Plato wrote The Republic approximately 380 BCE. It takes the form of a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates and several interlocutors, including Thrasymachus, who argues that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger; and Glaucon and Adeimantus, who challenge Socrates to prove that justice is worth choosing for its own sake rather than its social consequences, construct a model city from scratch to examine justice at a scale large enough to study. The city they construct, Kallipolis, is a rigidly stratified society ruled by philosopher-kings who have undergone decades of education in mathematics and philosophy and have been deprived of private property and family to prevent the corruption of self-interest.
The Allegory of the Cave, in Book VII, is the most influential passage: prisoners chained in a cave mistake shadows on the wall for reality; one escapes, sees the sun, and returns to describe true reality to the others, who do not believe him and would kill him if they could. The allegory is typically read as an account of philosophical enlightenment versus ordinary perception. It also functions, in context, as an argument for why philosopher-kings will not want to rule, they have better things to do, and must therefore be compelled. This tension between the philosophically educated person and the political community that both needs and resents them runs through the entire text.
The Republic is the origin point of Western political philosophy, and most subsequent positions in that tradition are constructed in relation to it, either extending Plato's arguments or arguing against them. Karl Popper's critique of Plato as a proto-totalitarian, offered in The Open Society and Its Enemies, is the most sustained modern refutation. What the text itself offers is less a blueprint for governance than a systematic inquiry into what justice is and whether it is rational to pursue it, questions that remain live precisely because the answers are genuinely difficult to produce and easy to dispute.
Nietzsche completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra in just 10 days, describing it as something given to him rather than written.
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