Plato’s Republic Book II: What would you do if you could get away with it?
In which not a single train of thought was ridden to the end
This essay is part of a weekly series I am doing in which I share my summaries, thoughts and ideas about each book from Plato’s Republic. You can read the summary of Book I here.
A MAN NAMED Glaucon pleads Socrates to not merely define justice, but to defend why we ought to pursue it at all. Is justice something you do for its own sake? Socrates says that justice is something that you do “both for itself and for what comes out of it” (358a). Naturally, neither of these concepts is ever brought up again or elaborated upon.
If you expect The Republic to behave like a well organised debate, you’ll be irritated and miss the fun of it. Glaucon is a bit us, the reader, because he desperately wants Socrates to convince him, logically, and without a doubt, that he should be doing the right thing. Socrates doesn’t indulge him (or us for that matter) so easily, but Plato, through this dialogue, gives us an entertaining look into what distracts people from the idea of justice even though we all may have some sense of it in our lives.
