Plato: justice, the philosopher-king and the ideal state

What this chapter is for

The subject. Plato is the first thinker on the syllabus, and the first great political philosopher of the West. He asked what justice is, who should rule, and why states decay. His answers are the ideal state of the Republic, ruled by philosophers, and the “second best” state of the Laws, ruled by law. This chapter teaches both. It then gives the case his critics make against him, from Aristotle to Karl Popper, and the case his defenders make back.

What you should be able to do when you finish.

1. State Plato’s idea of justice, in the city and in the soul, in his own words.
2. Explain the three classes of the ideal state, and why each does “its own business”.
3. Explain why Plato wanted philosophers to rule, and how they were to be trained.
4. Describe the communism of property and family among the guardians, and the place of women.
5. Give Plato’s four decaying constitutions, in order, and the reason for each fall.
6. Compare the Republic with the Statesman and the Laws.
7. Set out Aristotle’s and Popper’s criticisms, and the answers to them.
8. Say which of Plato’s ideas still matter, in the world and in Pakistan.

How this chapter is arranged. Section 1 states the central idea. Sections 2 and 3 give the life and the works. Sections 4 to 10 take the doctrines one at a time, in the order the Republic builds them. Section 11 turns to the later dialogues. Section 12 gives the critics and the defence, and Section 13 what survives. The last five sections are about the paper: the mix-ups, the past questions, the facts, the traps and a worked plan.

How often it is asked. Plato has been set three times in the eleven Paper I papers from CE-2016 to CE-2026. CE-2018 asked about his Republic, CE-2022 about his justice, and CE-2025 about his ideal city against Aristotle’s. A CE-2024 MCQ asked about his ideal state too.¹

Before you start

The words you need

• Philosophy. The study of the deepest questions, such as what is real, what we can know and how we should live. The Greek word means “love of wisdom”.
• Dialogue. A written conversation. Plato wrote almost everything as dialogues, and in most of them his teacher Socrates does the talking.
• Justice. For Plato, not mainly a matter of courts. It is the right order of a whole city, and of a whole person.
• Virtue. Excellence of character. Plato names four, which are wisdom, courage, temperance and justice.
• Temperance. Self-control, and in a city, the agreement of every class about who should rule.
• Guardians. The ruling class of Plato’s ideal state. He later splits them into rulers and auxiliaries, the soldiers who help them.
• Philosopher-king. A ruler who is also a true philosopher. Plato’s answer to the question “Who should rule?”.
• The Forms. Plato’s name for the perfect, unchanging realities behind the things we see. Examples are justice itself, beauty itself and, above all, the Good.
• Dialectic. The method of question and answer by which, Plato thought, the mind rises from opinions to knowledge of the Forms.
• City-state. A city that governs itself as an independent state, like Athens or Sparta. The Greek word is polis.
• Timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. The four flawed constitutions of the Republic. They are rule by the lovers of honour, by the rich, by the many, and by one man for himself.
• Utopia. A perfect society that exists in the imagination. The Republic is often called the first.

The places

• Athens. The largest city-state of Greece, and a democracy in Plato’s lifetime. He was born, taught and died there.
• Sparta. Athens’ rival, a disciplined military state. It defeated Athens in the long Peloponnesian War.
• The Piraeus. The port of Athens. The Republic opens there, at a festival.
• Syracuse. A Greek city in Sicily ruled by tyrants. Plato went there three times to try to turn a tyrant into a philosopher, and failed.

The story in plain words

1. Plato lived in Athens about 2,400 years ago.
2. He saw Athens lose a great war and then put his teacher Socrates to death.
3. He concluded that cities are badly run because the wrong people rule them.
4. He asked what justice really is.
5. His answer was that justice is each part doing its own job, in a city and inside a person.
6. A city has three parts, which are rulers, soldiers and producers. A person has three parts too, which are reason, spirit and desire.
7. Reason should rule in a person, so philosophers should rule in a city.
8. To keep the rulers honest, they would own no property and have no private families.
9. Women who were fit to rule would be trained and would rule as men did.
10. Every real city falls away from this ideal, step by step, down to tyranny.
11. Late in life Plato described a “second best” city, ruled by fixed laws rather than by wise men.
12. Critics say his ideal state crushes the individual. Defenders say it asks the right question about how to rule well.

1. Plato’s central idea

Plato’s central idea is that a city is just when each part does its own work under the rule of wisdom. It follows that only those who know the Good are fit to rule. Everything else in his politics follows from this one idea. It explains the three classes, the philosopher-kings, the education, the communism of the guardians and the decline of constitutions.

The idea grows out of one question, and justice is its key word. The Republic is built as an answer to that question. What is justice, and is the just life better than the unjust? Plato’s teacher Socrates takes up the question in the first book. The characters test the answers of the day, and each fails. Justice turns out to be neither paying your debts, nor helping friends and harming enemies, nor “the interest of the stronger”.² To find it, Socrates proposes to read justice first where it is written in “larger letters”, in a whole city, and then in the single person.² The ideal state is the result. It is built to show what justice is.

That method makes the city and the soul mirror each other. Each has three parts, and in each justice is the same thing, the right order of those parts. In the words of the Republic, “when the trader, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice, and will make the city just.”² The same holds inside the person. Reason should rule, spirit should support it, and desire should obey. A just city and a just soul are both a kind of health. An unjust city and an unjust soul are both a kind of civil war.

If justice is order under wisdom, then ruling must be a skill, and this is the second half of the idea. Ruling is like medicine or navigation, and it should be done by those who have the skill. A ship is best steered by a trained pilot, not by the crew’s vote. So a city is best ruled by those who know what is good for it. For Plato that knowledge is philosophy. This is why he says cities “will never have rest from their evils” until philosophers become kings.²

2. The life, and the Athens that made him

Plato’s distrust of the crowd and his faith in knowledge both have roots in his life. So the life is worth knowing before the theory. Plato was born in Athens, though the dates are not certain. The Stanford Encyclopedia gives “(429?–347 B.C.E.)” and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives “c. 427-347 B.C.E.”.⁶⁸ He came of a noble family. The IEP says that on his father’s side he descended from Codrus, “one of the early kings of Athens”, and on his mother’s side from Solon, “the prominent reformer of the Athenian constitution”.⁸ A man of that family was “naturally destined to take an active role in political life”.⁸

He grew up, however, in a city at war and then in defeat. The IEP notes that “Until his mid-twenties, Athens was involved in a long and disastrous military conflict with Sparta, known as the Peloponnesian War.”⁸ Athens lost. Plato watched as a young man while a democracy led the city into the war, and then through its defeat. Much of the Republic’s distrust of the many can be read against that experience. This is our reading, which many scholars share.

The event that turned him from politics to philosophy was the trial of his teacher. In 399 B.C.E., the Stanford Encyclopedia records, Socrates “was legally charged and convicted of the crime of impiety”.⁶ The IEP adds that “a democratic court voted by a large majority of its five hundred and one jurors for Socrates’ execution on an unjust charge of impiety”.⁸ Plato considered Socrates, in the IEP’s words, “the most just man of his time”.⁸ To Plato, a city that could kill its most just man had a way of ruling that was wrong at the root.

That conclusion kept him out of public office. In his Seventh Letter, as the IEP reports, Plato says “he could not identify himself with any of the contending political parties or the succession of corrupt regimes, each of which brought Athens to further decline”.⁸ The IEP quotes the conclusion he drew. “The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers”.⁸ The same sentence, almost word for word, sits at the centre of the Republic.

Instead of office, Plato founded a school to train the kind of rulers he wanted. The Academy in Athens lasted long after him. The IEP says it “provided a base for succeeding generations of Platonic philosophers until its final closure in C.E. 529”.⁸ There, it adds, “Mathematics, rhetoric, astronomy, dialectics, and other subjects, all seen as necessary for the education of philosophers and statesmen, were studied.”⁸ The IEP adds that “His most renowned pupil was Aristotle.”⁸

He also tried his idea in practice, and the attempt failed. He “visited Syracuse first in 387, then in 367, and again in 362-361”, hoping “to moderate the Sicilian tyrants with philosophical education and to establish a model political rule”. The IEP’s verdict is short: “this adventure with practical politics ended in failure”.⁸ The philosopher who wanted philosophers to rule never managed to make one ruler a philosopher. That failure, as section 11 shows, may explain the change in his last political work.

3. The works

Plato’s political ideas come to us in a form that needs care, because he wrote dialogues, not treatises. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that “Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a dialogue”, and that the one striking exception is the Apology, Socrates’ speech at his trial.⁶ In most dialogues Socrates leads the argument. So when a student writes “Plato says”, the words on the page are usually spoken by Socrates, or by a stranger Plato invents. The convention is to treat them as Plato’s own view in the political works.

Three of these dialogues carry his politics. The IEP names “the Republic, the Statesman, the Laws and a few shorter dialogues” as “the only strictly political dialogues of Plato”.⁸ The table shows how they differ on the central question of who should rule.

The speaker changes as Plato moves from the ideal to the practical, and that change is a clue. In the Statesman, the Stanford Encyclopedia notes, “a visitor from the town of Elea in Southern Italy leads the discussion”. The Laws is “a discussion between an unnamed Athenian and two named fictional characters, one from Crete and the other from Sparta”.⁶ Socrates is absent from the Laws alone, “which ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works”.⁶ Behind all three stands the Apology, Socrates’ defence speech at his trial.⁶ It is the background to Plato’s politics, because it shows the man and the death that shaped it.

4. The origin of the state

Before he can say what a just city is, Plato explains why cities exist at all, and his answer is simple. In the Republic, Socrates says: “A State, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.”² People need food, housing and clothing, and no one can make them all alone. So they gather as partners and helpers, and the gathering is a city.

From need comes the division of labour, because different people are good at different things. The city works best when each does one job. A farmer farms, a builder builds, a shoemaker makes shoes. The Republic states the rule as “one man should practise one thing only, the thing to which his nature was best adapted”.² This simple economic rule becomes, later in the argument, the heart of justice.

The first city built on this rule is too simple to last, and its growth explains why soldiers and rulers appear. Glaucon mocks the small city. “If you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?”² Socrates then allows luxuries, and with them comes the need for more land, and so for war, and so for soldiers. The Stanford Encyclopedia describes the sequence. First comes a “healthy city” with “no provision for war, and no distinction among classes”. Then comes a “fevered city” of luxuries, later purified and named Kallipolis, the beautiful city, with three classes.⁷ So the soldier class is born of the city’s appetite, and the need to govern it well is born with the soldiers.

For the exam, this account is an early version of one theory of the state’s origin. The state arises from human needs, not from force or from a contract. It is worth setting beside the other theories of the state’s origin, which the chapter on the state takes one by one. Aristotle kept the idea that the state is natural, and built on it.

5. Justice in the city and in the soul

With the three classes in place, Socrates can at last find justice. He does it by first finding the other three virtues of the ideal city. Wisdom belongs to the rulers. Courage belongs to the soldiers, who keep the right beliefs about what to fear. Temperance runs through all the classes. The Republic calls it “the agreement of the naturally superior and inferior, as to the right to rule of either, both in states and individuals”.² Justice is what is left when the other three have been found.

Justice, Socrates then says, was in front of them all along, in the first rule of the city. “Further, we affirmed that justice was doing one’s own business, and not being a busybody.”² In the city, injustice is “meddling of one with another, or the change of one into another”, which “is the greatest harm to the State”.² Justice is the opposite. It is “when the trader, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice”.²

The same order must hold inside each person, since the person has three parts to match the three classes. Reason calculates and should rule. Spirit, the part that feels anger and pride, should be reason’s ally, “the natural auxiliary of reason” as the Republic puts it.² Desire, the appetite for food, drink and money, should obey. The outward rule about crafts was only “a shadow of justice”, Socrates says. Real justice is “concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self”.² A just person keeps the three parts in order, as a just city keeps its three classes in order.

This inner definition is what lets Plato answer the challenge of the first book. There Thrasymachus had said “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger”.² Glaucon then sharpened the challenge with the story of the ring of Gyges. The ring made its wearer invisible, and so free to do wrong unseen.² Plato’s reply is that justice is the health of the soul. So it is good in itself, not only for its rewards. By the end, Socrates can say that justice “in her own nature has been shown to be best for the soul in her own nature”, whether a man has “the ring of Gyges or not”.²

The syllabus also asks for the concept of justice in Western and Islamic thought, and Plato’s version needs to be placed carefully. His justice is about order and function, each doing the work he is fitted for. It is not the modern idea of equal rights for all. The chapter on justice sets it beside Aristotle, Rawls and the Islamic idea of adl.

6. The three classes and the myth of the metals

Justice as order needs a city of clearly separated classes, and the Republic names three.

The Republic first calls the whole ruling group “guardians”. It then splits them. “The young men whom we before called guardians may be more properly designated auxiliaries and supporters of the principles of the rulers.”²

A city divided this way must persuade people to accept their places, and Plato’s answer is a story. Jowett’s translation calls it “one of those needful falsehoods” and “one royal lie”.² It is often called the “noble lie”. The citizens are to be told that they were formed in the earth, and that God mixed metals into them. “Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold”, the story runs. Others “he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries”, and others, “who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron”.²

The myth is not a caste system, and students often miss this. The story goes on. “A golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son”. The rulers must move each child to the class his nature fits. Plato speaks of “degrading the offspring of the guardians when inferior, and of elevating into the rank of guardians the offspring of the lower classes, when naturally superior”.² Place is to follow ability, not family. This is our reading of why the Republic can be called, in part, an argument for rule by merit.

Even so, a state that starts by telling its people a lie is hard to admire, and readers divide over it. Plato’s defenders say the myth teaches a truth in the form of a story. Each person has a nature, and a place that fits it. His critics, above all Popper, say it shows a ruling class that is willing to deceive the ruled for their own good. Section 12 gives both sides.

7. The philosopher-king and the theory of Forms

The rulers at the top of this order are philosophers, and Socrates knows the proposal will shock. He introduces it as “the greatest of the waves”, expecting it to “break and drown me in laughter and dishonour”. Then comes the proposal. “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, … cities will never have rest from their evils”.²

The proposal only makes sense once we see what Plato means by a philosopher. He does not mean someone who likes ideas. The true philosophers are “lovers of the vision of truth”.² They know the Forms, the unchanging realities behind the changing world. Above all they know the Form of the Good. “The idea of good is the highest knowledge”, Socrates says, and “all other things become useful and advantageous only by their use of this”.² A ruler who knows the Good knows what every law and policy is for.

Plato drives the point home with an image of democracy as a ship. The owner is “taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight”. The sailors quarrel about the steering, and “every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer”.² Meanwhile nobody listens to the true pilot, who knows that he “must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds”. The owner stands for the people, the sailors for the politicians, and the pilot for the philosopher. The lesson is that ruling needs knowledge, and a crowd rarely chooses the one who has it.

The image of the cave then shows how the philosopher gains that knowledge, and what it costs him. It opens Book VII. “Behold! human beings living in a underground den”, chained so that they see only shadows cast on a wall by a fire behind them.² They take the shadows for reality. One prisoner is freed and led up into the sunlight, where he sees real things and at last the sun itself. The sun stands for the Good. The freed prisoner is the philosopher. He goes back down to free the others. They mock him, and would kill him if they could, as Athens killed Socrates.

Having seen the sun, the philosopher would rather think than govern, and Plato turns this into a safeguard. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Socrates says “eight times that the philosophers in the ideal city will have to be compelled to rule”.⁷ This is part of the design. The ruler who does not want power is the one who will not abuse it.

8. Education in the ideal state

Philosopher-kings are not born but made, so education is the engine of the whole state. For Plato the ideal state is made by education more than by law. The rulers’ first task is to shape the young. Rousseau, as Ernest Barker quotes him, said “the Republic … is not a work upon politics, but the finest treatise on education that ever was written”.⁹

The education runs in stages, with a test at each, so that only the fittest reach the top.

The ages come from Book VII.² The last stage is the answer to the CE-2024 MCQ. In Plato’s ideal state a guardian reaches the summit of the order at fifty, when “they have reached fifty years of age”.²

Because the training follows nature and not birth or sex, it is open to women as well. “You will admit that the same education which makes a man a good guardian will make a woman a good guardian; for their original nature is the same?”² Section 9 takes this further.

9. The communism of the guardians, and the place of women

Training alone cannot keep rulers honest, so Plato takes away the things that would tempt them. The rulers and auxiliaries are to own almost nothing. “In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter”.² They are to live together, eat together and be paid in food by the other citizens. Only the guardians live this way. The producers keep their property and families.

The guardians give up private families too, for the same reason. The Republic proposes “that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent”.² Marriages are arranged by the rulers, and the best are to be paired with the best. “The best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible”.²

The reason for both rules is political, not economic. Property and family are what make a ruler put his own interest before the city’s. A ruler with no house to enrich and no son to promote has no interest but the common good. Ernest Barker described the aim as “a specialised class of governors detached from society by a system of communism”.⁹

Once family duties are gone, Plato sees no reason to keep women of the right nature out of rule. They are to be rulers and soldiers too. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that “in the ideal city the education for and job of ruling should be open to girls and women”.⁷ Readers disagree about what this shows. “Many readers have seen in Plato’s Republic a rare exception in western philosophy’s long history of sexist denigration of women”, and some find in it “a kind of feminism”.⁷ Others point to “Plato’s indifference to the needs of actual women in his own city” and to Socrates’ “frequent, disparaging remarks about women”.⁷ The fair answer is that Plato opened the highest office to women for reasons of the city’s good, not of women’s rights.

Because the word communism invites confusion, one warning belongs here. The guardians’ communism is a rule for the rulers only, meant to keep them honest. It is not a plan to abolish private property for all. It has nothing to do with workers owning the means of production. The chapters on Marx and on communism take up the modern idea.

10. The decline of constitutions

Having built the ideal, Plato asks how it would fall, and Books VIII and IX trace its decay. Socrates names four flawed constitutions. They are, “first, those of Crete and Sparta, which are generally applauded; what is termed oligarchy comes next … thirdly, democracy, which naturally follows oligarchy … and lastly comes tyranny, great and famous, … the fourth and worst disorder of a State”.² The first he calls “timocracy, or perhaps timarchy”, the government of honour.²

Each constitution falls through the fault of its own ruling principle, and the chain begins at the top. The ideal state becomes timocracy because the rulers divide. “Clearly, all political changes originate in divisions of the actual governing power; a government which is united, however small, cannot be moved.”² Honour then replaces wisdom as the city’s aim, and soldiers rule. In time the love of honour turns into the love of money, and timocracy becomes oligarchy. The rich take power, and the city splits. “Such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men”.²

The split between rich and poor drives the last two falls. Oligarchy becomes democracy when the poor win. “Democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some”, and then “give an equal share of freedom and power”.² Democracy in turn becomes tyranny through too much freedom. “The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”² A leader who champions the people against the rich becomes their master.

The city-soul analogy returns here, so each constitution has a matching kind of person. The oligarchic man is “the miser and money-maker”, the Republic says.² The democratic man chases every pleasure in turn. The tyrannical man is ruled by his worst desire. So the decline of constitutions is also a study of how a soul decays, and why the just life is the happiest.

This account is where Plato’s hostility to democracy is plainest, and the reason deserves exact statement. The Stanford Encyclopedia explains the core of the argument. “Socrates argues that without some publicly entrenched standards for evaluation guiding the city, chaos and strife are unavoidable.”⁷ Democracy “honors all pursuits equally, which opens the city to conflict and disorder”. Some readers find “a silver lining”. They note “that the democracy’s tolerance extends to philosophers”.⁷ Even Plato’s own dialogue, a free argument about justice, could only take place in a free city.

11. The Statesman and the Laws: the rule of law as second best

In his later works Plato kept his ideal but asked what to do when no wise ruler is available. The Statesman states the ideal sharply first. Its leading speaker, the visitor from Elea, says, “The best thing of all is not that the law should rule, but that a man should rule supposing him to have wisdom and royal power.” His reason is that “the law does not perfectly comprehend what is noblest and most just for all and therefore cannot enforce what is best”.³ A law is like a rule of thumb. A wise ruler can see what each case needs.

The same dialogue then turns to ordinary constitutions and ranks them by whether they keep their laws. “Monarchy, when bound by good prescriptions or laws, is the best of all the six, and when lawless is the most bitter and oppressive to the subject.”³ Democracy sits at the other end. It is “the worst of all lawful governments, and the best of all lawless ones”, because power in it is so divided that it can do neither great good nor great evil.³ So where no true statesman can be found, the law is the safer guide.

The Laws, one of Plato’s latest works, builds a whole state on that second-best principle.⁶ In it an unnamed Athenian designs a real colony, not an ideal one. He still holds that the best state is the one where “there prevails most widely the ancient saying, that ‘Friends have all things in common’”, with a “communion of women and children and of property”.⁴ He now admits that ordinary citizens are “not fitted either by nature or education” for this. So the Laws lets them “retain their houses and private property”, and it calls the result, “if not the very best, the second best”.⁴

The great change in the Laws is the place of law above the rulers. The rulers are now “servants or ministers of the law”, and the reason is stated plainly. “For that state in which the law is subject and has no authority, I perceive to be on the highway to ruin; but I see that the state in which the law is above the rulers, and the rulers are the inferiors of the law, has salvation”.⁴ This is one of the earliest statements of the rule of law.

Why did Plato change? The Plato of the Laws was older, and he had failed in Syracuse. Many scholars read the shift as the lesson of that failure. A philosopher-king is too rare to plan for, so a good constitution must work with ordinary rulers. The Laws still keeps a council of wise men, which Jowett’s summary calls the “Nocturnal Council … instituted for the preservation of the state”.⁴ Jowett describes its ordinary government as “a democracy of magistrates elected by the people”.⁴ The table sums up the distance between the two books.

12. The critics, and the defence

Plato’s ideal state has been attacked since his own lifetime, and the first critic was his own pupil. In Book II of the Politics, Aristotle agrees “that the city ought to be one as much as possible”. He adds “that if it is contracted too much, it will be no longer a city, for that necessarily supposes a multitude”.⁵ Push unity too far and “we shall reduce a city to a family, and a family to a single person”.⁵ A city needs different kinds of people, not one kind.

Aristotle also doubts that common property would be cared for. “What is common to many is taken least care of; for all men regard more what is their own than what others share with them in”.⁵ He sees a second danger too. The guardians and the producers would form, in effect, two cities inside one. “In one city there must of necessity be two, and those contrary to each other”.⁵ The quarrels Plato wanted to end would return between the classes.

The fiercest modern critic, Karl Popper, went further and called Plato an enemy of freedom. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper wrote that “my thesis that his political demands are purely totalitarian and anti-humanitarian needs to be defended”, and he defended it at length.¹⁰ He read Plato’s justice as a name for whatever keeps the ruling class in power. He read the myth of the metals as a licence for rulers to lie.

Popper’s deepest objection was to Plato’s question itself. “It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ … Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy.”¹⁰ Rulers are never reliably good or wise, Popper argued. So we should ask instead: “How can we organize political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”¹⁰ That question leads to democracy, elections and checks and balances, not to philosopher-kings.

Plato’s defenders answer that this reading is too literal. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that the charge of totalitarianism “applies to the Republic only conditionally, depending on the definition of ‘totalitarianism’ offered”.⁷ Popper and others say the rulers seek the unity of the city “regardless of the individual interests of the citizens”. The encyclopedia replies that “this would be surprising, if true”, because “the Republic provides a picture not just of a happy city but also of a happy individual person”.⁷ Many readers take the Republic as a pattern to think with rather than a plan to build. Jowett’s introduction says that Plato “fairly tells you that his Republic is a vision only”.²

A different attack came from inside the Muslim world, and it points the opposite way. Allama Iqbal, in Asrar-i-Khudi, warned that Plato’s thought had drawn Muslims away from action. In R. A. Nicholson’s translation, Iqbal calls Plato “the prime ascetic and sage” and says “He was so fascinated by the Ideal / That he made head, eye, and ear of no account.”¹¹ Iqbal’s objection is not Popper’s. Popper feared Plato’s rulers would do too much. Iqbal feared that Plato’s contempt for the visible world would make people do too little.

A strong answer weighs these criticisms rather than listing them. Aristotle’s points about unity and property are practical and hard to answer. Popper’s charge of totalitarianism depends on reading Plato’s ideal as a programme. Readers who take it as a thought experiment about justice give it less weight. Popper’s alternative question, how to limit bad rulers, is widely accepted. It is also the question Plato himself turned to in the Laws, when he put the rulers under the law. This is our reading.

13. What survives of Plato today

Much of Plato’s design is rejected, but three of his claims still shape how states are run. The first is that ruling is a skill. Every modern state picks its civil servants partly by examination and training, and not by birth or by vote. It asks officials to put the public interest above their own. Plato’s guardians, chosen by merit, trained for decades and forbidden private gain, are the oldest picture of that ideal. This is our reading, not a claim that any modern service copies him.

The second is the rule of law from his last work. The Laws’ principle that rulers are “the inferiors of the law” is the principle of every constitutional state.⁴ It is the foundation of Aristotle’s politics, and through him of the modern idea of constitutional government. The third is his view that a state is only as good as the education of its citizens and rulers. Rousseau’s remark that the Republic is the finest treatise on education ever written shows how far that view travelled.⁹

Plato also lives on in Muslim political thought, where he entered through Al-Farabi. The Stanford Encyclopedia says Al-Farabi “takes some inspiration from Plato’s Republic and Laws”, although “his access to these two texts may have been rather limited”.¹² Al-Farabi also, it adds, “sees the necessity to make of the philosopher king a philosopher prophet ruler”.¹² The chapter on Al-Farabi traces this. Iqbal’s critique shows the other side, a Muslim thinker rejecting Plato’s withdrawal from the world. A candidate who can place Plato between Al-Farabi and Iqbal shows the examiner the reach of the syllabus.

For Pakistan, the decline of constitutions reads as a warning, and it should be used with care. It describes any state where rulers divide, wealth buys power, and freedom slides into disorder. A candidate may use it to frame an argument about Pakistan’s constitutional history. Frame it as a policy lesson about strengthening institutions and the rule of law, not as an attack on any institution. The Laws’ insistence that rulers serve the law is the safer point to build on.

14. Mix-ups about Plato

15. What the papers asked

The questions are quoted as printed.¹ Two of the three essay questions ask you to judge as well as describe. CE-2018 asks whether any features are “valid, even today”. CE-2025 wants a comparison. The CE-2024 MCQ’s answer is fifty, as section 8 shows.

16. Facts to carry into the hall

• Dates. Born about 428 B.C.E. (the sources give 429 or 427), died 347 B.C.E.⁶⁸
• Teacher. Socrates, tried and put to death in 399 B.C.E.⁶
• School. The Academy in Athens, which lasted until C.E. 529.⁸
• Pupil. Aristotle, “His most renowned pupil”.⁸
• Syracuse. Visits in 387, 367 and 362-361 B.C.E.⁸
• The political works. Republic, Statesman, Laws.⁸
• Justice. “doing one’s own business, and not being a busybody”.²
• The origin of the state. “arises … out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing”.²
• The classes. Rulers (gold), auxiliaries (silver), producers (brass and iron).²
• The virtues. Wisdom, courage, temperance, justice.
• The decline. Aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny.²
• The guardians’ education. Dialectic at thirty, practical office for fifteen years, rule at fifty.²
• The rule of law. The rulers are “the inferiors of the law” (Laws).⁴
• Critics. Aristotle (Politics, Book II), Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945).⁵¹⁰

17. What loses marks

1. Defining Plato’s justice as fairness or equal rights. Use his own definition.²
2. Calling the classes castes. Say that children move by ability.²
3. Leaving out the soul. Justice in the city is only half of Plato’s theory.²
4. Confusing the Republic and the Laws. Say which work each idea comes from.⁴
5. Getting the order of constitutions wrong. Timocracy comes first, tyranny last.²
6. Listing criticisms without judging them. Weigh Aristotle and Popper against the defence.⁷
7. Quoting “Plato said” for words he never wrote. Quote the dialogues, and name the work.
8. Answering “valid today” with praise alone. Say which features survive and which do not.

18. A worked answer plan

The question is CE-2018 Paper I, Q.2: “Critically analyze the salient features of Plato’s Republic. Do you think that some of its features are valid, even today?”¹

The tasks. (1) Set out the salient features. (2) Analyse them critically. (3) Judge which are valid today.

Introduction. Plato, the Athenian philosopher (about 428 to 347 B.C.E.), wrote the Republic to answer what justice is. Its ideal state is ruled by philosophers and ordered so that each class does its own work. The answer’s claim is that its method is partly valid today. That method is rule by knowledge, through a trained and selfless ruling class. Its means are not valid. They are censorship, the noble lie and the abolition of the family.

The body, under headings.

1. The origin of the state in human need. The quotation from Book II.
2. Justice as each doing his own work. The definition, and the parallel between city and soul.
3. The three classes and the myth of the metals. Promotion by ability.
4. The philosopher-king. The third wave, the ship, the cave.
5. Education. The stages to the age of fifty. Rousseau’s remark, through Barker.
6. Communism of property and family, and women as guardians. Only for the guardians, and why.
7. The decline of constitutions. Timocracy to tyranny, and the excess of liberty.

Critical analysis. Aristotle on unity and on common property. Popper on “Who should rule?”. The defence from the Stanford Encyclopedia, that the charge of totalitarianism depends on reading the Republic as a programme.

Judgment, “valid today”.

• Still valid. Rule by competence, and selection by merit. Rulers kept from private gain. Education as the ground of good government. The warning that a state decays when its rulers divide and wealth rules.
• Not valid. The noble lie. Censorship. The abolition of the family. Rule by a class that no one can remove, which Popper’s question about removing bad rulers answers.
• Plato’s own correction. The Laws put the rulers under law, which is the lesson modern constitutions keep.

Conclusion. The Republic asks the right question about how to rule well and answers it with the wrong means. Its lasting value is its demand that power serve the common good and be held by those fit for it. The better modern answer to its question is Plato’s own later one, that rulers must be “the inferiors of the law”.⁴

What to remember from this chapter

• Plato (about 428 to 347 B.C.E.) turned from politics to philosophy after Athens’ defeat and the death of Socrates.
• Justice, for Plato, is each part doing its own work, in the city and in the soul.
• The city has three classes, rulers, auxiliaries and producers, matched to reason, spirit and desire.
• The myth of the metals places people by ability, and children can move up or down.
• Philosophers should rule because only they know the Good. They must be compelled to rule.
• The guardians give up private property and family, and women of the right nature can be guardians.
• The flawed constitutions decline from timocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny.
• The Laws is the “second best” state, where rulers serve the law.
• Aristotle criticised the excess of unity and common property. Popper called the Republic totalitarian and asked instead how to limit bad rulers.
• Plato reached Muslim thought through Al-Farabi, and Iqbal rejected his withdrawal from the world.

Check yourself

1. State Plato’s definition of justice in his own words. (Section 5.)
2. What does the Republic say is the origin of the state? (Section 4.)
3. Name the three classes and the metal of each. (Section 6.)
4. Why is the myth of the metals not a caste system? (Section 6.)
5. What does the ship of state teach? (Section 7.)
6. At what age does a guardian come to rule, and what comes before it? (Section 8.)
7. Who gives up private property in the ideal state, and why? (Section 9.)
8. Give the four flawed constitutions in order, and the cause of each fall. (Section 10.)
9. How does the Laws differ from the Republic on who rules? (Section 11.)
10. State Aristotle’s two objections and Popper’s alternative question. (Section 12.)
11. How did Plato’s thought reach Muslim philosophy, and why did Iqbal reject it? (Section 13.)