This is a very tongue-in-cheek term paper I wrote for my philosophy class on Plato in fall of 2016. I had a lot of fun with it & still like to talk about it sometimes when I get tipsy. I'm putting it up here because why not. Comments welcome.

Abstract:

Reading Plato’s Republic, you may have had reactions like this: “The Kallipolis… what a ridiculous and intriguing city! How utopian, yet how totalitarian! How alien!”

If so, then you are in the right place, because the thesis of this paper is that the present-day United States of America is in fact the Kallipolis.

Admittedly, the argument in this paper is not strong enough to take us all the way to that conclusion with any confidence. But it can push us in that direction. What I will do is draw out all the connections and parallels that I see between the USA and the Kallipolis. I will argue that the USA is currently surprisingly close to realizing Plato’s vision, at least in broad strokes. Some parts of my argument are rather hand-wavy, and others rely on debatable empirical claims, so I doubt you will end up fully convinced. Honestly I am not fully convinced myself. But I will make the best case I can, and hopefully you will end up convinced that the USA is closer in the direction of the Kallipolis than you previously thought.