1.2 Plato (427–347 BC): Justice and the Ideal State

Setting: Socrates' execution by democratic Athens (399 BC) — the wound behind the Republic: what state would make philosophy, not force, sovereign?

Justice in the individual (the Republic's answer, built in three waves): the soul has three parts — reason, spirit, appetite; justice is each part doing its own work (harmony): reason ruling, spirit enforcing, appetite obeying. Injustice = civil war within the soul.

Justice in the state (the ideal state — the soul written large):

Justice = each class doing its own and not meddling — the "one man, one work" principle; the state as an organism. (Note the craft-argument: ruling is a craft like medicine; the sick need doctors, the polis needs knowers.)

The state's distinctive institutions: community of property, wives and children for the guardian classes (to kill faction); education as the state's supreme instrument (the long curriculum culminating in dialectic); the noble lie (the myth of metals — a political fiction for social cohesion); the philosopher-king — "until philosophers rule… cities will have no rest from evils" (brief, the famous line); the Rule of Law alternative in the Statesman/Laws: if the ideal philosopher-king is unavailable, the second-best state is government of laws — "law is the golden cord of reason," the origin of the rule-of-law lineage.

Critique of democracy: Plato ranks it near the bottom (freedom degenerating into licence; the ship of state commanded by the crew's vote rather than the navigator's skill); the demagogue as democracy's natural product. Assessment (write both sides): the founder of political philosophy — and of the totalitarian temptation (Popper's Open Society charge: holism, engineered society, the noble lie as propaganda). His real legacy for law: justice as order and harmony;law as reason embodied; the demand that power justify itself by knowledge — questions every constitution still must answer.