relationship between political estrangement and the development of an alternative political system such as is embodied in the Republic:
The greatest achievements of political thought have for the most part been responses to social disintegration. Plato's Republic can be read as a meditation on the Peloponnesian War, in which the Greek cities not only fought one another for several decades but were also torn within by ferocious factional conflicts. . . .
Plato offers his version of a utopian society in The Republic, a society to replace his own, and he also develops a society reflecting his political beliefs and shaping everything from the family unit to the larger governmental body, all reflecting an ideal to which Plato believed the human species was developing. The term "utopia" would not come into being for some time, but the idea of an ideal was strong in Plato's thinking. For Plato, of course, what he saw as an ideal he believed existed in another realm so that the imperfect reflections in this world were only shadows of that ideal.
Plato describes a society that is completely rational. The idea
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