In Books II – IV of the Republic, Plato famously proposes an analogy between the constitution of the Greek city-state and the constitution of the human soul. The methodological assumption that underlies the architecture of the Republic is that philosophical questions about topics that we might today group under the heading of ‘moral psychology’ – descriptive and normative questions about the workings of the human psyche – cannot be separated from questions of political philosophy. I argue that Plato was right to think that you cannot theorize the soul without at the same time theorizing the city, and vice versa. I go on to ask: what happens if we retain the idea that there is a profound methodological insight embedded in the city-soul analogy, but, unlike Plato, we want to defend democracy as the best form of government?

Daniela Dover is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD in Philosophy from New York University and her BA in Classics from Yale University. She is currently working on a book about how political and moral-psychological thinking interact in the context of critiques and defenses of democracy.