My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Old white guys sit around discussing how to set up a totalitarian military state with them as the rulers.
Plato’s famous text covers a lot of ground as it tries to establish what justice is. It covers politics, personal and political ethics, idealised states (democracy ranks third out of four), education, and virtue. The Republic is a heady read, whilst being fascinating.
The strawman style to the interlocuter dialogue did annoy me as a reader. Whilst it was in service of making a larger point, it did make the discourse feel more shallow than it is. Plato’s thinking was also amazingly progressive for an age that predates the enlightenment by the best part of a millennium. But this thinking was also confined by the times.
Plato, along with Socrates and Aristotle, were the drivers behind western society. Books like The Republic put forward a lot of ideas for discussion and dissection, opening the dialogue that would lead to progress. That alone makes The Republic worth reading, but I also found it was worth reading if only to see much of it in context rather than discussed second-hand. E.g. The famous allegory of the cave takes on a slightly different light when not viewed in isolation.
For a more detailed understanding:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/
Tyson Adams 
In all seriousness here, since when was Plato white?
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You mean in that this predates the concept of “white people” or that we don’t actually know much about skin colour of ancient Greece?
Because, yes, both are correct. I used it is a allusion to the Western cultural and social dominance that was inherited from the ancient Greeks.
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Thanks, I wanted to make sure you were using it in the way I thought you were. Didn’t want to make that assumption…
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