply disappeared, and politics with them.”