[358e]
“for
on what subject would a man of sense rather delight to hold and hear
discourse again and again?” “That is
excellent,” he said; “and now listen to what I said
would be the first topic—the nature and origin of justice. By
nature,1 they say, to commit injustice is a good and to suffer it is an
evil, but that the excess of evil in being wronged is greater than the
excess of good in doing wrong. So that when men do wrong and are wronged by
one another and taste of both, those who lack the power
1 Glaucon employs the antithesis between nature and law and the theory of an original social contract to expound the doctrine of Thrasymachus and Callicles in the Gorgias. His statement is more systematic than theirs, but the principle is the same; for, though Callicles does not explicitly speak of a social contract, he implies that conventional justice is an agreement of the weak devised to hold the strong in awe. (Gorgias 492 C), and Glaucon here affirms that no relally strong man would enter into any such agreement. The social contract without the immoral application is also suggested in Protagoras 322 B. Cf. also Crito 50 C, f.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.