THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO - Studyplace

xxviii
INTRODUCTION
peet that the evils of human life will ever be cured by the en·
thronement of reason in any possible form of society. There is no
facile optimism in the programme here laid down for the philosophic
statesmen to be trained at the Academy, no compromise between
existing conditions and those enduring and unquestionable
principles on which reform must be based, if reform is to produce
a stable and harmonious order. And when the outline of the perfect
society has been traced, the doubt is confessed, whether the
perfection of any human institutions can withstand the disintegrating
touch of time. The Muses themselves pronounce the doom
of the ideal state before it has even seen the light: 'Hard as it may
be for a state so framed to be shaken, yet, since all that comes into
being must decay, even a fabric like this will not endure for ever,
but will suffer dissolution' (546 A, p. 269).
These words preface an account of the decline of society and
of the individual soul, as if it were written in man's fate that every
attempt to scale the heavens should be followed by a descent into
hell. The lowest depth to which the state can fall is despotism; and
in the soul of the despotic man, whom the Greeks called 'tyrant,'
the three most powerful motives, ambition, fear, and greed, have
finally triumphed over reason and humanity. The startling resemblance
between the portrait of this character in chapter xxxii and
some of the present rulers of mankind warns us that Thrasymachus'
doctrine, professing as it does to lay bare the real truth about
human nature in politics, is still very much alive.
Socrates' arguments with Thrasymachus in the first Part may
strike the reader as scholastic and abstract in form and too remote
from our modern habits of thought. They are, no doubt, qf a kind
that Socrates would use in dealing with the professionally clever
disputants known as Sophists. His two young friends refuse to accept
them as conclusive. At the beginning of Part II they reopen
Thrasymachus' case with an earnestness which calls for a more
profound analysis and defence of justice. The reply fills the remainder
of the Republic. It rests ultimately on the conviction that
materialistic egoism misconceives that good 'which every soul pursues
as the end of all her actions, dimly divining its existence, but
perplexed and unable to grasp its nature with the same clearness