A radical restatement of the principles that should govern a good state, Plato’s Republic written in 375BC introduces ideas of constraints being placed upon public office and reluctant leadership. Plato, inspired by his mentor Socrates, seeks to move from the tyranny of the Oligarchies that brutalised Athens’ civic life, but also away from the factional strife of direct democracy that was justifying conquest abroad and hysterical politics at home. Picturing the Greek word εὐδαιμονία – Eudaimonia – a common and individual human flourishing as the central aim of the state, Plato, through a series of thought-experiments designs a new form of government where institutional constraints require that a carefully cultivated ruling class will govern in the interest of and for the goodness of their citizens, who are not capable of always knowing what is good for them.

Both statesmen and citizens will be protected from leaning to their worst appetites and from collective and individual tyranny by the absence of incentives to misbehave. Plato, voicing and colouring Socrates’ ideas, wanted to remove the motivators for selfishness in government: private property is surrendered, family bonds are negated within a political context, virtue becomes not only a qualifier but a key element in the education of the ruling class. Alongside these thoughts, for the first time the soul of the individual became a mirror which reflected the soul of the state. Just as when a person’s soul fell into disarray, when it’s natural sense no longer supported reason over pursuit of pleasure, so too a state fell into civil war when it could no longer reliably support reason over self-interest.