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I’ve read this right through a couple of times now � three, or there about, I think. And bits of it many, many times. This is one of the key books of ‘the western canon�, you really do need to be aware of it. And you might be surprised at how frequently it is referenced, particularly in science fiction � everything from The Giver to Brave New World to The Matrix. And while the world Plato is presenting is meant to be a utopia, it is generally used as the basis for the most terrifying of dystopias.

One of the things I noticed this time through was all the eugenics. Not just in the selective breeding of the human stock, but also in the murder of the ‘unfit�. I’ve always been very sensitive to ideas of killing people based on some notion of the ‘costs to society� that they bring. I believe such ideas undermine our very humanity to the point where the ‘improved� society would no longer be fit to be called human.

This book is seeking to provide an answer to the question ‘what is justice?� � or rather, it starts by questioning if it is just to help your friends and harm your enemies? I’m not sure it is immediately obvious that we might go from these questions to answers concerning the division of labour in a society � but that seems to be a major consideration of the theory of justice being presented here. Basically, people are born with various levels of merit and a just society would identify those who are favoured with whatever merit they have, and it would set them to the tasks that best suit whatever merit they have. Plato talks of the merit of people as a bit like being assigned to different metals (not unlike in the Olympics) and those people metals differentiate them into different classifications � gold, silver, bronze and iron � and each will have their proper tasks in society. Once you have been assigned to one of these classifications you are pretty much stuck there. There are tasks that are appropriate to your abilities and the just society is one where people are assigned tasks that best meet their abilities. For this reason, it is important that parents don’t know their own children and that children are brought up in common by the whole of society. That way you won’t end up with a bronze child from two gold parents being given a gold education that they will not be able to make any use of, or their bronze child wreaking havoc trying to be a philosopher king, when they would have been a better baker or blacksmith or something.

All the same, the best people are still likely to have the best children and so the society should make all proper efforts to ensure that the best breeds with the best � in much the same way as you would if you were breeding race horses.

The best societies would be ruled by philosopher kings � and they would not be allowed to have any possessions of their own, since they ought to be focused on the good of the society as a whole. There is a kind of threat to such people � Plato believes they would be unlikely to really give a stuff about most things that others find very rewarding. For instance, wealth, power, prestige and so on. They are likely to be seen as too ‘other worldly�, even by themselves, and therefore they are likely to be uninterested in taking on the responsibility of ruling and they might need to be encouraged. This is all for the good � because the sorts of people who want to rule are generally not the sort of people who should ever be allowed to rule. This is one of the things in which me and Plato are very much on the same page � although, for me, rather than breeding a special class of philosopher kings to rule over us, I am increasingly becoming an anarchist as I struggle to think of a single person in my life who has been a worthwhile leader. I’ve certainly never met a philosopher I would be happy to have as my king.

These philosopher kings are expected to structure pretty well all aspects of life to make sure that the dumb (or rather we differently-abled with all too much base metal in our veins) are kept content in our ignorance. There are many, many things that the mass of society really shouldn’t be troubling their all too small minds over. It is also important that the philosopher kings do what they can to make sure that the rest of society doesn’t get their passions too excited by things like poetry either. A large part of religion will need to go � particularly the bits where the gods were seen fighting with each other or doing immoral things to women dressed up as bulls and such.

The allegory of the cave is the most famous part of this dialogue. It concerns the nature of education. What always strikes me about it is the pain that is associated with learning the truth and how once one has learnt the truth one appears to be foolish to all those around them. But that the point of learning is to return to those who are ignorant and to be forced to attempt to explain the truth of existence to them. This is almost always a near fatal enterprise. People generally don’t like being told they are wrong and being told ‘everything you have ever thought was true is actually false� is hardly the first line in a new romance.

I keep going on about Marx’s utopia being based on the idea of there being no division of labour � so it is interesting that Plato’s is based on the exact opposite idea to this. In fact, Plato says that people really only have one thing that they are likely to be good at and that they must stick to that. He may have been both the first eugenicist, and the first Fordist/Taylorist too.

His discussion of the different types of government in book viii is a bit of a highlight to this, I think. I found his discussion of democracy particularly interesting. I’m not sure I agree with it, but I thought his discussion of how it tended towards tyranny was all a bit chilling, and perhaps also a bit too close to home. The power of money to buy democracy, the fact tyrants need to remove the best of those around them and so becomes increasingly stupid, and focused on giving the people ‘what they want� � mostly bread and circuses � looks all uncomfortably like Trump’s America writ large.