Astral Codex Ten

Republic

3 min read

Republic

Article

Republic is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 11, 2023 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Book II of Plato’s Republic”; “Plato’s Republic might be a response to Cyropaedia”. It most often appears alongside Babylon, China, Egypt.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 11, 2023
  • Last seen: January 10, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
I am very positive about the broad programme of integrating anthropology with history, but I think that one aspect of Western thought is a bit different, maybe even “unique”, from a very early point. That aspect is the idea that we can rethink society rationally from the ground up. It starts in Book II of Plato's Republic, when Socrates says that the city-state is the reflection of the individual and vice versa, and that you can't understand the good for an individual person without working out what the ideal city would look like. And in the rest of the book, he goes on to reorganize society – in his and his interlocutors' minds – by reason alone. Property in common! Men and women brought up the same! Disabled children, uh, left out to die! Some of these ideas, good and bad, get put into practice twenty-five centuries later.
Book Review: Cyropaedia
January 10, 2024 · Original source
The thought once occurred to us how many republics have been overthrown by people who preferred to live under any form of government other than a republican, and again, how many monarchies and how many oligarchies in times past have been abolished by the people […]
Xenophon was a mercenary who fought beside Persians, making him potentially qualified to know things about Cyrus. He was a member of Socrates’ inner circle along with Plato, making him potentially qualified to know things about political philosophy (Plato’s Republic might be a response to Cyropaedia or vice versa; classicists aren’t sure).
This reminded me of Sparta, which might not be a coincidence. Most of what we know of Spartan society, we know from . . . Xenophon, who in addition to spending time in Persia spent time in Sparta and wrote about them too. Maybe Persian society and Spartan society were similar in ways. Or maybe Xenophon just had a virtuous-military-education fetish that he applied to whatever society he was writing about, sort of like what his colleague Plato did in The Republic.