Countless and diverse readings of Plato’s Republic abound, no doubt a testimony to the complexity and multivocity of the work, to its seemingly inexhaustible power to generate meaning.^[9] What else could account for so many different appropriations of the same book? As an ideal utopia, as a critique of idealism, as a blueprint for totalitarian politics, as a comedy and as a tragedy: there are almost as many Republics as there are interpreters. I want to explore the Republic, at least initially, for what it has to say about theory as a founding activity, where such theory also implies a “foundationalist” epistemology. This means reading Plato as both a “heroic” and a “critical” theorist: heroic because he delineates the epic proportions of great political theory in a way that usefully describes the work of founding in the Republic; critical because the means of explanation and the standards of evaluation Plato employs share affinities with the tasks of a critical social theory outlined by Habermas and introduced in chapter 1.

The dialogue is pervaded by the appropriately theoretical images and metaphors of sight, light, and vision. Socrates begins his famous narrative by recounting a visit to the Piraeus to see (theasthai) an inaugural festival of the Thracian goddess Bendis. This journey to see the sights and Socrates’ assessment of the spectacle invoke and transform an earlier meaning of the word theory and the vocation of the theōros. Originally, a theōros was an official envoy sent by the city to a strange or unfamiliar land to observe, and then report upon, the sacred events he had witnessed. But Socrates’ journey down into the Piraeus, Athens’s port and stronghold of radical democracy, does not conclude with his appraisal of the procession, nor does Socrates waste much time on the festival itself. He quickly moves on to describe the more important theoretical vision the Republic itself proposes. That initial journey, then, serves as both pretext and context for the prisoner’s journey up and out of the cave into the light of day, a journey that culminates in the upward ascent of the philosopher to the vision of the Good and ends with the mythical descent of Er into the underworld at the dialogue’s conclusion.

Of course, vision or sight as a controlling metaphor is nothing new in Greek literature. We have already encountered it in Sophoclean tragedy and know that the Greeks registered sight as a commonplace trope for knowledge in their literary and philosophical lexicons.^[10] We have also seen the themes the Republic shares with Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos: the will to knowledge, a certain impatience with the constraints of tradition, the insistence on exposing underlying patterns of unity beneath the phenomenal world. Yet the Republic articulates a vision and transforms the tropics of “visual” discourse in a way that Oedipus only dreamed of and Sophocles perhaps feared to imagine. Where Oedipus seeks merely to master his own destiny (and perhaps the destiny of Thebes), Plato’s Republic would reimagine an entire world in order to master the destiny of mankind. Neither oracles nor curses, nor seemingly much else, limit the capaciousness of the Republic’s theoretical imagination: its vision is breathtaking, not only for its vast scope, but for its utter innovation, its radical break with all previous standards of thought and judgment. In a heroic act of thought, Plato sought to reconstruct his entire political world by grasping present structures and relationships in order to represent them in a new and unfamiliar way.^[11] But Plato’s efforts involve more than a mere reassembling of the familiar world in a novel way. For the Republic does not merely—and fancifully—redescribe that world to us. Rather, it recreates the world as we know it, for the Platonic act of thought is in an important sense an act of creation, and the political theorist is also something of a political craftsman. In a crucial way, Platonic theory does not so much rearrange the old world as invents a new one. Such is the heroic task that the Platonic theoretical imagination sets for itself.

Plato exercises the creative powers of the theoretical vocation through the device of a foundation play. After the aporetic discussion of justice in book 1, Socrates must make a new start. He proposes the famous analogy between the city and the soul as a way to capture the truth about justice. Plato has Socrates cast himself and the company as founders (oikistēs) who will watch justice and injustice come into being with the growth of their city. The founding drama assumes the form of a political “cosmogony” as the founders create and order their successive cities and rank them in an ascending hierarchy, from Glaucon’s primitive “city for pigs” to the callipolis of book 7.

That final city most perfectly embodies the nature of justice. Comprised of three classes, which parallel the three corresponding parts of the soul and character types, the best city is ordered on the principle of “one person, one task.” This Platonic division of labor reconciles conflicting interests and conflicting classes: everyone and every class does what he, she, or it is best suited by nature to do. Justice becomes doing one’s own rather than paying one’s debts (Cephalus), helping friends and harming enemies (Polemarchus), or wanting or having more than one ought (Thrasymachus).^[12] All three classes and parts of the soul are thus ordered by justice in conjunction with temperance. In this ordering, the good of each individual and of each class is identical with the good of the whole. Class relations, far from being antagonistic, are complementary and reciprocal. Under the principle of specialization, each class (and individual) contributes its proper share necessary for the successful functioning of the city. The result is a unified social and political order in which natural ability and social status are reconciled and harmonized. Certainly, there is hierarchy in this integrated order: some classes, some jobs, and some souls are indeed understood as more virtuous or valuable than others. Yet all are equally necessary to the just functioning of the city, no class or individual is demeaned, and in fact difference is cultivated and allowed to flourish. Moreover, that difference does not turn invidious, and the hierarchy that results in no way entails domination. In addition, advantages and rewards seem rather evenly distributed: for example, members of the ruling classes have access to political power, but they own no private property and hold all in common, while members of the working class may accumulate fortunes but are excluded from the workings of power. The rightly ordered city, the analogue of the rightly ordered soul, is thus in harmony with itself, and the Republic shows us how (and why) this order comes into being.

This rather schematic, truncated, and celebratory sketch of the just city’s political architecture and founding vision indicates that the Republic is no mere intellectual exercise, but rather the willed creation of an entirely new political order. This raises a crucial question: why does the discussion of justice assume the form of a founding and Socrates the identity of a founder or lawgiver (oikistēs)? One ready response has to do with the analogous structures of city and soul and the comparative ease of discerning justice in the former as opposed to the latter. On this account, the Republic concerns only the justice of the individual, a reading that finds support in the initial motivation of the search, as well as in the more pessimistic pronouncements about the possibility of actually founding the just regime later in the dialogue (592b). But that answer is too easy, for it fails to recognize the claim that “justice can belong to a single man and to a whole city” (368e), and so account for the centrality of the foundation play. A better explanation, to my mind, rests with the inseparability, for the Greeks, of ethics and politics. The distinction we moderns might make between the two would have made no sense to Plato, for whom “the goodness of individuals was closely related to the goodness of the state in which they lived; the good life demanded the good society in which to express itself and the good society promoted and made possible the good life.”^[13] Yet even this Platonic expression of the “organic state” fails to confront the contending forces within the dialogue that drive Plato to confound the visual vocation of the theorist with the plastic craft of the political founder. A final reason for insisting that justice in the individual and justice in the city are coterminous has to do with Plato’s obvious concern for the quality of public life and his radical critique of Athenian democracy. If we are to believe the “Seventh Letter,” Plato never lost that concern for the politics of his native city, and ironically it was precisely that care for public things that turned him toward theory and makes his philosophy political philosophy.

As this latter remark implies, the Republic comprises a “structure of intentions” or set of controlling political purposes. The motivation behind its theoretical reformulation is a deep concern for public life. Although it may be a cliché that political theory emerges as a response to a crisis in politics, it is certainly true that without this concern, the Republic would not be political theory. If Plato indeed wrote the Republic in response to an experienced crisis in Athenian democracy, what was the nature of that crisis and why did it require a response of such extraordinary scope and so radical a nature? To be sure, Plato was not responding to this or that discrete failure in Athenian law, policy, or institutional arrangements, a failure that could be solved by other, less radical means. Rather, the Republic bears witness to a state of systematic distortion in the entire Athenian polity, a disorder in the fundamental structures, meanings, and purposes of the city, which, in Plato’s estimation, calls forth from the theorist a distinctly theoretical response. As Plato diagnoses it, systematic disorder requires an equally systematic reordering of a polity’s most fundamental principles.

Plato’s politics, then, are foundational, because his theoretical vision is foundationalist: nothing less than the complete reform of both soul and city, self and order, according to the dictates of an absolutist epistemology will suffice (that Plato has Socrates give up political reform in favor of the individual goodness of the philosopher at the end of book 9 in no way diminishes the Platonic will to order, but rather indicates the frailty and imperfection of the human world). The presentation of soul and city as analogues, then, and their subsequent reordering according to the form of the Good, is more than an aesthetic device that confers a certain level of satisfying symmetry to the construction (although it is that too). Rather, that presentation and reordering are driven by currents that run deep within the book (and perhaps within Plato himself): the almost obsessive impulse to place the unruly, disorderly, and disturbing matters of politics beyond contest and contestability. For these reasons, the Republic necessarily works from the ground up.

The Republic that has emerged so far is a work of heroic and critical theory. It is heroic because of the immensity and impossibility of its task. It is critical because its means of explanation and its standards of evaluation cohere in a single concept: to explain the systematic disorder of a polity is, in Platonic terms, also to judge that order from a critical vantage point. Explanation and judgment are necessarily “total,” and the Platonic theoretical critique is radical: Plato goes to the root of things. There is no piecemeal social engineering here, but rather the radical transformation of the foundations of the social and psychic totality. As an act of radical theory, the Republic reimagines that totality; as an act of radical politics, the Republic replaces it with the creation of its own theoretical labors. Plato does not merely offer a new vision or version of the world; he would transform the world itself and in that transformation “validate” his theory. Nowhere does Plato suggest that theory ought to yield the role of arbiter to the facts of the world: if the theory does not conform to the facts, then the conclusion we must draw (certainly the one Plato draws) is that the fault lies in our world, not in our theory. “Is our theory any the less true,” asks Socrates, “if a state so organized should not actually be founded?” (472e). On this telling, Platonic theory is both critical and radical, and the acts of the Platonic theoretical imagination are acts of radical politics. Plato barely leaves implicit what Marx would later make explicit in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”^[14]

The political dimensions of the Republic are hardly exhausted by this deliberately anachronistic, although I think rather telling, mapping of Marx’s revolutionary rhetoric onto Plato. There is another, considerably less obvious, way in which the Republic intends a politics. The Republic described thus far has been a text with theoretical designs on the political world. But perhaps the Republic has other designs in other directions as well. Here, I wish to mention briefly what I shall later develop in more detail. I want to suggest that the Republic comprises a complex set of strategies with political designs on its readers. At the level of its rhetoric and through its textual practice, the Republic deploys various and subtle strategies of persuasion: through the choice of its images and metaphors and in the tone, texture, and shades of meaning it gives words, the dialogue aims to draw us in and on, to bring us up short, to start our thinking anew, or to convince us of an argument we do not really believe. A book of diverse moods, the dialogue is now hopeful, now resigned, both confident and doubtful, at once conciliatory and combative, first comic, then tragic. A book of many rhetorical devices, the Republic deploys them to keep its readers off balance: we feel by turns provoked, seduced, repulsed, persuaded, or incited, but certainly never bored or disinterested. Judged in terms of communicative rationality, the Republic deploys an array of strategies and tactics meant to bring about perlocutionary effects—that is, effects of power—even as it states its illocutionary intent, its disavowal of power. But before I pursue a reading of the Republic as a complex set of rhetorical (and political) strategies, I should pause to take stock of my present position, survey the terrain I have covered, and chart the next stage of the journey.