I apologize for the extremely late post, these blogs completely slipped my mind in the midst of midterms.

The Republic by Plato was an extremely difficult and occasionally boring read in my opinion. It was necessary to re-read certain passages multiple times in order to fully grasp the concepts and ideas that Plato (via the voice of Socrates) was trying to get across. After finally plowing through the book I felt a great sense of satisfaction because I was able to tackle such a thought-provoking text while still feeling that I understood all or most of the concepts. What I found extremely intriguing was Plato’s critique of democracy which ran through the entire discussion. Instead of allowing for personal freedom and movement between social classes like in a democracy, Plato emphasized the importance of functionality and specialization. By having each person in society perform the task that their natural abilities were suited to, a society would be extremely efficient and would minimize any wasted potential. In a modern democracy, many people are unemployed, or work at jobs that they are not very good at. If we were all placed in occupations that we are good at, then things would run extremely smoothly, like when he said,

“better-quality goods are more easily produced if each person does one thing for which he is naturally suited, does it at the right time, and is released from having to do any of the others”

I also found the idea of preventing rulers from handling currency or owning private property very interesting, because that would clearly limit a lot of political corruption, which is a huge issue in our modern day societies. Not that I am against personal freedom, or democracy, but reading The Republic really swayed me to agree with a lot of Plato’s arguments about how we could improve on our own society. This book definitely got me thinking about things differently in general, and I really enjoyed being able to discuss the concepts with our Arts One class.