The Republic And Antigone Analysis

Within both Plato’s The Republic and Sophocles’ Antigone, the concept of justice is heavily focused on mostly in order to figure out what is considered just or not. In addition to the overall theme of justice being the main topic, the meaning of death and how it relates to the deeper economic/philosophical significance behind the texts is discussed. However, these texts differ in the way that justice is perceived. In The Republic, justice is defined in such a way that will benefit everyone in a society, whereas in Antigone, many of the examples of justice are defined for personal reasons. Beginning with the concept of death in Antigone, for most of the characters death comes as something extremely unfortunate, as it is used as way the government

In The Republic, justice is supposedly being defined for society and is meant to benefit everyone as a whole. However, in Antigone, the definition of justice from Antigone’s perspective mostly seems to be for personal gain; she wants to be able to say she did the morally correct and “just” thing by properly burying her brother. Going off of the apparent societal benefit in The Republic, there is usually some economic theory thought about. Economics is a large part of every society because this is how a society functions. In Book II, Plato “assume[s] that [man] has the same three principles in his own soul which are found in the state” (Plato 34 PDF). He uses a macroeconomic approach to analyze justice in his society, just because he believes the problems that exist on the microeconomic of individual people will be the same. He simply believes that he will see small, individual problems on a larger scale in his society. Plato seems to understand that citizens live together and provide mutual support to one another solely because the citizens believe they are getting something beneficial for themselves out of this. He then figures there must be some system to the way the citizen’s efforts should be organized. Thus, Plato in a way, introduces the division of

The definition of justice and its relationship to economics is more of a personal account, whereas it was more societal in The Republic. Regarding Creon and his tyrannical way of ruling and creating unnecessary laws out of the need for control, and Antigone deciding to go against his wishes, there leaves some room to be subjective. Creon saw the burial as disrespectful because he felt that Antigone’s brother went against the city and Creon did not believe he should have a proper burial. Creon clearly says “anyone who acts against the order will be stoned to death before the city” (Sophocles 43-44). On the other hand, Antigone felt like she was doing what was morally right by burying her brother because after all, he is still humans and humans deserved to be buried. From Ismene’s perspective, she “[is] not disrespecting [Creon] … or acting against the state. That’s not in [her] nature” (Sophocles 97-98). Ismene thought that disobeying her ruler was worse than her own brother not being buried properly. In this case, the “value of the service” is Polynices’ burial, and as each character has a different opinion on it, it becomes subjective. This relates back to economics as the most basic understanding of supply and demand. Different people value different goods and services as different amounts. If a MacBook laptop is priced at $800,