Praxis as Property: the Concept of Justice in Plato's Republic

Scholarship on the Republic has tended to stress the centrality of the tripartite soul to the Republic's conception of justice. Yet since Socrates's task in the dialogue is to show the desirability of justice in the ordinary Athenian sense, any emphasis on idiosyncratic psychology would render his account of justice fundamentally beside the point. This paper suggests a way out of this dilemm a. It argues that Platonic justice in the Republic represents a shrewd twist on the entirely conventional, distributive Athenian notion of justice as refraining from seizing for oneself what belongs to another. Plato's twist is to substitute the performance of one's own activity (pi rho alpha xi iota zeta tau alpha epsilon alpha nu tau omicron nu) for the possession of one's household goods (epsilon xi iota zeta tau alpha epsilon alpha nu tau omicron nu) as the proper object of justice. The paper then shows how this account of Platonic justice makes sense both textually and contextually, before concluding.