Plato on the Individual, Polis and Political Authority in Republic

Offering an in-depth examination of the political philosophy of Plato’s Republic, Stephen O. Peprah challenges the prevalent scholarly interpretation that misreads and underestimates Plato’s view of the status and role of non-philosophical citizens. Rather than seeing the ordinary human beings who make up the civic population as servile to the select philosophical elite, the argument is not only that they make an important contribution to the polis based on their moral, epistemic, and somatic competences, but that the political community serves their well-being.

Grounded in recent work on Plato’s political philosophy and within Plato’s contractarian commitment (koinonia) in Book II of Republic, this study shows that the individual and the polis have positive, if not equal, standing. Each is positively dependent on the other, and political authority of the philosopher-rulers is justified to create enabling conditions to facilitate this mutual interdependence. And so, by arguing that Plato’s just society – Kallipolis – evolves from the collaborative efforts of individuals who aim to deal with a common human predicament (insufficiency), Peprah reveals that Platonic political theory is engineered to be a more inclusive system than previously thought. This study is an important reassessment that shows the artisans of Republic as possessing individual and political agency.