Plato’s Republic is arguably the most discussed and most controversial philosophical work ever written. Scholars trained extensively in the subtleties and nuances οf interpretive controversies easily forget what it is like to be a student first encountering this elusive and puzzling work. Steeped in our learned debates, we find ourselves at odds with our students as we teach this work–for we are anxious to get to the delights οf our interpretive contests, whereas they find the extent οf learned disagreement about the work both baffling and off-putting. No doubt to avoid engendering such reactions in their first experiences with Plato, Rice has sought to minimize the buzz οf controversy virtually to the point οf elimination from view and to focus instead on how well the Republic can serve to awaken and to inspire philosophical thought in the novice. There is something to be said for such an approach. The problem for a reviewer, then, is how much to expect from a mere 142 pages. In fairness, the answer is probably “not much,” but even so, it is probably worth noting that this little book could do a great deal more at least to identify what some οf the most famous interpretive problems are, regarding the Republic. Rice has a few casual things to say, for example, about the apparent differences in style between Book I and the other books οf the Republic, but nothing specific to say about the Socratic elenchus, other than that in showing Socrates refuting people as he does in Book I, “Plato was not out to convince persons like Thrasymachus οf anything positive about justice”. If we accept the standard view, as Rice tentatively does that Book I may reasonably be understood as belonging with the “early” period group οf Plato’s dialogues in representing the historical Socrates – then Rice’s anti-constructive conception οf Socrates’s elenctic philosophizing cannot be squared with what Plato’s Socrates says οf what he does and why he does it, in several different dialogues, such as the Apology, Crito, and Gorgias. In these other elenctic dialogues, Socrates characterizes himself as arguing for and against certain positions, even though his logical style is that οf reductio ad absurdum. According to Rice, Plato chose the dialogue format at least because it was so well suited to showing how “philosophical questions emerge in the ordinary course οf life”, that “philosophy is rooted in ordinary life”. Rice is clever enough to recognize that this explanation, however, confronts Plato with a problem: after all, Plato’s Republic argues for several practices that would, as Rice puts it, “shut down, or at least severely limit, the dialogue by which he says philosophy initially advances”. But it wasn’t Plato who said that philosophy advances only by dialogue involving anyone who might like to engage in it–this was Rice’s view, one which might easily enough be derived from the way Plato’s Socrates behaves in the “early period” dialogues. Given Rice’s concession that something seems to have changed by the time we get to the “middle period” dialogues (and Books II-X οf the Republic), it seems at least worth questioning whether this view οf why Plato used the dialogue form (in the “middle” period and hence in th