When I told my favourite teacher at school that I was interested in studying philosophy at university, one of the books he lent me was Plato's Republic. It was a brilliant choice because it encompassed so many topics and the debates it contained were still relevant.
At university I found that one of the thinkers I was most attracted to, Karl Popper, had devoted the first volume of his wartime critique of totalitarian thinking, The Open Society and Its Enemies, to a critique of the Republic.
Popper was not the first thinker of his era to treat Plato in this way. The future Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman had published his Plato Today in 1937.
In this, if you will, trialogue, Professor Angie Hobbs brings out the appeal of Plato's approach to discussion and, in particular, the relevance today of his analysis of democracy and demagoguery.
And I value the way Classical ethical discussion of how we should live our lives encompasses questions that our modern talk of state-guaranteed rights tends to pass over.
I'm also struck by the similarities between the training Plato sets out for his ruling class in the Republic and the education that the English upper classes used to inflict upon their sons.
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