3. A Fresh Start

Chapter Three, ‘A Fresh Start’, explores the way in which Socrates tries to address the Republic’s two questions, ‘What is justice?’ and ‘Is the just life happier than the unjust life?’. Rather than offering a battery of arguments as he did in Book I, Socrates offers an analogy between the polis (the Greek city-state) and the psychê (individual soul) that will structure the rest of the Republic. The plan is to first discover the nature of justice as a political virtue—as a virtue of the polis—and then apply this to the individual soul in order to discover the nature of personal justice.