A New Approach to the Problem of Justice

Abstract

The preliminary discussion of justice in Book I had served two purposes. First, by finding fault with the two accounts of justice advanced by Polemarchus and by Thrasymachus respectively, Plato had revealed the inadequacies and the superficialities of conventional approaches to the subject, and the difficulty of giving a satisfactory analysis of an abstract concept, however familiar the concept, or the everyday use of it, might be. Secondly, Thrasymachus’s thesis had raised the question whether justice was any kind of a good at all, Thrasymachus having maintained that it was none, and Socrates claiming that it was a good, but having done little more to show that it was than attempting to demolish Thrasymachus’s arguments that it was not. The rest of the Republic is devoted to these two main questions: What is Justice ? And what kind of a good (if any) is it ?