Inside and Outside The Republic

Abstract

An engaged reader of the Republic must at some point wonder how or if it all fits together. There seems to be jumbled within that text a challenge to conventional justice, a political theory, a psychology, a metaphysics, a theory of education and a critique of art, music and poetry. A brilliant work; but is it an integrated whole? A just republic, for Plato, turns out to be a harmonious, though differentiated, unity; and so the question can be rephrased: is the Republic a just Republic? Most of the illuminating discussions of the Republic can be seen as attempts to answer this question. I would like to suggest that this problem of unity arises in a particularly acute form for modern readers, because we are disposed to see the Republic as existing in bits. For we tend to conceive of psychology as the psychology of the individual. Since Plato, in the Republic, is concerned with the constitution of the individual psyche, it is easy for us to assume that his psychology is revealed in that account.' But this omits what, I believe, is the most distinctive aspect of Plato's psychology: a dynamic account of the psychological transactions between inside and outside a person's psyche, between a person's inner life and his cultural environment, between intrapsychic and interpsychic relations?2 If we ignore these dynamic transactions, we cannot

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