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  • Plato's Republic in the Recent Debate
  • Francesco Fronterotta (bio)

Plato's Republic continues to arouse intense controversy among commentators, both for its ethical and political project and for its psychological, epistemological, and ontological implications for the knowledge of philosophers, who, says Plato, should be set as guides for such a project. Considering just a few examples from recent years, we might recall that a new critical edition of the dialogue has been published1 that contains significant innovations both in the text and in the attribution of lines to speakers. Moreover, this new edition has been accompanied by a volume of philological commentary edited by the same author.2 Numerous translations in the main modern languages have also been published with a more or less detailed apparatus of notes.3 An equally significant quantity of works of commentary, individual or miscellaneous, of extremely varied origin and composition has appeared, from the monumental work coordinated by M. Vegetti (1998–2007), to the volumes of O. Höffe (1997), E. N. Ostenfeld (1998), S. Sayers (1999), R. Gutiérrez (2003), B. Mitchell and J. R. Lucas (2003), S. Rosen (2005), M. Dixsaut (2005a–b), G. Santas (2006), and G. R. F. Ferrari (2007). Just this brief indication of the mass of philological, historical, and philosophical studies suggests the constant—and constantly renewed—appeal of a dialogue that is rightly considered as one of the most influential and representative of Plato's thought.

This is not, of course, the appropriate context to suggest an interpretation of the Republic; more modestly, I simply wish to indicate some of the main lines of discussion that the recent critical literature has followed in order to bring out some of the problems raised by a reading of the work. A preliminary difficulty that should be faced in some way concerns the object of the dialogue: if Diogenes Laertius had no doubt in classifying the Republic as one of Plato's political dialogues (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 3.50–51), it is fairly easy to see that the [End Page 125] work's characteristic interweaving of themes can only be dissolved into clearly defined sections at the price of rather forced schematizations.4 In the face of such a complex articulation of the theme, one inevitably wonders where the essentially "political" nucleus of the dialogue is to be found, unless, of course, one wants to locate it in the interaction of the characters, in their different dialectical roles, or in the continuity of the sequence of arguments they expound.5 These problems have been given fresh attention, mainly by those scholars who refer to the "dialogical approach" (on which see below), but in my view such an approach would be an obvious diminutio. In any case, as Vegetti has observed,6 one can identify some fairly clear lines of thought in Plato's conception of politics: from the definition of the status of the government of the city, and the requirements for being admitted to it, to its aims and the tools of consensus to maintain it, and also to the city's corresponding social, economic, and institutional structure, with the examination of the class relations to which it gives rise and the various possible concrete situations in which the city is historically placed (in peace or war, establishing trading relations with other cities or not, and so on). The usual starting point for this investigation is the recognition that the existing city is "sick" (VIII, 544c), which leads to the study of the causes and course of this illness, with the goal of curing it and establishing an institutional model that is immune to the disease. The city's main symptom is the lasting conflict, not unique to Plato's Athens, between its distinct social components, the , which produces a sort of permanent civil war within the individual cities or between the different cities in the Greek world. In this context, it is clearly the Athenian democratic system that is on trial, with Plato regarding it as inescapably exposed to demagogic decline coinciding with the subjection of the ends of government to the irrational forces of the masses, and thus in radical contradiction with...

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