The Republic, written by Plato is a dialectic between Socrates and his interlocutors: Thrasymachus, Glaucon, Adeimantus and Polymarchus. As the title of the book suggests, it is a piece of political philosophy: Socrates and his companions are piecing apart ideas of justice, good and the beauty in the process of building up an ideal State; and through it build a vision of justice. The 10-book volume goes in depths of dialectic in a popularly known Socratic fashion, and towards the end, one would be pleasured to find many famous Socratic/Platonic ideas, such as the allegory of the cave. Some of the first pieces of known philosophy to me surely included this and the trolley problem, and I was glad to find many other concepts layered in the chains of this continuum.
When one thinks of Socrates, one expects a halo of divine rationality and calmness emanating from his words; it's when you start on him however that you really get a realistic view on this. Socrates is not perfect, his views are hardly the perfect encompiment. What is so neat about this dialectic is his style. It carries one through a step by step process and you just start reaching some results. And that's a beautiful role that logic plays. Except this is ethics, and some places aren't just singly defined in terms of employment. I'll have to explain this properly, so here goes:
One, Socrates is a great philosopher, but he looks too much into the grander vision. He considers the state that is war-ready, it's guardians are primarily militarians, and their education is solely focused on creating temperance. Problem is, that leads him to disdain other roles. The artisans all come behind, and Socrates feels a lawyer and a doctor aren't even really necessary except for in acute situations. The education is built around the temperate military, and he doesn't consider why he would need that model for the others, for the above reason most probably. And since he doesn't think about the smaller picture, he often loses sights of the microcosms, the biggest being the human psychology in multiple instances.
Temperance is a virtue needed in the long run, but Socrates forgets how human beings need the multitude of emotions rather than prepping them using music for gymnastics and philosophy. He is much better than Epictetus(sorry, just happened to have read him so he comes to the mind), but yet in his grand vision, builds an entirely socialist state that is aristocratic(that seems contradictory, but I trust you it's not) in view of his temperance goal.
Now to clarify, Socrates isn't entirely contemptible here. The book drives across the point, one that has influenced the socialist vision as well- how justice gets overhauled in turn of private pocessions for the 'guardians' aka the rulers and how the downfall starts with a four step hierarchy of unjust structures, and funnily enough, and probably well known is how he advocates democracy to be one of them. The man presents his justification, and this only comes across if you follow through the hierarchy, but to summarize, it's the extending leaning of democracy towards liberty that could lead to tyranny like how oligarchy could lead to democracy due to the same factor.
One of the striking and shocking parts came for me as Socrates turned out to be progressive in his roles for women around Book V. This was confusing, and that is also a thing which I found at fault, where certain contradictions arise. So, to say women are to be equals in one part, and to say they are better at weaving and cooking just a few pages back- it feels off. Same goes for slaves. Epictetus was firm about his opinion: the slave becomes free through education of the soul. Socrates plays them down in one part, in a later part says the child of a person need not be in his same class(fun fact, guy was a great voter for eugenics: his downfall model begins with a eugenic factor), and yet in a later part talks about mixtures and preventing one class from partnering with another(part of the downfall). But coming back to the first point, and this is where you praise his dialectic, for he uses the logic he used for men to come to the conclusion for how women come under the same set of logic and hence the same roles. He maintains this view of the role of women in traditionally manly roles throughout the book.
The peak of the Republic is definitely around Book V. From Book VI-VII,it turns a lot more imaginative, and I felt Socrates played on his words and may have selected his factors to bring across his point. His advocation for eugenics is one such part. He uses analogies of one scenario and translates them into another scenario which realistically follows a different mode of physics. In this case, to say about how gold and silver when mixed with bronze and iron deprecates their 'purity' and then to translate it to humans-it is a play on emotions.
Socrates' interlocutors have a good hand with their dialogue. Towards the latter parts, you do feel it's a lot more instances of simple affirmative stances notched up an extra at intervals, but mostly it stays in tune with a conversation, and at times, funny, for example when Socrates admits that he was trying to get around points in order to escape and how they say they caught it.
One of the confusing aspects about the whole book in general is the Socrates-Plato divide. Plato has 'documented' Socrates' dialogues here, but we don't know if he added in his own points, and in fact many of the popular ideas are known under his name rather, such as the Theory of Forms(beautiful theory by the way).
Socrates' is a man of rationality. One of the main pursuits of this book was to justify justice as its own pursuit when Glaucon questioned of peoples' mere show of it and escape from its hold-and this is a very rational adventure. It's only with certain terms that he puts out regarding 'unholiness' that you question whether that concerns our rational model or actual divinity, but those instances are rare.
Benjamin Jowett's translation is quite a mark. Only with the end of Book VIII, where certain dialogues were successive for a person without a reply was it necessary for a pause to analyze the length and depth of the dialogue to determine who the actual speaker was, but otherwise the words couldn't have been clearer and more understandable, except for the mathematics that Plato himself presents. That itself is a side note to add at this end: Socrates was trying hardly to advovate arithmetics, but in its pursuits, mathematicises things which do not have any bases or standards. An example is how he proclaims the good man to be 729 times pleasanter than the tyrant, but he surely did not account for the quantitative aspect for the standards on which the basis was made except this simple factor of the former's truth being three times not removed as compared to the latter..which is more like an incremental measure when the basis itsef isn't numerized here. Another is Plato's number, which funnily enough is quite incomphrehensible even to the neo-Platonists, all to lay dry before a justification of divine and human cycles, which were never rationally explained, nor was questioned by his fellow interlocutors. Here's where you strongly start questioning the Socrates/Plato divide and the reality of certain bits.
The book has certain historical significance as I thought I might mention: the idea of how Socrates felt that light was an addition to just enable sight as itself rather than light being the fundamental; and the cosmological perspectives of the time from the ending of the book, particularly the solar system, from the myth of Er, which was quite magical and a beautiful ending.
The Republic was an enlightening read for me. It offers these ideas on some core aspects of ethics and political structure, which may not all be quite agreeable, but there is something to be taken in from all of them. From learning about these people to actually reading their works, it was a field work, and I recommend this to any one on such a route or intent on finding out about political build-ups.