This concise monograph is a painstaking and learned examination of the first book of Plato’s Republic. It is admirably attentive to nuances in the arguments of both Socrates and his three main interlocutors there—Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus—while also keeping at least one eye on the connections between those arguments and subsequent developments in the remaining nine books of the dialogue (see especially the sections titled “Anticipations”: 51, 87, 146–47, 179–80). A brief preface is followed by seven chapters, a list of references, and an index. Chapter 1 sets forth clearly the author’s own approach to Plato (“How to Read Rep. 1,” “Literary and Dramatic Features”: 13–18) and sketches the arguments of the chapters that follow. Chapters 2 and 3 each bear the name of Socrates’s principal interlocutor in the portion of the text examined, Cephalus and Polemarchus respectively, with the next three chapters being devoted to Thrasymachus. It is hardly surprising that a little over half of the book is thus devoted to Socrates’s conversation with the famous rhetorician and his bracing attack on the goodness of justice. The final chapter (“Justice Springs Eternal”), in effect a conclusion to the whole but not identified as such, grapples with the different and even incompatible understandings of justice seen in books 1 and 4.

Weiss begins from the fact that, in certain circles at least, Republic 1 “does not get much respect” (1). For, as Weiss explains, some scholars have adopted the view that an early version of the Republic circulated without what we now know as its first book, and some contend as a result that book 1 was “belatedly tacked on” (1) and is undeserving of the respect accorded the rest of the text. Exercising an admirable sobriety, Weiss contends that the Republic as we have it is a genuine whole and that the first book is in fact “critical” to understanding the arguments in the remainder of it (1, 193). It is in any case no tacked-on addendum. Some might say that Weiss, in defending book 1 in this way, is kicking in an open door or at least a door that need never have been shut. But she performs the valuable service of combating some of the hypotheses based on a supposed circulation of a hypothetical ur-Republic. This is by no means the only example of a scholar laboring mightily to demolish the constructions of other scholars so as to get us back to square one: the text as we have always had it.

Among the most distinctive features of this study is its contention that justice in the Republic has two different meanings. The first such meaning is “the simple one of paying debts and not cheating or lying to escape one’s obligations, the justice that consists for the most part of rule-following.” This is exemplified by Cephalus’s understanding (and practice) of justice. The second meaning is pointed to by Polemarchus, namely the justice “that a person in a position of authority and responsibility wields,” a person who “requires skill” (53). The first meaning of justice Weiss calls “‘l-justice’ for ‘lay-justice,’” the second she calls “technē-justice’ or ‘t-justice’.” These labels, foreign to the text of Plato, figure throughout the analysis. They sometimes result in wording like the following: “is the answer not also no when the question is whether just men (men who are t-just) are able to make other men unjust (l-unjust) via justice (t-justice)? If it were possible for just men to make other men unjust by justice, then good men (men who are t-good) would be able to make other men bad (l-bad) by goodness (aretē—335d1) (t-goodness)” (78). Taken in their context, and with the active assistance of the reader, these sentences can be rendered intelligible; they cannot be made pleasing to the eye and ear.

Weiss brings out clearly the evident tension between justice as it is presented in book 1 and justice as it is presented in book 4 (e.g., 1–2, 181–93). For whereas the former is concerned with how we treat others—helping or harming them, giving them back what we owe, telling them the truth—the latter is concerned with the right order of the just man’s soul, an order indistinguishable from moderation (183–88). To use familiar jargon, justice appears at one point to be altogether “other-regarding,” at another altogether “self-regarding.” Weiss contends that the later account of justice cannot stand, for “It is Book 1 that sets us straight on justice” (193). Socrates himself disagrees, however (Rep. 354a13–c3). What is more, the “self-regarding” character of justice is not absent from the discussion of justice in book 1. At a crucial juncture in the argument, Polemarchus agrees without hesitation that justice is “human virtue” and hence constitutive of the goodness of good human beings (Rep. 335c1–5). (Much the same view, or hope, is at the core of the challenge to Socrates made by both Glaucon and Adeimantus: justice in the soul of the just must be the necessary and sufficient condition of their own “happiness” [Rep. 361d3, 364a7, and 365d1–2].) As for the definition of justice in book 4, there are of course two such definitions: justice as it appears in the city and as it appears in the individual soul. Each is indeed “self-regarding.” And far from solving the problem of justice, this two-fold definition is Socrates’s restatement of it. For in order to rise to the challenge at hand, Socrates needs to demonstrate that all that is required of us by our just community—our duties—is identical to or fully compatible with what our own deepest good requires. By separating justice in the city (doing one’s duty) from justice in the individual (the health of one’s own soul), Socrates points again to the fundamental question, even as he proclaims it answered. No wonder the Republic continues for six more books.

The present study does not solve the problem of justice as it is set forth in the Republic. Glaucon and Adeimantus, to say nothing of Thrasymachus, would probably be dissatisfied with Weiss’s last word here, to the effect that “Justice is noble” and hence that “the life of justice is self-justifying. It needs no further defense” (193; contrast Rep. 614b2–621d3). Yet Justice in Plato’s “Republic” remains a useful resource that can be consulted with profit by those who wish to begin to understand for themselves this truly classic text.