#000572
The Republic of Plato
Plato; translated by F. M. Cornford
Plato's *Republic* is the founding text of Western political philosophy, a dialogue that begins with a simple question—what is justice?—and answers it by building an entire ideal city in speech. Along the way come the allegory of the cave, the divided line, the theory of the Forms, the philosopher-king, and a famous, unsettling program of censorship and communal life. F. M. Cornford's 1941 translation, long a classroom standard, is prized for its lucidity: he reorganizes and paraphrases where needed to keep the argument moving, with a critical introduction and running notes. Readers wanting a strictly literal text now have alternatives, but Cornford remains one of the most approachable doors into the dialogue.
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The author
Plato (c. 428–348 BC), an Athenian aristocrat and pupil of Socrates, founded the Academy and wrote the dialogues that made philosophy a literary form. Socrates is the Republic's chief speaker, though the views are Plato's own.
The translator
Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874–1943) was a Cambridge classicist known for translating Plato with unusual readability. His version freely rearranges Greek syntax and occasionally compresses; reviewers of the day praised its clarity while noting it takes liberties a strictly literal scholar would not.
The book
The dialogue moves from a street-level argument about justice to the construction of the kallipolis, the just city, and back down to the ranking of political regimes and the myth of Er. Its central images—the cave, the sun, the line—remain the most taught passages in ancient philosophy.
How to read it
The Republic is admired and resisted in equal measure: its vision of a rigidly ordered, censoring, philosopher-ruled state drew Karl Popper's famous charge of proto-totalitarianism in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a reading many scholars find overstated but which frames the modern debate. Read it as argument to wrestle with, not doctrine to accept.
For more context
Pair with Popper's critique and Julia Annas's An Introduction to Plato's Republic; compare Cornford against the more literal Grube–Reeve translation.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Plato; translated by F. M. Cornford
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Place of publication
- Oxford
- Year
- 1941
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Colorado
Places