This is one of those books for which it would be impossible to encompass its scope in a brief review, but I will make a few notes of my own perspective anyway. (I think I could do with reading some commentaries and discussions of the text as well, so I’m afraid my discussion will be pretty surface-level for now. I’m not even going to touch the spiritual aspect — maybe another time.)

Although it will probably always stoke controversy, the Republic’s criticisms of democracy may be the most important lessons it has to offer us today (albeit making its most common English title something of a misnomer). Like Plato, we find ourselves in an environment where our governmental system is failing its aims — a system that should offer peaceful coexistence and people-directed decision-making is increasingly, and very publicly, failing to do so — and the prospect of reform has gone from tempting to positively urgent. Nevertheless, the solution is not to dissolve the whole system and put ourselves at great risk by doing away with the protections and stability it’s afforded us in the past, and so it’s unfortunate that Plato’s reasoning is so often co-opted by authoritarians who wish to harm others, which I still feel was not his intention (and certainly not the way he envisions his own society). Perhaps a better, and more realistic system (though I accept Plato was probably not aiming for realism) would be a society that periodically corrects itself over time, rather than one that vainly expects to remain static.

We might be better off considering different political models and the risks involved, although to be fair, this may have been Plato’s intention in the first place — to speculate. The views Socrates delivers here are not wholly consistent with some other dialogues, and it often seems like he’s following a logical progression through to whatever conclusion befalls him (embodying Plato’s ideal of objective rationality) rather than trying to argue for a particular view from the start. In any model, however, we expect people to govern the process, and people are both highly fallible and prone to corruption — it seems this is the real problem, and the real source of failure, that the social structure has to account for. We can’t expect that the best, wisest man will ever really be made king, because that isn’t how people rise to the top in any system, and it certainly isn’t a position that will win you the favour of those acting out of self-interest. The authoritarian state that Plato seems to be arguing for had also been shown to fail — he lived in a time of much greater political exploration than today, and the consistent failure of so many different schemes probably coloured his pessimism here. No matter how excellent the discussion may be, and how much we can gain from our analysis on various levels, this is a dialogue where an en aporiai ending is probably the only one that fits.