Socrates and his interlocutors build an ideal city to discover the nature of justice, arriving at the philosopher-king and the allegory of the cave. The cornerstone of Western political philosophy.
Books mentioned in The Republic (2)
Iliad by Homer: “You know the first lines of the Iliad, in which the poet says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to release his daughter, and that Agamemnon flew into a passion with him; whereupon Chryses, failing of his object, invoked the anger of the God against the Achaeans.”
The Odyssey by Homer: “But in what follows he takes the person of Chryses, and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself. And in this double form he has cast the entire narrative of the events which occurred at Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey.”
Books that mention The Republic (25)
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt: “Plato's Republic—one of the most influential works in the Western canon—is an extended argument that you should pick heads, for your own good.”
The Just City by Jo Walton: “Well, some people are trying to set up Plato’s Republic.”
The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton: “I hadn’t read the Republic yet, but Ficino had told us Plato said that a Just City would hold justice and the pursuit of excellence as the highest good.”
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell: “We will read Plato's Republic as soon as we have finished Homer.”
Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells: “I remember that among others I tried a translation of Plato's "Republic" then, and found extraordinarily little interest in it; I was much too young for that; but "Vathek"--"Vathek" was glorious stuff.”
Utopia by Thomas More: “if I should either propose such things as Plato has contrived in his 'Commonwealth,' or as the Utopians practise in theirs”
Politics by Aristotle: “So that when Socrates, in Plato's Republic, says that a city is necessarily composed of four sorts of people, he speaks elegantly but not correctly, and these are, according to him, weavers, husbandmen, shoe-makers, and builders; he then adds, as if these were not sufficient, smiths, herdsmen for…”
Representative Men by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “He says, in the Republic, "Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man”
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel: “In Plato's Republic, Socrates compares ordinary citizens to a group of prisoners confined in a cave.”
The Secret History by Donna Tartt: Epigraph: "Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling..." — PLATO, Republic, BOOK II; later Julian quizzes Richard on having read "all of Plato," and quotes Plato's definition of Justice "in the Republic."
Among Others by Jo Walton: “She put down a brand-new copy of the Everyman edition of Plato’s Republic. ("The Republic isn’t as much fun as The Symposium.")”
Necessity by Jo Walton: “"Athene was setting up Plato's Republic, on Thera, before the Trojan War, before the Thera eruption" — plus multiple further references ("having read The Republic", "In the Republic Plato slid easily between the city and the soul"). Distinct from the in-world place name "the Republic"/"the Republics" used elsewhere for the daughter…”
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons, formerly took the name of _city_,[1] and now takes that of _Republic_ or _body politic_; it is called by its members _State_ when passive, _Sovereign_ when active, and _Power_ when compared with others like itself.”
The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault: “"Have you read nothing of Plato's, then, not even The Republic?" I confessed that this was so”
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes: “I am at the point of believing this my labour, as uselesse, and the Common-wealth of Plato; For he also is of opinion that it is impossible for the disorders of State, and change of Governments by Civill Warre, ever to be taken away, till Soveraigns be Philosophers.”
The Essays by Michel de Montaigne: “I refer to her Plato's cave in his Republic, and the physicians, who so often submit the reasons of their art to her authority…”
A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume: “I am apt to think a travellar would meet with as little credit, who should inform us of people exactly of the same character with those in Plato's republic on the one hand, or those in Hobbes's Leviathan on the other.”
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant: “The Platonic Republic has become proverbial as an example--and a striking one--of imaginary perfection, such as can exist only in the brain of the idle thinker; and Brucker ridicules the philosopher for maintaining that a prince can never govern well, unless he is participant in the ideas.”
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais: “Or, did you ever see a dog with a marrowbone in his mouth,--the beast of all other, says Plato, lib. 2, de Republica, the most philosophical?”
Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw: “My parting gift to him was not a copy of Plato's Republic, but a revolver and a hundred Undershaft cartridges.”
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett: “…ull hour on the absurdity of Jolter's proposition, and the beauty of the democratic administration; canvassed the whole scheme of Plato's republic, with many quotations from that ideal author, touching the to kalon: from thence he made a transition to the moral sense of Shaftesbury, and concluded hi…”
An Inquiry into the Good by Nishida Kitarō: “In his famous work The Republic, Plato equates the organization of the human mind with the organization of the state, and says that the state governed by reason is the highest good for both state and individual. [auto-translated]”
Words of a Pygmy by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “Our society seems unable to stay safe without slaves. Even the Plato of The Republic presupposes slaves, and this is no accident. [auto-translated]”