The Republic - Paperback

by Benjamin Jowett (Translator), G-Ph Ballin (Editor), Plato (Author)

The Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater wealth of humour or imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave life and speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point (cp, especially in Books V, VI, VII) to which ancient thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon among the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of knowledge, although neither of them always distinguished the bare outline or form from the substance of truth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction of science which was not yet realized.

Author Biography

Benjamin Jowett modern variant 15 April 1817 - 1 October 1893 was renowned as an influential tutor and administrative reformer in the University of Oxford, a theologian and translator of Plato and Thucydides. He was Master of Balliol College, Oxford Early life Jowett was born in Peckham, Kent, and grew up in Camberwell, the third of nine children. His father was a furrier originally from a Yorkshire family that, for three generations, had been supporters of the Evangelical movement in the Church of England; and an author of a metrical translation of the Old Testament Psalms. His mother was a Langhorne, related to John Langhorne, the poet and translator of Plutarch. At twelve, Jowett was placed on the foundation of St Paul's School (then in St Paul's Churchyard) where he soon gained a reputation as a precocious classical scholar. Aged eighteen he was awarded an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life. He went up in 1836, and was quickly recognized as one of the leading Oxford Dons of his generation, made a Fellow while still an undergraduate in 1838; he graduated with first-class honours in 1839. This was at the height of the Oxford Tractarian movement: through the friendship of W.G. Ward he was drawn for a time in the direction of High Anglicanism; but a stronger and more lasting influence was that of the Arnold school, represented by A.P. Stanley. The controversy caused Jowett to withdraw from High Table at college to lodgings in Broad Street.