Justice -- Early works to 1800; Political science -- Early works to 1800; Utopias -- Early works to 1800
continuous effort is in some degree confirmed by the numerous
references from one part of the work to another.
The second title, "Concerning Justice," is not the one by which the
Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally in antiquity, and,
like the other second titles of the Platonic Dialogues, may therefore
be assumed to be of later date. Morgenstern and others have asked
whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or the
construction of the State is the principal argument of the work. The
answer is, that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same
truth; for justice is the order of the State, and the State is the
visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.
The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal of
the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body. In
Hegelian phraseology the State is the reality of which justice is the
ideal. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of God is
within, and yet develops into a Church or external kingdom; "the house
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," is reduced to the
proportions of an earthly building. Or, to use a Platonic image,
justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through the
whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is completed,
the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the
same or different names throughout the work, both as the inner law of
the individual soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and
punishments in another life. The virtues are based on justice, of
which common honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice
is based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is
reflected both in the institutions of States and in motions of the
heavenly bodies. The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather than
the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with
hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications
that the same law is supposed to reign over the State, over nature, and
over man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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