The concept of happiness and individual liberty are values inherent in western democracy, values that appear to have no place in the authoritarian concept of the ideal state as presented by Plato in the Republic. Plato unfolds his concept of the ideal state by telling us that only those who know the good are fit to rule. To know the good, he deems that a long and arduous period of intellectual training is required to discover this knowledge. Such a course of training, in a famous analogy of Plato’s, allows men to transcend to the real world outside as opposed to the underground cave where most men are intellectually confined. The Republic is ten books in length and begins with the concept of justice, not politics. Socrates narrates the work, but the sophist Thrasymachus insists that he knows all too well what the concept of justice is and that the other definitions being given are foolish. As Thrasymachus says “I declare justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger” (Rouse 137).
Thrasymachus explains the concept of Nietzsche slave morality, where the rulers of the state are tyrants who break the rules that they enforce against the weak masses. Thus, anyone who is strong would never act like the masses who support rulers who break the laws they impose on them. To Thrasymachus, the “just man comes off worse than an unjust man everywhere” (Rouse 137). Socrates refutes this charge and explains that if the weak prevent the strong from taking anything they want, then they are strong. He is asked by Glaucon and the others to expand this idea in order to prove that the just man is happy despite the unjust man receiving praise, celebration, and reward.
Socrates continues to explain the relationship between the individual (soul) and the universal (state). The soul is the microcosm to the macrocosm of the state. Socrates tells us that it is not easy to understand matters of the soul, but it is easy to under...