It will be seen that Plato’s concept of justice is fundamentally different from our ordinary view as analysed above. Plato calls class privilege ‘just’, while we usually mean by justice rather the absence of such privilege. But the difference goes further than that. We mean by justice some kind of equality in the treatment of individuals, while Plato considers justice not as a relationship between individuals, but as a property of the whole state, based upon a relationship between its classes. The state is just if it is healthy, strong, united—stable.
