Author(s): Blackburn Simon

Cultural Studies

Tyranny is not a matter of minor theft and violence, but of wholesale plunder, sacred and profane, private or public. If you are caught committing such crimes in detail you are punished and disgraced; sacrilege, kidnapping, burglary, fraud, theft are the names we give to such petty forms of wrongdoing. But when a man succeeds in robbing the whole body of citizens and reducing them to slavery, they forget these ugly names and call him happy and fortunate, as do all others who hear of his unmitigated wrongdoing.' From Plato's Republic A dazzling book, by a distinguished contemporary philosopher, on Plato's greatest and most influential work: The Republic. Plato is perhaps the most significant philosopher who has ever lived and The Republic, composed in Athens in about 375bc, is widely regarded as his most famous dialogue. Its discussion of the perfect city and the perfect mind laid the foundations for Western culture and, for over two thousand years, has been the cornerstone of Western philosophy. In this book, Simon Blackburn explains the judicial, moral and political ideas in The Republic and examines its influence on the modern world. He shows why, from St Augustine to twentieth-century philosophers such as Whitehead and Bergson, Western thought is still conditioned by this most important of books.