Plato's extended philosophical dialogue on justice, the ideal state, and the nature of the soul — the foundational text of Western political philosophy and one of the most influential works in the history of ideas.
It begins with a simple question: what is justice? And it ends with a vision of the perfect state that has been used to justify everything from Enlightenment liberalism to twentieth-century totalitarianism. The Republic is the most consequential conversation in the history of Western philosophy.