Leo Strauss On Plato's 'The Republic', plus commentary and additions

This  essay is a rendition, mostly word for word, of Leo Strauss' (a Jewish emigre American scholar-philosopher influenced by Nietzsche) own writings on the subject. It is primarily intended to make his thought, which I believe to be largely true and important, available to a new or wider audience; occasionally though, I have made additions or alterations  at certain points in order to offer some of my own reflections, which appear in bold.



PLATO
427-347 B. C.

Thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have come down to us as Platonic writings, not all of which are now regarded as genuine. Some scholars go so far as to doubt that any of the letters is genuine. It seems then Plato never speaks to us in his own name, for in his dialogues only his characters pseak. Why Plato proceeded in this manner is not easy to say. Perhaps he doubted there can be a philosophic teaching proper, and, too, thought like his master Socrates that philosophy is in the last analysis knowledge of ignorance. One could say there Plato's dialogues as a whole are less the presentation of a teaching than a monument to the life of Socrates -to the core of his life: they all show how Socrates engaed in his most important work, the awakening of his fellow men and the attempting to guide them toward the good life that he himself was living. Still, Socrates is not always the chief character in Plato's dialogues; in a few he does hardly more than listen while others speak, and in one dialogue (the Laws) he is not even present. We mention these strange facts because they show how difficult it is to speak of Plato's teaching.
All Platonic dialogues refer more or less directly to the political question. Yet only three dialogues indicate by their very titales that they are devoted to politcal philosophy: the Republic, the Statesman, and the Laws. The political teaching of Plato is accessible to us chiefly through these three works.

The Republic
When approaching a Platonic dialogue it is important to pay attention to the setting and characterization. 'The Republic' opens with Socrates and his companions being waylaid by a larger and stronger party, led by the elderly, respectable, pious and wealthy Kephalos; this mirrors the way in which philosophers such as Socrates, who are always in a minority, are compelled to consider political topics by the persecution their inquiries, which offend established pieties, often draw. It also reflects the Platonic notion that, in order for the just city to come about, philosophers must be compelled to rule.
The conversation begins with Socrates addressing a question of Kephalos. His question is a model of propriety, giving Kephalos an opportuniy to speak of everything food which  he possesses, to display his happiness, as it were, and it converns the only subject about which Socrates could conceivably learn something from him: how it feels to be very old. In the course of his answer Kephalos comes to speak of injustice and justice. He seems to imply that justice is identical with telling the truth and paying back what one has received from anyone. Socrates points out that it would not be just to always tell the truth or return, say, a weapon to a madman. Polmarchus takes over the argument at that stage (after his Kephalos, his father, leaves to perform an act of piety); but Polemarchus inherits only half of his father's intellectual property: he no longer maintains that telling the truth is essential to justice. Without knowing it, he thus lays down one of the principles of the Republic. As appears later in the work, in a well-ordered society it is necessary that one tell untruths of a certain kind to children and even to the adult subjects.
Polemarchus maintains that justice consists in giving to everyone what belongs to him; but he also holds that justice is good, not only to the giver but also to the receiver. This results in a contradiction, since, arguably, very few people make wise use of their property. To reconcile this, we must demand that everyone should own only what is "fitting" for him, what is good for him. Polemarchus further modifies his conception of justice by claiming that it consists of helping one's friends and harming one's enemies. In brief, we might be compelled to demand the abolition of private property or the introduction of communism. To the extent to which there is a a connection between private property and the family, we would even be compelled to demand the abolition of the family or the introduction of absolute communism, i.e. of communism not only regarding property but regarding women and children as well. On the original formulation, justice seemed to require only a fairly simply form of virtue, ie. law-abidingness. The modified versions, however, seems to require knowledge of a very high order, since they would require both correctly identifying friends and what is good for them.  Extremely few people will be able to determine wisely which things and which amounts of them are good for the use of each individual; only men of exceptional wisdom are able to do this. We would then be compelled to demand that society be ruled by simply wise men, by philosophers in the strict sense, wielding absolute power. The refutation of Kephalos' view of justice thus contains the proof of the necessity of absolute communism under the rule of the philosophers. This 'proof', however, abstracts from a number of most relevant things. If we want to understand the Republic, we would would do well to understand the nature of these disregarded things.
Socrates critiques the notion that justice includes 'harming enemies', since, he argues, harming people, just like harming horses, only makes them worse. However, Polemarchus' view may be taken to reflect a most potent opinion regarding justice - the opinion according to which justice means public-spiritness, full dedication to one's city as a particular society which as such is potentially the enmy of other cities. Justice so understood is patriotism, and consists indeed in helping one's friends, i.e. one's fellow citizens and harming one's enemies, i.e. foreigners. Justice thus understood cannot be entirely dispensed with in any city however just, for even the most just cirt is a city, a particular or closed or exclusive society. Therefore Socrates himself demands later in the dialogue that the guardians of the city by by nature firendly to their own people and harsh or nasty to strangers. He also demands that the citizens of the just city cease to regard all human beings as their brothers and limit the feelings and actions of fraternity to their fellow citizens alone. The opinion of Polemarchus properly understood is the only one among the generally known views of justice discussed in the first book of the Republic which is entirely preserved in the positive or constructive part of the Republic.
The third and last opinion discussed in the first book of the Republic is the one maintained by Thrasymachos. He is the only speaker in the work who exhibits anger and behaves discourteously and even savagely. He is highly indignant over the result of Socrates' conversation with Polmarchus. He seems to be particularly shocked by Socrates' contention that it is not good for onself to harm anyone or that justice is never harmful to anyone. It is most important, both for the understanding of the Republic and generally, that we do not behave toward Thrasymachos as Thrasymachos behaves, i.e. angrily, fanatically, or savagely. If we look than at Thrasymachos' indignation without indignation, we must admit that his violent reaction is to some extent a revolt of common sense. Since the city as city is a society which from time to time must wage war, and war is inseparable from harming innocent people, the unqualified condemnation of harming human beings would be tantamount to the condemnation of even the justest city. Apart from this, it seems entirely fitting that the most savage man present should maintain the most savage thesis on justice. Thrasymachos contends that justice is the advantage of the stronger. Still, this thesis proves to be only the consequence of an opinion which is not only not manifestly savage but is even highly respectable. According to that opinion, the just is the same as the lawful or legal, i.e. what the customs or laws of the city prescribe. Yet this opinion implies that there is nothing higher to which one can appeal from the man-made laws or conventions. This is the opinion now known as "legal positivism". but in its origin it is not academic; it is the opinion on which all poltical societies tend to act. If the just is indentical with the lega, the source of justice is the will of the legislator. The legislator is the man or body of men that rules the city; the tyrant, the common people, the men of excellence, and so on. According to Thrasymachos, each regime lays down the laws with a view to its own preservation and well-being, in a word, to its advantage and nothing else. From this it follows that obedience to the laws or justice is not necessarily advantageous to the ruled and may even be bad for them. And as for the rulers, justice simply does not exist: they lay down the laws with exclusive concern for their own advantage.
If the rulers make mistakes however, they may command laws that are disadvantageous to themselves. When Socrates points this out, Thrasymachos declares after some hesitaton that the rulers are not rulers if and when they make mistakes; the ruler in the strict sense is infallible, just as the artisan in the strict sense is infallible. Yet the artisan 'in the strict sense', Socrates argues, proves to be concerned, not with his own advantage, but with the advantage of the others whom he serves, i.e. the shoemaker makes shoes for others. Hence the ruler rules for the sake of the ruled also. As the Republic progresses, we see that its city is a city of artisans, in this sense. (And since craftmanship or art is in the soul and not in the body, the difference between the two sexes loses its importance, and the equality of the sexes is established. )
Thrasymachos would have avoided his downfall if he had left matters at the common sense view according to which rulers are of course fallible, or if he had said that all laws are framed by the rulers with a view to their apparent advantage. The fact that he did not do seems to reflect a notion that the ruler who makes mistakes is not likely to remain a ruler for very long, which it suits him to promote due to his own role as a rhetorician and adviser to rulers, who require him precisely for this reason.
One could say - and as a matter of fact Thryasymachos himself says - that Socrates' conclusion, namely, that no ruler or other artisan ever considers his own advantage is very simple-minded: Socrates seems t obe a babe in the woods. As regards artisans proper, they of course consider the compensation they receive for their work. The universal art, the art accompanying all arts, the art of arts, is the art of money-making: one must therefore say that serving others or being just becomes good for the artisan only through his practicing the art of money making, or that no one is just for the sake of justice, or that no one likes justice as such. But the most devastating argumet against Socrates' reasoning is supplied by the arts which are manifestly concerned with the most ruthless and calculating exploitation of the ruled by the rulers. Such an art is the art of the shepherd - the art wisely chosen by Thrasymachos in order to destroy Socrates' argument, especially since kings and other rulers have been compared to shepherds since the oldest times. The shepherd is surely concerned with the flock - so that the sheep will supply men with the juiciest lamb chops. As Thrasymachos puts it, the shepherds and exclusively concerned with the good of the owners and of themselves.  But there is obviously a difference between the owners and the shepherds: the juiciest lamb chops are for the owner and not for the shepherd, unless the shepherd is dishonest. Now, the position of Thrasymachos with regard t oboth rulers and ruled is precisely that of the shepherd with regard to both the owners and the sheep: Thrasymachos can securely derive benefit from the assistance which he gives to the rulers (regardlness of whether they are tyrants, common people, or men of excellence) only if he is loyal to them, if he does his job well for them. Contrary to his assertion, he must grant that a man's justice is salutary, not only to others and especially to the rulers, but also to himself. It is partly because he has become aware of this necessity that he changes his manners so remarkably in the last part of the first book. What is true of the helpers of rulers is true of the rulers themselves and all other human beings (including tyrants and gangsters) who need the help of other men in their enterprises however unjust: no association can last if its members do not practice justice among themselves. This, however, amounts to an admission that justice may be a mere means, if an indispensible means, for injustice - for the exploitation of outsiders. Above all, it does not dispose of the possibility that the city is a community held together by collective selfishness and nothing else, or that there is no fundamental difference between the city and a gang of robbers.  These are similar difficulties explain why Socrates regards his refutation of Thrasymachos as insufficient: he says at its conclusion that he has tried to show that justice is good without having made clear what justice is.
The adequate defense or praise of justice presupposes not only knowledge of what justice is, but also an adequate attack on justice. At the beginning of the second book, Glaukon attempts tp present such an attack; he claims that he restates Thrasymachos' thesis, in which he does not believe, with greater vigor than Thrasymachos had done. Glaukon also takes it for granted that the just is the same as the legal or conventional, but he attempts to show how convention emerges out of nature. By nature each man is concerned with his own good and wholly unconcerned with any other man's good to the point that he has no hesitation whatever about harming his fellows. Since everyone acts accoirdngly, they all bring about a siutation which is unbearable for most of them; the majority, i.e. the weaklings, figure out that every one of them would be better off if they agreed among themselves as to what each of them may or may not do. Whay they agree upon is not stated by Glaukon, but part of it can easily be guessed: they will agree that no one may violate the life and limb, the honor, the liberty, and the property of any of the assoicates, i.e. the fellow citizens, and every must do his best to protect his associates against outsiders.  Both the abstension from such violations and the service of protection are in no way desirable in themselves but only necessary evils, yet lesser evils than universal insecurity. But what is true of the majority is not true of the "real man" who can take care of himself and who is better off if he does not submit to law or convention. Yet even the others do violence to their nature by submitting to law and justice: they submit to it only from fear of the consequences of failture to submit, i.e. from fear of punishment of one kind of another, not voluntarily or gladly. Therefore every man would prefer injustice to justice if he could be sure of escaping detection: justice is preferable to injustice only with tha view to possible detection, to one's becoming known as just to others, i.e. to good repute or other rewards. Therefore since, as Glaukon hopes, justice is choiceworthy for its own sake, he demands from Socrates a proof that the life of the just man is preferable to that of the unjust man even if the just man is thought to be unjust in the extreme and suffers all kinds of punishment or is in the depth of misery, and the unjust man is thought to be of consumate justice and receives all kinds of reward or is at the peak of happiness: the height of injustice, i.e. of the conduct according to nature, is the tacit exploitation of law and convention for one's own benefit alone, the conduct of the supremely shrewd and manly tyrant. In the discussion with Thrassymachos, the issue had become blurred by the suggestion that there is a kinship between justice and art. Glaukon makes the issue manifest by comparing the perfectly unjust man to the perfect artisan, whereas he conceives of the perfectly just man as a simple man who has no quality other than justice. With a view to the teaching of the Republic as a whole, one is tempted to say that Glaukon understands pure justice in the light of pure fortitude; his perfectly just man reminds one of the unknown soldier who undergoes the most opainful and most humiliating death for no other purpose whatesover except in order to die bravely and without any prospect of the his noble deed every becoming known to anyone.
Glaukon's demand on Socrates is strongly supported by Adeimantos. It becomes clear from Adeimantos' speech that Glaukon's view according to which justice is choiceworthy entirely for its own sake is altogether novel, for in the traditional view justice was regarded as choiceworthy chiefly, if not exclusively, because of the divine rewards for justice and the divine punishment for injustice, and various other consequences. Adeimantos' long speech differs from Glaukon's because it brings out the fact that if justice is to be choiceworthy for its own sake, it must be easy or pleasant. Glaukon's and Adeimantos' demands establish the standard by which one must judge Socrates' praise of the just; they force one to investigate whether or to what extent Socrates has proved in the Republic that justice is choiceworthy for its own sake or pleasant or even by itself sufficent to make a man perfectly happy in the midst of what is ordinarily believed to be the most extreme misery.
In order to defend the cause of justice, Socrates turns to founding a city in speech. He justfies this by the consideration that it can be detected more easily in the city than in the individual because the former is larger than the latter, implying that there s a parallelism between the two. Another motive for turning to the city in speech, rather than in, say, an actual  city, is that in a real city the laws may be bad, (i.e. not salutary), and therefore not just.
The founding of good city takes places in stages. First arises the healthy city, which arises due to the need for any things, which require other human beings. This city satifies the basic, bodily needs of everyone, working harmoniously through free trade on the basis of  one man one art (job). This is because men are suited by nature to different arts and specialization allows for still greater profiency. The healthy city is a happy city: it knows no poverty, no coercion or government, no war and eating of animals. It does not need government because there is a perfect harmony between everyone's service and his reward: no one encroaches on anyone else. The healthy city seems to be similar, in its free-market, no-government approach to the vision of contemporary Alt Right. philosopher Stefan Molyneux. In the healthy city, justice is easy or pleasant and free from any tincture of self-sacrifice.  One wonders why it requires transcending at all. Leo Strauss depicts it as a state of innocence, in which both evil and virtue are dormant. Plato himself seems to think that it naturally decays into the luxurious or feverish city. This is when such a city has grown to desire many unnecessary things. This causes ill-health in its citizens and a desire for conquest in war over its neighbours. This leads to the need for warrior class, likewise based on the principle one man, one art. Hitherto it looked as if all the arts were of equal rankand the only universal art, or the only art accompanying all arts, was the art of money-making. That order is hierachic: the universal art is the highest art, the art directing all other arts, which as such cannot be practiced by the practioners of of arts other than the highest. This art of arts will prove to be philosophy. For the time being we are told only that the warrior must have nature resembling the nature of that philosophic beast, the dog. Dogs are said to be philosophic because, like philosophers they 'love what they know' (i.e. in their case, people they know). For the warriors must be spirited and hence irascible and harsh on the one hand to strangers and gentle on the other, to their fellow citizens. They must have disinterested liking for their fellow citizens and a disinterested dislike for foreigners. The men possessing such special natures need in addition a special education. With a view to their work they need training in the art of war. They will be by nature the best fighters and the only ones armed and trained in arms: they will inevitably be the sole possessors of politcal power.  But this is not the education with which Socrates is chiefly concerned. Since the age of innocence has no passed, evil is now rampant in the city.  The education which the warriors more than anyone else need is thus above all the education in civic virtue. That education is "music" (including poetry)  education. Not all poetry and music is apt to make men good citizens in general and good warriors or guardians in particular. Therefore the poetry and music not conducive to this moral-political end must be banished from the city. He demands particularly that the gods be presented as models of human excellence. This education must also be buttressed by the right kind of institutions, i.e. by absolute communism or by the completest possible abolition of privacy: everyone may enter everyone else's dwelling at will. As reward for their service to the craftemen proper, the guardians do not receive money of any kind but only a sufficient amount of food and other necessities, such as clothing and housing.
Let us see in what way the good city as hitherto described reveals that justice is good or even attractive for its own sake. That justice, or observing of the just proportion between service and reward, bewtween working for others and one's own advantage, is necessary was shown in the discussion with Thrasymavhos by the example of the gang of robbers. The education of the guardians as agreed upon between Socrates and Adeimantos is not education to justice. It is education to courage and moderation. . Justice itself seems to flow from the proper combination of these two virtues. As for the sickness in the feverish city, these virtues require that Dr.s do not merely prolong a person's illness, but that they refuse to treat patients who are sick in body that they cannot cure and return to their appointed task, and even to kill those who are sick or wicked in soul.  (410 a) The music education in particular, as distinguished from the gymnastic education is education to moderation, and this means to love of the beautiful, i.e. of what is by nature attractive in itself. Socrates silently makes clear the difference between the gang of robbers and the good city: the essential difference consists in the fact that the armed and ruling part of the good city is animated by love of the beautiful, by love of everything praiseworthy and graceful. The difference is not to be sought in the fact that the good city is guided in its relations to other cities, Greek or barbarian, by considerations of justice: the sizw of the territory of the good city is determined by that city's own moderate needs and by nothing else. The difficulty appears perhaps more clearly from what Socrates says when speaking of the rulers. In addition to the other required qualities, the rulers must have the quality of caring for the city or loving the city; but a man is most likely to love that whose interest he believes to be identical with his own interest or whose happiness he believes to be the condition of his own happiness. The love here mentioned is not obviously disinterested in the sense that the ruler loves the city, or his serving the city for its own sake. This may explain why Socrates demands that the rulers be honored both while they live and after their death.  At any rate the highest degree of caring for the city and for one another will not be forthcoming unless everyone is brough to believe in the falsehood that all fellow citizens, and only they, are brothers. ( 415 b) To say the ;east, the harmony between self-interest and the interest of the city which was lost with the decay of the healthy city, has not yet been restored. No wonder then that at the beginning of the forth book ADeimantos expresses his dissatisfaction with the condition of the soldiers in the city of the armed camp. Read within the context of the whole argument, Socrates' reply is to this effect: Only as a member of a happy city can a man be happy; only within these limits can a man, or any other part of the city, be happy; complete dedication to the happy city is justice. It remains to be seen whether complete dedication to the happy city is, or can be, happiness of the individual.
After the founding of the good city is in the main completed, Socrates and his friends turn to seeking where in it justice and injustice are, and whether the man who is to be happy must possess justice or injustice. (427 d) They look first for the three virtues other than justice (wisdom, courage, and moderation). In the city which is founded according to nature, wisdom resides in the rulers and in the rulers alone, for the wise men are by nature the smallest part of any city, and it would not be good for the city if they were not the only ones at its helm. In the good city, courage resides in the arrior class, for political courage, as distinguished from brutish fearlessness, arises only through education in those by nature fitted for it. Moderation on the other hand is to be found in all parts of the good city. In the present context, moderation does not mean exactly what it meant when the education of the warriors was discussed but rather the control of what is by nature worse by that which is by nature better - that control through which the whole is in harmony. In other words, moderation the agreement of the naturally superior and inferior as to which of the two ought to rule in the city. Since controlling and being controlled differ, one must assume that the moderation of the rulers is not identical with the moderation of the ruled. Justice seems to be a related virtue, which considers in everyone's doing the one thing pertaining to the city for which his nature is best fitted, or simply, in everyone's minding his own business: it is by virtue of justice this understood that the other three virutes are virtues. More precisely, a city is just if each of its three parts (the money-makers, the warriors, and the rulers) does it own work and only its own work. Like moderation, then, it is not a preserve of a single part but required by every part. Likewise, justice in the city differs from class to class. In order to discover justice pure and simple, it becomes necessary to consider justice in the individual man. A very provisional consideration of the soul seems to establish that it consists of the same three types of "natures", i.e. desire, spiritness or anger, and reason.  Hence we may conclude that a man is just if each of these three parts of his soul does its own work and only its own work, i.e. if this soul is in a state of health. But if justice is health of the soul, amd conversely injustice is disease of the soul, it is obvious that justice is good and injustice is bad, regardless of whether or not one is known to be just or unjust. (444d -445b). A man is just if the rational part in him is wise and rules, and if the spirited part, being the subject and ally of the rational part, assists it in controlling the multitude or desires which almost always become desires for more and ever more money. This means, however, that only the man in whom wisdom rules the two other parts, i.e. only the wise man, can be truly just.(442 c) No wonder then that the just man proves to be identical with the philosopher. (580d - 583 b). The money-makers and the warriors are not truly just even in the the just city because their justice derives exclusively from habituation of one kind or another as distinguished from philosophy; hence in the deepest recesses of their souls they long for tyranny, i.e. for complete injustice. (619 b-d)  We see then how right Socrates was when he expected to find injustice in the good city. (427d)  This is not to deny of course that as members of the good city the nonphilosophers will act much more justly than they would as members of inferior cities.
The parallel between city and soul indicates that just as the warriors occupy a higher rank than the money-makers, so spiritedness occupies a higher rank than desire.  It is very plausible that those who uphold the city against foreign and domestic enemies and who have received a music education deserve higher respect than those who lack public responsibility as well as music education. But it is much less plausible that spiritedness as such should receive a higher respect than desire as such. It is true that "spiritedness" includes a large variety of phenomena ranging from the most noble indignation about injustice, turpitude, and meanness down to the anger of the spoiled child who resents being deprived of anything that he desires, however bad. But the same is also true of "desire": one kind of desire is eros, which ranges in its healthy forms from the longing for immortality via offspring through the longing for immortality via immortal fame to the longing for immortality via participation by knowledge in the things which are unchangeable in every respect. The assertion that spiritedness is higher in rank than desire as such is then questionable. Leo Strauss says that it is based on a 'deliberate suppression of eros - an abstraction characteristic of the Republic'. He says we must never forget that while there is philosophic eros, there is no philosophic spiritedness. This seems contradicted, though, by Plato's referring to the spirited dog as the the 'philosophic beast'.
This abstraction shows itself most strikingly in two other facts; when Socrates mentions the fundamental needs which give rise to human society, he is silent about the need for procreation, and when he describes the tyrant, injustice incarnate, he presents as Eros incarnate. ( 573 b-c,  574 c - 575 a) In the thematic discussion of the respective ranks of spiritedness and desire, he is silent about eros.  (439 d)  It seems then there is a tension between eros and the city, and hence between eros and justice: only through the depreciation of eros can the city come into its own. Eros obeys its own laws, not the laws of the city however good: in the good city, eros is simply subjected to what the city requires. The good city require that all love of one's own - all spontaneous love of one's own parents, one's own children, one's own friends and beloved - be sacrificed to the common love of the common. As far as possible, the love of one's own must be abolished except insofar as it is love of the city as this particular city, as one's own city. As far as possible, patriotism takes the place of eros, and patriotism has a closer kinship is to spiritness, eagerness to fight, "waspishness", anger and indignation than to eros.
While it is harmful to one's soul to jump at Plato's throat because he is not a liberal democrat, it is also bad to blue the difference Platonism and liberal democracy, ffor the premises "Plato is admirable" and "liberal democracy is admirable" do not legitimately lead to the conclusion that Plato was a liberal democrat. The founding of the good city started from the fact that men are by nature different, and this proved to mean that men are by nature of unequal rank. They are unequal particularly with regard to their ability to acquire virtue. The inequality which is due to nature is increased and deepened by the different kinds of education or habituation and the different ways of life (communistic or noncommunistic) which the different parts of the good city enjoy. As a result, the good city comes to resemble a caste society. A Platonic character who hears an account of the good city in the Republic is reminded by it of the caste system established in ancient Egypt, although it is quite clear that in Egypt the rulers were priests and not philosophers. Certainly in the good city of the Republic, not descent but in the first place everyone's own natural gifts determine to which class he belongs. But this leads to a difficulty. The members of the upper class, which lives communistically, are not supposed to know who their natural parents are, for they are supposed to regard all men and women belonging to the older generation as their parents. On the other hand, the gifted children of the noncommunist lower class are to be transferred to the the upper class (and vice versa); since their superior gifts are not necessarily recognizable at the moment of their birth, they are likely to come to know their natural parents and even to become attached to them; this would seem to unfit them for the transfer to the upper class. There are two ways in which this difficult can be removed. The first is to extend absolute communism to the lower class; and, considering the connection between way of life and education, also to extend music education to that class. According to Aristotle, Socrates has left it undecided whether in the good city absolute communism is limited to the upper class or extends also to the lower class. To leave this question undecided would be in agreement with Socrates' professed low opinion of the imporatance of the lower class. Stll, there can be only little doubt that Socrates wishes to limit both communism and music education to the upper class. Therefore, in order to remove the difficulty mentioned, he can hardly avoid making an individual's membership in the upper or lower class hereditary and thus violating one of the most elementary principles of justice. Apart from this, one may wonder whether a perfectly clear line between those gifted and those not gifted for the profession of warriors can be drawn, hence whether a perfectly just assignment of individuals to the upper or lower class is possible, hence whether the good city can be perfectly just. Be this as it may, if comunism is limited to the upper class, there will be privacy both in the money-making class and among the philosophers as philosophers, for there may very well be only a single philosopher in the city and surely never a herd: the warriors are the only class which is entirely political or public or entirely dedicated to the city; the warriors alone present therefore the clearest case of the just life in one sense of the word "just".
It is necessary to understand the reason why communism is limited to the upper class or what the natural obstacle to communism is. That which is by nature private or a man's own is the body and only the body. The needs or desires of the body induce men to extent the sphere of the private, of what is each man's own, as far as they can. This most powerful striving is countered by music education which brings about moderation, i.e. a most severe training of the soul of which, it seems, only a minority of men is capable. Yet this kind of education does not extirpate the natural desire of each for thigs or human beings of his own: the warriors will not accept absolute communism if they are not subject to the philosophers. It thus becomes clear that the striving for one's own is countered ultimately only by philosophy, by the quest for the truth which as such cannot be anyone's private possession. Whereas the private par excellence is the body, the common par excellence is the mind, the pure mind rather than the soul n  general. The superiority of communism to noncummunism as taught in the Republic is intelligible only as a reflection of the superiority of philosophy to nonphilosophy. This clearly contradicts the result of the preceding paragraph. The contradiction can and must be resolved by the distinction between two meanings of justice. This distinction cannot become clear before one has understood the teaching of the Republic regarding the relation of philosophy and the city. We must therefore make a new beginning.
-At the end of the fourth book, it looks as if Socrates had completed the task which Glaukon and Adeimantos had imposed on him, for he had shown that justice as health of the soul is desirable not only because of its consequences but above all for its own sake.  But then, at the beginning of the fifth book, we are suddenly confronted by a new start, by the repteition of a scene which had occured at the very beginning. Both at the very beginning and at the beginning of the fith book (and nowhere else), Corates' companions make a decision, nay, take a vote, and Socrates who had not share in the decision obeys it. Socrates' companions behave in both cases like a city (an assembly of the citizens), if the smallest possible city. But there is this decisive difference between the two scenes: whereas Trasymachos was absent from the first scene, he has become a member of the city in the second scene. It could seem that the foundation of the good city requires that Thrasymachos be converted into one of its citizens. (Remember, Thrasymachos represents anger, and an ability to stir this up in the populace through his rhetoric. On the other hand, he also represents the doctrine that the laws are made for the advantage of the rulers - which in this case, would be the philosopher/s - along with the connected doctrine that 'might makes right'. Is this what Leo Strauss has in mind?)
At the beginning of the fifth bok Socrates' companions force him to take up the subject of communism in regard t owomen and children. They do not object to the proposal itself in the same way in which Adeimantos had objected to the communism regarding property at the beginning of the fourth book, for even Adeimantos is no longer the same man he was at that time. They only wish to know the precise manner in which the communism regarding women and children is to be managed. Socrates replaces that question by these more incisive questions: 1) is communism possible? 2) Is it desirable? It appears that the communism regarding women is the consequence or presupposition of the equality of the two sexes concerning the work they must do: the city cannot afford to lose half of its adult population from its working and fighting force, and there is no essential difference between men and women regarding natural gifts for the various arts. The demand for equality of the two sexes requires a complete upheaval of custom, an upheaval which is here presented less as shocking than as laughable; the demand is justified on the ground that only the useful is fair or noble and that only what is bad, i.e. against nature, is laughable: the customary difference of conduct between the two sexes is rejected as being against nature, and the revolutionary change is meant to bring about the order according to nature. For justice requires that every human being should practice the art for which he or she is fitted by nature, regardless of what custom or convention may dictate. In proving this possibility, Socrates explciitly abstracts from the different between the two sexes in regard to procreation. This means that the argument of the Republic as a whole, according to which the city is a community of male and female artisans, abstracts to the highest degree possible from the highest activity essential to the city which takes place "by nature" and not "by art".
Socrates then turns to the communism regarding women and children and shows that it is desirable because it will make the city more "one," and hence more perfect, than a city consisting of separate families would be: the city should be as similar as possible to a single human being or to a single living body, i.e. to a natural being. At this point we understand somewhat better why Socrates started his discussion of justice by assuming an important parallelism between the city and the individual: he was thinking ahead of the greatest possible unity of the city. The abolition of the family does not mean of course the introduction of license or promiscuity; it means the most severe regulation of sexual intercourse from the point of view what is useful for the city of what is required for the common good. The consideration of the useful, one might say, supercedes the consideration of the holy or sacred: human male and females are to be coupled with exclusive regard to the production of the best offspring, in the spirit in which the breeders of dogs, birds, and horses proceed; the claims of Eros are simply silenced.  The new order naturally affects the customary prohibitions against incest, the most sacred rules of customary justice. In the new scheme, no one will know any more his natural parents, children, brothers, and sisters, but everyone will regard all men of the older generation as his fathers and mothers, of his own generation as his brothers and sisters, and of the younger generation as his children. This meansm,  however, that the city constructed according to nature lives in a most important respect more according to convention than according to nature. For this reason, we are disappointed to see that while Socrates takes up the question of whether communism regarding women and children is possible, he drops it immediately. Since the institution under consideration is indispensible for the good city, Socrates thus leaves open the question of the possibility of the good city, i.e. of the just city, as such. And this happens to his listeners and to the readers of the Republic after they have made the greatest sacrifices - such as the sacrifice of Eros as  well as of the family - for the sake of the just city.
Socrates is not for long allowed to escape from his awesome duty to answer the question regarding the possibility of the just city. The manly Glaukon compels his to face that question. However, the question to which they return is not the same one which they left. The question which they left was whether the good city is possible in the sense that it is in agreement with human nature. The question to which they return is whether the good city is possible in the sense that i can be brought into being by the transformation of the actual city. The latter question might be thought to presuppose the affirmative answer to the first question, but this is not quite correct. As we learn now, our whole effort to discover what justice is ( so that we could be enabled to see how it is related to happiness) was a quest for "justice itself" as a pattern.  By seeking for justice itself as a pattern we implied that the just man and the just city will not be perfectly just but will indeed approximate justice itself with particular closeness; only justice itself is perfectly just. This implies that not even the characteristic institutions of the just city (absolute communism, equality of the sexes, and the rule of the philosophers) are simply just. Now justice is not "possible" in the sense that it is capable of coming into being, because it "is" always without being capable of undergoing any change whatever. Justice is an "idea" or "form", one of many "ideas." Ideas are the only things which strictly speaking "are", i.e. are without any admixture of nonbeing, because they are beyond all becoming, and whatever is becoming is between being and nonbeing. Since the ideas are the only things which are beyond all change, they are in a sense the cause of all change and all changeable things. For example, the idea of justice is the cause for anything (human beings, cities, laws, commands, actions) becoming just. They are self-subsisting beings which subsist always. They are of utmost splendor. For instance, the idea of justice is perfectly just. But their splendor escapes the eyes of the body. The idea re "visible" only to the the eye of the mind, and the mid as mind perceives nothing but ideas. Yet, as is indicated by the fact that there are many ideas and that the mind which perceives the ideas is radically different from the ideas themselves, there must be something higher than the ideas: "the good" or the "idea of the good" which is in a sense the cause of all ideas as well as of the mind perceiving them. It is only through perception of "the good" on the part of the human beings who are by nature equpped for perceiving it that the good city can come into being and subsist for a while.
The doctine of ideas which Socrates expounds to Glaukon is very hard to understand; to begin with it is utterly incredible, not to say that it appears to be fantastic. Hitherto we have been given to understand that justice is fundamentally a certain character of the human soul, or of the city, i.e., something which is not self-subsisting. Now we are asked to believe that it is self-subsisting, being at home as it were in an entirely different place than human beings and everything else that participates in justice. No one has ever succeeded in giving a saisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas. It is possible, however, to define rather precisely the central difficulty. It is possible, however, to define rather precisely the central difficulty. "Idea" means primarily the looks or shape of a thing; it means then a kind or class of things which are united by the fact that they all possess the same "looks,", i.e. the same character and power, or the same "nature"; therewith it means the class-character or  nature of the things belonging to the class in question: the "idea" of a thing is that which we mean by trying to find out the "what" or the "nature" of a thing or a class of things. The connection between "idea" and "nature" appears in the Republic from the facts that "the idea of justice" is called "that which is just by nature,", and the ideas in contradistinction to the things which are not ideas or to the sensibly perceived things are said to be "in nature." This does not explain, however, why the ideas are presented as "separated" from the things which are what they are by partcipating in an idea or, in other words, why "dogness" (the class character of dogs) should be "the true dog." It seems that two kinds of phenomena lend support to Socrates' assertion. In the first place the mathematical things as such can never be found among sensible things: no line drawn on sand or paper is a line as meant by a mathematician. Secondly and above all, what we mean by justice and kindred things is not as such, in its purity or perfection, necessarily found in human beings or societies; it rather seems that what is meant by justice transcends everything which men can ever achieve; precisely the justest men were and are the ones most aware of the shortcomings of their justice. Socrates seems to say that what is patently true of mathematical things and of the vitures is true universally: there is an idea of the bed or the table just as of the circle and of justice. Now while it is obviously reasonable to say that a perfect circle or perfect justice transcends everything which can ever ben seen, it is hard to say that the prefect bed is something on which no man can ever rest. However this may be, Glaukon and Adeimantos accept this doctrine of ideas with relative ease, with greater ease than absolute communism. This paradoxical fact does not strike us with sufficient force because we somehow believe that these able young men study philosophy under Professor Socrates and have heard him expound the doctrine of ideas on innumerable occasions, if we do not believe that the Republic is a philosophic treatise addressed to readers familiar with more elementary (or "earlier") dialogues. Yet Plato addresses the readers of the Republic only through the medium of Socrates' conversation with Glaukon and the other interlocutors in the Republic, and Plato as the author of the Republic does not suggest that Glaukon- to say nothing of Adeimantos and the rest- has seriously studied the doctrine of ideas. Yet while Glaukon and Adeimantos cannot be credited with genuine understanding of the doctine of ideas, they have heard, and in a way they know, that there are gods like Dike or Right, and Nike or Victory who is not this or that victory or this or that statue of Nike but a self-subsisting being which is the cause of every victory and which is of unbelievable splendor. More generally, they know that there are gods - self-subsisting beings which are the causes of everything good, which are of unbelievable splendor, and which cannot be apprehended by the senses since they never change their "form." This is not to deny that there is a profound difference between the gods as understood in the "theology" of the Republic and the ideas, or that in the Republic the gods are in a way replaced by the ideas. It is merely to assert that those who accept that theology and draw all conclusions from it are likely to arrive at the doctine of ideas.
We must now return to the question of the possibility of the just city. We have learned that justice itself is not "possible" in the sense that anything which comes into being can ever be perfectly just. We learn immediatly afterward that not only justice itself but also the just city is not "possible" in the sense indicated. This does not mean that the just city as meant as sketched in the Republic is an idea like "justice itself,", and still less htat is is an "ideal": "ideal is not a Platonic term. The just city is not a self-subsisting being like the idea of justice, located so to speak in a superheavenly place. Its status is rather like that of a painting of a perfectly beautiful human being, i.e. it is only by virtue of the painter's painting; more precisely, the just city is only "in speech": it " is" only by virtue of having been figured out with a viewe to justice itself or to what is by nature right on the one hand and the human all-too-human on the other. Although the just city is decidely of lower rank than justice itself, even the just city as a pattern is not capable of coming into being as it has been blueprinted; only approximations to it can be expected in cities which are in deed and not merely in speech. What this means is not clear. Does it mean that the best feasible solution will be a compromise so that we must become reconcilded to a certain degree of inequality of the sexes (e.g. that we must permit every warrior to keep his shoes and the like as long as he lives) and a certain degree of inequality of the sexes (e.g. that certain military and administrative functions will remain the preserve of the male warriors)? There is no reason to suppose that this is what Socrates meant. In the light of the succeeding part of the conversation, the following suggestion would seem to be more plausible. The assertion according to which the just city cannot come into being as blueprinted is provisional, or prepares the assertion that the just city, while capable of coming into being, is very unlikely to come into being. At any rate, immediately after having declared that only an approximation to the good city can reasonably be expect, Socrates raises the question, what feasible change in the actual cities will be necessary and sufficient condition of their transformation into good cities? His answer is, the "coincidence" of political power and philosophy: the philosophers must rule as kings, or the kings must genuinely and adequately philosophize. As we have shown in our summary of the girst book of the Republic, this answer is not altogether surprising. If justice is less the giving or leaving to each what the law assigns to him than the giving or leaving to each what is good for his soul, but what is good for his soul is the virtues, it follows that no one can be truly just who does not know "the virtues themselves," or generally the ideas, or who is not a philosopher.
By answering the question of how the good city is possible, Socrates introduces philosophy as a theme of the Republic. This means that in the Republic, philosophy is not introduced as the end of man, the end for which man should live, but as a means for realizing the just city, the city as armed camp which is characterized by absolute communism and equality of the sexes in the upper class, the class of warriors.  Since the rule of philosophers is not introduced as an ingredient of the just city but only as a means for its realization, Aristotle is justified in disregarding this institution in his critical analysis of the Republic (Politics II). At any rate, Socrates succeeds in reducing the question og the possibility of the just city to the question of the possibility of the coincidence of philosophy and political power. That such a coindicidence shoudl be possible is to begin with most incredible: everyone can see that philosophers are useless if not even harmful in politics.  Socrates, who had some experiences of his own with the city of Athens -experiences to be crowned by his capital punishment- regards this accusation of the philosophers as well-founded, although in need of deeper exploration. He traces the antogonism of the cities toward the philosophers primarily to the cities: the present cities, i.e. the cities not ruled by philosophers, are like assemblies of madmen which corrupt most of those fit to become philosophers (for instance,  by lavishing honor and rewards on docility to societal norms and markers of success rather than urging them towards a life of individualistic free inquiry), and on which those who have succeeded against all odds in becoming philosophers rightly turn their back in disgust. But Socrates is far from absolving the philosophers altogether. Only a radical change on the part of both the cities and the philosophers can bring about that harmony between them for which they seem to be meant by nature. The change consists precisely in this: that the cities cease to be unwilling to be ruled by philosophers and the philosophers cease to be unwilling to rule the cities. The coincidence of philosophy and political power is very difficult to acheive, very improbable, but not impossible. To bring about the needed change on the part of the city, of the nonphilosophers or the multitude, the right kind of persuasion is necessary and sufficient. The right kind of persuasion is supplied by the art of persuasion, the art of Thrasymachos directed by the philosopher and in the service of philosophy. No wonder then that in our context Socrates declares that he and Thrasymachos have just become friends. The multitude of the nonphilosophers is good-natured and therefore persuadable by the philosophers. But if this is so, why did not the philosophers of old, to say nothing of Socrates himself, succeed in persuading the multitude of the supremacy of philosophy and the philosophers and thus bring about the rule of philosophers and therewith the salvation and happiness of their cities? Strange as it may sound, in this part of the argument it appears to be easier to persaude the multitude to accept the rule of philosophers than to persaude the philosophers to rule the multitude: the philosophers cannot be persuaded, they can only be compelled to rule the cities. Only the nonphilosophers could compell the philosophers to take care of the cities. But, given the prejudice against the philosophers, this compulsion will not be forthcoming if the philosophers do not in the first place persuade the nonphilosophers to compel the philosophers to rule over them, and this persuasion will not be forthcoming, given the philosopher' unwillingness to rule. We arrive then at the conclusion that the just city is not possible because of the philosopher's unwillingness to rule.
Why are the philosophers unwilling to rule? Being dominated by the desire for knowledge as the one thing needful, or knowing that philosphy is the most pleasant and blessed possession, the philosophers have no leisure for looking down at human affairs, let alone for taking care of them. The philosophers believe that while still alive they are already firmly setlled, far away from their cities, in the Isles of the Blessed. Hence only compulsion could induce them to take part in political life in the just city, i.e. in the city which regards the proper upbringing of the philosophers as its most important task. Having perceived the truly grand, the human things appear to the philosophers to be paltry. The very justice of the philosophers-their abstaining from wronging their fellow human beings- flows from contempt for the things which the nonphilosophers hotly contest. They know that the life not dedicated to philosophy and therefore in particular the political life is like life in a cave, so much so that they city can be identified with the Cave. The cave dwellers (i.e. the non-philosopherS) see only the shadows of artifacts. That is to say, whatever they perceive they understand in the light of their opinions, sanctified by the fiat of legislators, regarding the just and noble things, i.e. of conventional opinions, and they do not know that these their most chrished vonctions possess no higher status than that of opinions. For if even the best city stands or falls by a fundamental falsehood, which the imperfect cities rest or in which they believe, will not be true.  Precisely the best of the nonphilosophers, the good citizens, are passionately attached to these opinions and therefore violently opposed to philosophy, which the attempt to go beyond opinion towards knowledge: the multitude is not as persuadable by the philosophers as we sanguinely assumed in an earlier round of the argument. This is the true reason why the coincidence of philosophy and politcal power is, to say the least, extremely improbable: philosophy and the city tend away from one another in opposite directions.
The difficulr of overcoming the natural tension between the city and the philosophers is indicated by Socrates' turning from the question of whether the just city is "possible" in the sense of being comformable to human nature to the question of whether the just city is "possible! in the sense of being capable of being brough to light by the transformation of an actual city. The first question, understood in contradistinction to the second, points to the question whether the just city could not come into being through the settling together of men who had been wholly unassociated before. It is to this question that Socrates tacitly gives a negative answer by turning to the question of whether the just city could be brough into being by the transformation of an actual city. The good city cannot be brought to light out of human beings who have not yet undergone any human discipline, out of "primitives" or "stupid animals" or "savages! gentle or cruel; its potential members must already have acquired the rudiments of civilized life. The long process through which primitive men become civilized men cannot be the work of the founder or the legislator of the good city but is presupposed by him. But on the other hand, if the potential good city must be an old city, its citizens will have been thoroughly molded by their city's imperfect laws or customs, hallowed by old age, and will have become passionately attached to them. Socrates is therefore compelled to revise his original suggestion according to which the rule of the philosophers is the necessary and sufficient condition of the coming into being of the just city. Wheras he had originally suggested that the good city will come into being if the -philosophers become kings, he finally suggests that the good city will come into being if, when the philosophers have become kings, they expel everyone older than ten from the city, i.e. separate the children completely from their parents and their parents' ways and bring them up in the entirely novel ways of the good city. By taking over a city, the philosophers make sure that their subjects will not be savages, by expelling everyone older than ten, they make sure that their subjects will not be enslaved by traditional civility. The solution is elegant. It leaves one wondering, however, how the philosophers can compel everyone older than ten to obey submissively the expulsion decree, since they cannot yet have traned a warrior class absolutely obedient to them. This is not to deny that Socrates could persuade many fine young men, and even some old ones, to believe that the multitude could be, not indeed compelled, but persuaded by the philosophers to leave their city and their children and to live in the fields so that justice will be done. (How is one philosopher supposed to educate all those kids though, and how will they defend themselves against invasion?)
Leo Strauss says that part of the Republic which deals with philosophy is the most important part of the book. It is therefore particularly puzzling that his statement on it seems riddled with contradictions.  He says it transmits the answer to the question regarding justice to the extent to which that answer is given in the Republic. The explicit answer of what justice is had been rather vague: justice consists in each part of the city or the soul "doing the work for which it si by nature best fitted" or in a "kind" of doing that work: a part of is just if it does its work or minds its own business "in a certain manner." The vagueness is removed one replaces "in a certain manner" by "in the best manner" or "well": justice consists in reach part of its soul doing its work well. Since the highest part of the soul is reason, and since this part cannot do its work well if the two other parts too do not do their work well, only the philosopher can be truly just. But the work which the philosopher does well is intrinsically attractive and in fact the most pleasant work, wholly regardless of its consequences. Hence only in philosophy do justice and happiness coincide. In other words, the philosopher is the only individual who is just in the sense in which the good city is just: he is self-sufficient, truly free, or his life is as little devoted to the service of other individuals as they life of the city is devoted to the service of other cities. But the philosopher in the good city is just also - and this seems like a contradiction- in the sense that he serves his fellow men, his fellow citizens, his city, or that he obeys the law. That is to say, the philosopher is just also in the sense  in which all members of the just city, and in which all members of any city, regardless of whether  they are philosophers or nonphilosophers, are just. Yet justice in this second sense is not intrinsically attractive or choiceworthy for its own sake, but is good only with a view to its consequences, or is not noble but necessary: the philosopher serves his city, even the good city, not, as he seeks the truth, from natural inclination, from Eros, but under compulsion. It is hardly necessary to add that compulsion does not cease to be compulsion if it is self-compulsion. According to a notion of justice which is more common than that suggested by Socrates' defintion, justice consists in not harming others; justice thus understood proves to be in the highest case merely a concomitant of the philosopher's greatness of soul. But if justice is taken in the larger sense according to which it consists in giving to each what is good for his soul, one must distinguish between the cases in which this giving is intrinsically attractive to the giver (these will be the cases of the potential philosophers) and those in which it is merely a duty or compulsory. This distinction, incidentally, underlies the difference between the voluntary conversations of Socrates (the conversations which he spontaneously seeks) and the compulsory ones (those which he cannot with propriety avoid). The clear distinction between the justice which is choiceworthy for its own sake, wholly regardless of its consequences, and identical with philosophy, and the justice which is merely necessary and identical in the highest case with the political activity of the pihlosopher is rendered possible by the abstraction from eros which is characteristic of the Republic. For one might well say that there is no reason why the philosopher should not engage in political activity out of that kind of love of one's own which is patriotism.
According to the views of Strauss expressed in the previous paragraph, a philosopher is both 'truly free', devoted to serving no one but himself... and, on the other hand, 'compelled'  and serves his fellow man. As Strauss himself argues in his book 'Persecution and the Art Of Writing', contradictions in the work of great thinkers are rarely unintentional, but rather deliberate attempts to scramble potentially unhelpful truths to hide them from those for whom they are not suitable. Could it be that Strauss, a philosopher himself and arch defender of philosophy, is attempting to play down the incompatibility between the philosopher's own freedom and happiness, and that of the city which he is supposed to be taking charge of - perhaps so that readers will be less concerned about the possibility of a selfish philosopher ruling contrary to the interests of their city? The last sentence of the preceding paragraph seems to be very much consistent with this hypothesis, because, if we recall, Strauss said earlier that patriotism was more akin to spiritedness, rather than Eros, blatantly contradicting himself here. As we also recall, spiritedness is much less associated with philosophy for Strauss than is Eros - in fact Strauss has gone out of his way to emphasize this, by discounting or ignoring Plato's conception of the spirited dog as the 'philosophic beast' in his assertions on this issue. Furthermore, he also indicated that patriotism, or a powerful love of the city above other considerations, was dependent upon the myth that all citizens of it were brothers.
Book VII is the chapter in which Plato introduces his famous Cave metaphor. Ordinary citizens are said to be 'as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling', 'from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way  around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets.' 'Then also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kinf of material.', casting 'shadows on the side of the cave' which the shackled men watch. If someone were to be released from his shackles, turn around and face the light of the sun outside, he would be blinded and not know what he was seeing. It would take his eyes time to adjust. But once he had may his way out, and become accustomed to the light, he would probably never want to go back. If he did go back down, in order to attempt to lead other men to the light, his eyes would once again fail him in the darkness below, since it would take them a long time to adjust again. He would appear foolish and be made a laughing stock in the law courts and public debates where men only discuss shadows. Such is the plight of philosophers in society. In most societies, since the philosophers have attained to the pure light of the sun by virtue of their own strength, in spite of their education, they don't owe the other citizens anything (this statement of Socrates seems to indicate that, if justice is partly  'helping one's friends', as was discussed before, the average city is obviously not the friend of most philosophers). But, in the Republic, since they have been helped and educated towards the light, they must come back down to assist the others and govern them. Once their eyes have become habituated to the darkness, having seen what is truly real, they will see ten thousand times better than everyone else. 
By the end of the seventh book justice has come to sight fully. Socrates has in fact performed the duty laid upon him by Glaukon and Adeimantos to show that justice properly understood is choiceworthy for its own sake regardless of its consequences and therefore that justice is unqualifiedly preferable to injustice. Nevertheless the conversation continues, for it seems that our clear grasp of justice does not include a clear grasp of injustice but must be supplemented by a clear grasp of the wholly unjust city and the wholly unjust man with the same clarity with which we have seen the wholly just city and the wholly just man will we be able to judge whether we ought to follow Socrates' friend Thrasymachos, who chooses injustice, or Socrates, who chooses justice. This is in turn requires that the fiction of the possibility of the just city be maintained. As a matter of fact, the Republic never abandons the fiction that the just city as a society of human beings, as distinguished from a society of gods or sons of gods, is possible. When Socrates turns to the study of injustice, it even becomes necessary for him to reaffirm this fiction with greater force than ever before. The unjust city will be uglier and more condemnable in proportion as the just city will be possible. But the possibility of the just city will remain doubtful if the just city was never actual. Accordingly Socrates now asserts that the just city was once actual. More precisely, he makes the Muses assert it or rather simply imply it. The assertion that the just city was once actual is, as one might say, a mythical assertion which agrees with the mythical premise that the best is the oldest. Socrates asserts then through the mouth of the Muses that the good city was actual in the beginnging, prior to the emergence of the inferior kinds of cities; the inferior cities are decayed forms of the good city, soiled fragments of the pure city which was entire; hence the nearer in time a kind of inferior city is to the just city the better it is, or vice versa. It is more proper to speak of the good and inferior regimes than of the good and inferior cities (observe the transition from "cities" to "regimes" in 543d-544a). "REgime" is our translation of the Greek politeia. The book which we call Republic is in Greek entitled Politeia. Politeia is commonly translated by "constitution." The term designates the form of government understood as the form of the city, i.e. as that which gives the city its character by determining the end which the city in question pursues or what it looks up to as the highest, and simultaneously the kind of men who rule the city. For instance, oligarchy is the kind of regime in which the rich rule and therefore admiration of wealth and for the acquisition of wealth animates the city as a whole, and democracy is the kind of regime in which all free men rule and therefore freedom is the end which the city pursues. According to Socrates, there are five kinds of regime: 1) kingdom or aristocracy, the rule of the best man or the best men, that is directed toward goodness or virtue, the regime of the just city; 2) timocracy, the rule of lovers of honor or of the ambitious men which is directed toward superiority or victory; 3) oligarchy or the rule of the rich in which wealth is most esteemed; 4) democracy, the rule of the free  men in which freedom is most highly esteemed; 5) tyranny, the rule of the completely unjust man in which unqualified and unashamed injustice holds away. THe descending order of the five kinds of regime is modeled on Hesiod's descending order of the five races of men: the races of gold, of silver, of bronze, the dvine race of heroes, the race of iron. We see at once that the Platonic equivalent of Hesiod's divine race of heroes is democracy. We shall soon see the reason for this seemingly strange correspondence.
The Republic is based on the assumption that there is a strict parallelism between the city and the soul. Accordingly Socrates asserts that, just as there are five kinds of regime, so there are five kinds of characters of men, the timocratic man, for instance, corresponding to timocracy. The disinction which for a short while was popular in present-day politcal science between the authoritarian and the democratic "personalities," as corresponding to the distinction between authoritarian and democratic socieites, was a dim and crude reflection of Socrates' distinction between the royal or aristocratic, the timocratic, the oligarchic, the democratic, and the tyrannical soul or man, as corresponding to the aristocratic, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical regimes. In this connection it should be mentioned that in describing the regimes, Socrates does not speak of "ideologies! belonging to them; he is concerned with the character of each kind of regime and with the end which it manifestly and explicitly pursues, as well as with the political justification of the end in question in contradistinction to any transpolitcal justification stemming from cosmology, theology, metaphysics, philosophy of histroy, myth, and the like. In his study of inferior regimes Socrates examines in each case first the regime and then the corresponding individual or soul. He presents both the regime and the corresponding individual as coming into being out of the preceding one. We shall consider here only his account of democracy, both because this subject is most important to citizens of a democracy and because of its intrinsic importance. Democracy arises from oligarchy, which in its turn arises from timocracy, the rule of the insufficiently musical warriors who are characterized by the supremacy of spiritness. Oligarchy is the first regime in which desire is supreme.  In oligarchy the ruling desire is that for wealth or money, or unlimited acquisitiveness. THe oligarchic man is thrifty and industrious, controls all his desires other than the desire for money, lacks education, and possesses a superficial honesty derivative from the crudest self-interest.  Oligarchy must give to each  the unqualified right to dispose of his property as ahe sees fit. It thus renders inevitable the emergence of "drones," i.e. of members of the ruling class who are either burdened with debt or already bankrupt and hence disfranchised- of beggars who hanker after their squandered fortune and hope to restore their fortune and political power through a change of regime ("Catilinarian existences"). Besides, the correct oligarches themselves, being both rich and unconcerned with virtue and honor, render themselves and especially their sons fat, spoiled, and soft. They thus become despised by the lean and tough poor. Democracy comes into being when the poor, having become aware of their superiority to the rich and perhaps being led by some drones who act as traitors to their class and possess the skills which ordinarily only members of a ruling class possess, make themselves at an opportune moment masters of the city by defeating the rich, killing and exiling a part of them, and permitting the rest to live with them in the possession of full citizen rights. Democracy itself is characterized by freedom, which includes the right to say and do whatever one wishes: everyone can follow the way of life which pleases him most. Hence democracy is the regime which fosters the greatest variety: every way of life, every regime can be found in it. Hence, we must add, democracy is the only regime other than the best in which the philosopher can lead his peculiar way of life without being disturbed: it is for this reason that with some exageration one can compare democracy to Hesiod's age of the divine race of heroes which comes closer to the golden age than any other. Certainly the in a democracy the citizen who is a philosopher is under no compulsion to participate in political life or to hold office. One is thus led to wonder why Socrates did not assign to democracy the highest place among the inferior regimes, or rather the highest place simply, seeng that the best regime is not possible. One could say that he showed his preference for democracy "by deed": by spending his whole life in democratic Athens, by fighting for her in her wars, and by dying in obedience to her laws. However this may be, he surely did not prefer democracy to all other regimes "in speech." The reason is that, being a just man, he thought of the well-being not merely of the philosophers but of the nonphilosophers as well, and he held that democracy is not designed for inducing the nonphilosophers to attempt to become as good as they possibly can, for the end of democracy is not virtue but freedom, i.e. freedom to live either nobly or basely according to one's liking. Therefore he assigns to democracy a rank even lower than to oligarchy, since oligarchy requires some kind of restraint whereas democracy, as he presents it, abhors every kind of restraint. One could say that adapting himself to his subject matter, Socrates abandons all restraint when speaking of the regime which loathes restraint. In a democracy, he asserts, no one is compelled to rule or to be ruled if he does not like it; he can live in peace while his city is at war; captial punishment does not have the slightest consequence for the condemned man: he is not even jailed; the order of the rulers and ruled is completely reversed: the father behaves as if he were a boy and the son has neither respect nor fear of the father, the teacher fears his pupils while the pupils pay no attention to the teacher, and there is complete equality of the sexes; even horses and donkeys no lnger step aside when encountering human beings. Plato writes as if the Athenian democacy had no carried out Socrates' execution, and Socrates speaks as if the Athenian democracy had not engaged in an orgy of bloody perseuction of guilty and innocent alike when the Hermes status were mutilated at the beginning of the Sicilian expedition. Socrates' exageration of the licentious mildness of democracy is matched by an almost equally strong exaggeration of the intemperance of democratic man. He could indeed not avoid the latter exaggeration if he did not wish to deviate in the case of democracy from the procedure which he follows in his discussion of the inferior regimes. That procedure consists in understanding the man corresponding to an inferior regime as the son of a father corresponding to the preceding regime. Hence democratic man had to be presented as the son of an oligarchic father, as the degenerate son of a wealthy father who is concered with nothing but making money; the democratic man is the drone, the fat, soft, and prodigal playboy, the lotus-eater who, assigning a kind of equality to equal and unequal things, live one day in complete surrender to his lowest desires and the next ascetically, or who, according to the Karl Marx's ideal, "goes hunting in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, raises cattle in the evening, devotes himself to philosophy after dinner, i.e. does at every moment what he happens to like at that moment; the democratic man is not the lean, tough and thifty craftsman or peasant who has a single job. Socrates' deliberately exaggerated blame of democracy becomes intelligble to some extent once one considers its immediate addressee, the austere discussion of poetry in the section on the education of the warriors: by his exaggerated blame of democracy Socrates lends words to Adeimantos' "dream" of democracy. One must also not forget that the sanguine accound of the multitude which was provisionally required in order to prove the harmony between the city and philosophy is in need of being redressed; the exaggerated blame of democracy reminds us with greater force than was ever before used of the disharmony between philosophy and the people.
After democracy, comes tyranny (a warning to us today). This occurs when the most orderly men who have accumulated the most wealth become persecuted by the envious many, creating faction within the city;  the many then promote a tyrant to assail these better men, and, once he has tasted a drop of injustice he becomes a wolf with increasingly few limits. He redistributes wealth to his supporters, and uses war as a pretext to crack down on his enemies. Eventually, everyone who dares criticize him is done away with. He destroys the best and fosters the worst. The city suffers the harshest and bitterest enslavement to slaves.
After Socrates had brought to light the entirely unjust regime and the entirely unjust man and the compared the life of the entirely unjust man with that of the perfectly just man, it became clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that justice is preferable to injustice. Nevertheless the conversation continues. Socrates suddenly returns to the question of poetry, to a question that had already been answered at great length when he discussed the education of the warriors. We must try to understand this apparently sudden return. In an explicit digression from the discussion of tyranny, Socrates had noted that the poets praise tyrants and are honored by tyrants (and also by democracy), whereas they are not honored by the three better regimes. Tyranny and democracy are characterized by surrender to the sensual desires, including the most lawless. The tyrant is Eros incarnate, and the poets sing the praise of Eros. They pay great attention and homage precisely to that phenmenon from which Socrates abstracts in the Republic to the best of his powers. The poets therefore foster injustice. So does Thrasymachos. But just as Socrates, in spite of this, could be a friend of Thrasymachos, so there is no reason why he could not be a friend of the poets and especially of Homer. Perhaps Socrates needs the poets in order to restore, on another occasion, the dignity of Eros: the Banquet, the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates is shown to converse with poets, is devoted entirely to Eros.
It is worth reflecting here that, as in the dialogue Strauss has just mentioned, at other points in Corpus Platonicus it is philosophy in general or Socrates in particular who is identified as wholly erotic. According to the scholar Shadia Drury, in her book 'The Political Ideas Of Leo Strauss', Leo Strauss himself characterizes, albeit guardedly in his trademark esoteric style, the best regime as a tyranny of philosophers. By this, she appears to mean their absolute rule according to decree rather than law. Another question that is worth raising is, if a tyranny inevitably followers democracy in the order of regimes, and one of the things a tyrant does is to purge the better men and lift up his toadies, then a philosopher, as one of the best men, if he does not become a tyrant himself, faces the prospect of himself being purged. It would seem that the philosopher is therefore compelled to seek to install himself as the tyrant, just as Plato requires for the realization of the best regime. This happy result is also naturally enabled by the fact that it is only in a democracy, the preceding regime to tyranny, that philosophy is freely permitted. This interpretation is supported by the ostensive parallel between Kingship and Tyranny, which are both absolute rule of one man, occuring at the beginning and end of the series, along with the natural question that arises as to what regime occurs after tyranny - we are left to consider whether the series is in fact not a series, but a cycle. One may also note that the unhappiness of the successful tyrant is undoubtedly exagerated; in view of the fact that a tyranny must come at its allocated time, one can say that the tyrant or 'most unjust man', is, so far from the most unhappy, one of the happiest or least unhappy remaining members of an admittedly very unhappy city whose most just men he purges. Furthermore, while the tyrant is said to order his soul by making his lowest desires, or 'love', King within himself, one could argue that this supposed inversion of the true order is still much preferable to an anarchy and disorder of instincts, which Sorcates elsewhere characterizes as disease. Plato could not admit these startling facts because it would have been contrary to his purposes of proving the abject misery and folly of injustice. Balanced against the previous thesis of this paragraph, one has to bear in mind the inherent problem of tyranny that it is based upon the envy-driven re-distribution from and usurpation of seemingly the most-able, sovereign men to the most slavish and demonstrably incompetant; thus, how it could be turned from that to a genuine aristocracy, even by a completely wise man, remains an open question. 
The foundation for the return to poetry was laid at the very beginning of the discussion of the inferior regimes and of the inferior souls. THe transition from the best regime to the inferior reimes was explicitly ascribed to the Muses speaking "tragically," and the transition from the best regime to the inferior regimes was explicitly ascribed to the Muses speaking "tragically,", and the transition from the best man to the inferior men has in fact a somewhat "comical" touch: poetry takes the lead when the descent from the highest theme - justice understood as philosophy - begins. The return to poetry, which is preceded by the account of the inferior regimes and the inferior souls, is followed by a discussion of the "greatest rewards for virtue", i.e. the rewards not inherent in justice or philosophy itself. THe return to poetry constitutes the centre of that part of the Republic in which the conversation descends from the highest theme. This cannot be surprising, for philosophy as quest for the truth is the highest activity of man, and poetry is not concerned with the truth.
In the first discussion of poetry, which preceed by a long time the introduction of philosophy as a theme, poetry's unconcern with the truth was its chief recommendation, for at that  time it was untruth that was needed. The most excellent poets were expelled from the just city, not because they teach untruth, but because they teach the wrong kind of untruth. But in the meantime it has become clear that only the life of the philosophizing man in so far as he philosophizes is the just life, and that that life, so far from needing untruth, utterly rejects it. The progress from the city, even the best city, so the philosopher requires, it seems a progress from the qualified acceptance of poetry to its unqualified rejection.
In the light of philosophy, poetry reveals itself to be the imitation of imitations of the truth, i.e. of the ideas. The contemplation of the ideas is the activity of the philosopher, the imitation of the ideas is the activity of the ordinary artisan, and the imitation of the works of the artisans is the activity of poets and other "imitative" artisans. To begin with, Socrates presents the order of rank in these terms, the maker of the ideas (e.g. of the idea of the bed) is the God, the maker of the imitation (of the bed which can be used) is the artisan, and the maker of the imitation of the imitation (of the painting of a bed) is the imitative artisan. Later on he restates the order of rank in these terms: first the user, then the artisan, and finally the imitative artisan. The idea of the bed originates in the user who determines the "form" of the bed with a view to the end for which it is to be used. The user is then the one who possesses the highest or most authoritative knowledge: the highest knowledge is not that possessed by any artisans as such at all; the poet who stands at the opposite pole from the user does not possess any knowledge, not even right opinion.  In order to understand this seemingly outrageous indictment of poetry one must first identify the artisan whose work the poet imitates. The poets' themes are above all the human beings referring to virtue and vice; the poets see the human beings in the light of virtue, but the virtue toward which they look is an imperfect and even distorted image of virtue. The artisan whom the poet imitates is the nonphilosophic legislator who is an imperfect imitator of virtue itself. In particular, justice as understod by the city is the work of the legislator, for the just as understood by the city is the legal. No one expressed Socrates' sggestion more clearly than Nietzsche, who said that "the poets were always the valets of some morality..." But according to the French saying, for a valet there is no hero: Are the artists and in particular the poets not aware of the secret weakness of their heores? This indeed is the case according to Socrates. The poets bring to light, for instance, the full force of grief which a man feels for the loss of someone dea rto him- of a feeling to which a respectable man would not give adaquate utterance except when he is alone, because its adequate utterance in the presence of others is not becoming and lawful: the poets bring to light that in our nature which the law forcibly restrains. If this is so, if the poets are perhaps the men who understand best the nature of the passions which the law restrains, they are very far from being merely the servants of the legislators; they are also the men from whom the prudent legislator will learn. The genuine "quarrel between philosophy and poetry" concerns, from the philosopher's point of view, not the worth of poetry as such, but the order of rank of philosophy and poetry. According to Socrates, poetry is legitimate only as ministerial to the "user" par excellence, to the king who is the philosopher, and not as autonomous. For autonomous poetry presents human life as autonomous, i.e. as not directed toward the philosophic life, and therefore it never presents the philosophic life itself except in its comical distortion; hence autonomous poetry is necessarily either tragedy or comedy since the non-philosophic life understood as autonomous has either no  way out of its fundamental difficulty or only an inept one. But ministerial poetry presents the nonphilosophic life as ministerial to the philosophic life and therefore, above all, it presents the philosophic life itself. The greatest example of ministerial poetry is the Platonic dialogue.
Leo Strauss leaves out the part where Plato says that the reason poetry depicts strong emotional demonstrations, is because they more lend themselves to depiction than stoical fortitude. Plato also says that by depicting these over-indulgent reactions, they promote people to imitate them, which seems like a very valuable point.
The Republic concludes with a discussion of the greatest rewards for justice and the greatest punishments for injustice. The discussion consists of three parts 1) proof of the immortality of the soul; 2) the divine and the human rewards and punishments for men while they are alive; 3) the rewards and punishments after death. The central part is silent about the philosophers: rewards for justice and punishments for injustice does not have the intrinsic attractiveness which the justice the justice of the philosophers has. The account of the rewards and punishments after death is given in the ofrm of a myth. The myth is not baseless, since it is based on the proof of the immortality of the souls. The soul cannot be immortal if it is compsed of many things unless the composition is perfect. But the soul as we know it from our experience lacks that perfect harmony. In order to find the truth, one would have to recover by reasoning the original or true nature of the soul. This reasoning is not achieved in the Republic. That is to say, Socrates proves the immortality of the soul without having brought to light the nature of the soul. The situation at the end of the Republic corresponds precisely to the situation at the end of the first book of the Republic where Socrates makes clear that he proved that justice is salutary without knowing the "what" or nature of justice. The discussion following the first book does bring to light the nature of justice as the right order of the soul, yet how can one know the right order of the soul if one does not know the nature of the soul? Let us remember here also the fact that the parallelism between soul and city, which is the premise of the doctrine of the soul stated in the Republic, is evidently questionable and even untenable. The REpublic cannot bring to light the nature of the soul because it abstracts from Eros and from the body. If we are genuinely concerned with finding out precisely what justice is, we must take "another longer way around" in our study of the soul than the way which is taken in the Republic. This does not mean that what we learn from the Republic about justice is not true or is altogether provisional. The teaching of the Republic regarding justice, although not complete, can yet be true in so far as the nature of justice depends decisely on the nature of the city - for even the transpolitical cannot be understood as such except if the city is understood - and the city is completely intelligeible because its limits can be made perfectly manifest: to see these limits, one need not have answered the question regarding the whole; it is sufficient to have raised the question regarding the whole. The Republic then indeed makes clear what justice is. However, as Cicero has observed, the Republic does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things - the nature of the city. socrates makes clear in the Republic what character the city would have to have in order to satisfy the highest needs of man. By letting us see that the city constructed in accordance with this requirement is not possible, he lets us see the essential limits, the nature, of the city.
To add my own slightly less esoteric take-away: If one examines the parallelism between the city and the individual, we see that, just as justice for the city requires only internal peace and harmony, while actually exhorting hostility  towards outsiders, so 'justice' in the philosophic sense of that term for the individual, the justice that there has been established  a genuine need for, requires only order within the individual while actually promoting hostility with all other human beings. This sobering conclusion is tempered only by the 'gang of thieves' or 'city of the beautiful' argument, whereby it is necessary to forge alliances and at least give the impression of loyalty to a group of similarly loyal and preferably graceful companions in order to succeed. It is therefore perhaps best if Leo Strauss is correct in his analysis of the insufficiency of Plato's arguments, and it is left up to others such as ourselves to provide a more compelling case for justice. It is therefore perhaps best if Leo Strauss is correct in his analysis of the insufficiency of Plato's arguments, and it is left up to others such as ourselves to provide a more compelling case for justice. In order to discover my own answer, feel free to add me as a friend and watch out for my forthcoming book "Madness is a form of love: The search for a higher sanity".

*The above text, excluding those in bold, is mostly a word for word reproduction of philosopher Leo Strauss's essay in "The History Of Political Philosophy". I claim no ownership over it; if the legitimate proprietors want me to remove it, I suggest they contact me and I will take it down right away.